Lord Baltimore Hotel

In a penthouse at the Lord Baltimore Hotel in Baltimore, there's a handprint on the wall the size of a child's. Staff have scrubbed it off, painted over it, papered over it. By every account, it keeps coming back.

They blame a little girl. The hotel's most-reported ghost is a child the staff call Molly, seen in a cream-colored dress and black shoes, often with a red ball. Guests who've never heard the legend have asked the front desk about "the red ball" on their own. Most of it happens on the 19th floor. A painting of her hangs up there now.

What Molly was in life nobody can pin down. The accounts split — some put her around 7, others around 10; some say she jumped from the roof with her parents, others that she was simply left behind. No newspaper or hotel record confirms a girl named Molly ever died here at all. She exists as the story people tell, and they tell it the same way for decades.

What is documented is when the building opened: December 30, 1928, nine months before the crash. The 19th floor became, in the Depression years, a place people went to step off. By some tellings more than twenty did; a search of old Baltimore Sun records turns up about a dozen, scattered across later years, several from interior windows rather than the roof. The round number is taller than the record. The deaths are real enough.

Deborah Davis has worked the hotel 39 years. She talks to whatever's there. "You'll walk down the hall and things fall down. You hear a knock, knock, knock. I say, 'Molly, I'm not playing today. I'm not in the mood for this.'"

Molly isn't the only one people report. A phantom couple is said to dance in the Calvert Ballroom in 1940s clothes, and they don't like to be bothered. Behind a mirrored door in the Versailles room sits a hidden Prohibition-era speakeasy, with a "madam" spirit attached to it. A front desk clerk says he watched three beer bottles fly across a bar with no one near them. During an overnight investigation, a CBS crew left equipment running and got a stone on a string that moved on its own, an elevator button that lit with nobody at the controls, and a camera battery that drained from full to half in the dark.

The hotel leans into it now — an annual ghost hunt with the Baltimore Paranormal Society, EMF meters, recorders. "The hotel is notorious among the paranormal community in Maryland," its lead investigator says. Even the director of sales, who calls himself not a believer, repeats what the mediums tell him: the place is crowded. A lot of spirits here.

And the elevator still takes Davis to the 19th floor sometimes. She never presses the button.