Kennesaw House

At the Kennesaw House in Marietta, Georgia, the most-told story is the elevator. A visitor rides it down to the basement, the doors open, and instead of a museum storeroom they're standing in a Civil War field hospital in full operation — wounded men screaming, blood everywhere, surgeons cutting off limbs with little or no anesthesia. The visitor scrambles back into the elevator, rides up, brings staff down with them. The basement is empty.

That scene has been told on PBS, CNN, and the History Channel, and it works because every layer of it actually happened in this building. Some accounts set the vision on an upper floor instead, but the basement version is the one that travels.

The building has lived a stack of lives. It went up in 1845 as a cotton warehouse, one of the oldest things in Marietta. In 1855 Dix Fletcher bought it and opened it as the Fletcher House hotel. On the night of April 11, 1862, James Andrews and a band of disguised Union soldiers slept under its roof — the next morning they boarded a train and stole a locomotive called The General, and the chase ran 90 miles north before they were caught. Andrews was hanged as a spy.

Then the hotel became a hospital, for both sides' wounded, and the upper floors became a morgue. The fourth floor — where the dead were stacked — caught fire from embers off the burning railroad depot next door, and it was never rebuilt. The morgue is a scar in the building's own frame.

Staff have names for two of the dead. They call the man Dr. Wilder — a figure in a cream coat and black hat, trailing cigar smoke with no smoker in the room. The museum director has reported hearing his own name called twice in an empty building. And children on field trips report a woman in an antebellum dress who smiles at them and vanishes; staff call her Mrs. Fletcher, after a portrait that still hangs inside.

Local legend puts the count at more than 700 spirits. No one has ever explained where that number comes from.