In Brief
The Lafayette Hotel in Marietta, Ohio is run, in part, by a dead man. S. Durward Hoag managed the riverfront landmark for forty years and died in 1982 without ever leaving. Staff call him friendly. The other spirit, down in the basement, they avoid.
The Full Story
At the Lafayette Hotel in Marietta, Ohio, the elevator rides up to the top floor and back down with no one aboard. The staff have a name for whoever's working the buttons. They call him Mr. Hoag, and they say he used to run the place.
S. Durward Hoag and his father bought the riverfront hotel in the early 1930s, and the family kept it until 1973. He lived with them on the upper floors and managed it for forty-odd years. He died in 1982. By every account at the front desk, he never actually checked out.
Most of what he does is small and oddly considerate. Light bulbs flicker and burst, and guests report a bright pop like a camera flash in an empty room. One guest left a sandwich behind; it vanished overnight and turned up the next morning, untouched, on the coffee table. A door left ajar is found shut. A shower runs ice cold mid-rinse. The third floor is where it gathers, the floor people most often tie to Hoag.
"Talking with guests, if someone says that they've experienced something, it's usually on the third floor," says general manager Sheila Rhodes. Her read on him is gentler than most ghost stories allow. "Most of the stories are like that, so I think Mr. Hoag is a friendly, funny ghost."
Some of it reads less like a haunting than a man still doing his job. In the wing built and named for him, papers get rearranged and small objects shifted, and accountants working late have reported a voice whispering close by. The habit, the story goes, outlasted the man.
The hotel opened in 1918 at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, on the site of an earlier hotel that burned two years before, and it's named for the Marquis de Lafayette, who passed through Marietta in 1825. People have also reported a woman in Victorian dress in the corridors, and a maid in a black dress, neither of them tied to Hoag.
There's one part of the building where the friendliness runs out. Down in the basement, off the women's restroom, a woman's spirit is said to lock the doors and shut off the lights. Several of the staff won't use it. A little boy has been seen waiting just outside.
So the hotel keeps two ghosts. One straightens up after the guests and rides the elevator for fun. The other is downstairs, in the dark, where the staff won't go.
