The Lowe Hotel in Point Pleasant, West Virginia counted its ghosts by floor: a barefoot dancer on the mezzanine, a tricycle in the second-floor hall, a bearded man in the mirror of room 314. The new owners' Legends page is blank.
The Lowe Hotel in Point Pleasant, West Virginia sorted its ghosts by floor. The most-told one lives on the third, in room 314, where a tall, thin man with a long beard, dressed in a 1930s suit, has been seen standing in the frame of a large mirror. The paranormal writer Rosemary Ellen Guiley catalogued him in *Fate* magazine in 2007 and called the third floor the most active in the building.
The account underneath that came from the owner. Ruth Finley told an investigator that the wife of a railroad employee stayed a week in 314, woke one night to a man standing in the room, and afterward kept seeing the same man in the mirror while she did her hair.
The investigator was Joe Nickell, and he didn't believe a word of it. He came to Point Pleasant three times chasing the Mothman and stayed at the Lowe twice, both times in 314. He got nothing. Guiley's article had floated the idea that the bearded man was Sid Hatfield, the Matewan police chief shot dead in 1921; Nickell pointed out that Hatfield was clean-shaven in the last photograph taken of him, died a decade before anyone was wearing a 1930s suit, and lived several counties away. Nickell did photograph ghost orbs in 314, including in the mirror itself. He got them by aiming the camera at the glass and shaking out a dust cloth in front of it.
The rest of the building was busier. On the mezzanine between the first and second floors, guests reported a barefoot young woman in a nightgown, hair loose, dancing to music nobody else could hear. The story names her as Juliette Smith, daughter of the man who built the place and forbidden by him to marry the man she loved, though no census, obituary or newspaper item records a Juliette Smith in Point Pleasant at all. A regional folklore account puts a child of about two on a tricycle in the second-floor hallway, usually nothing but laughter and the squeak of wheels down an empty corridor. Guests alone on the third floor heard whistling, and cleaning supplies turned up that the staff said they never used. In suite 316, a man stands at the window looking out at the Ohio River, apparently with nothing below the knee. They call him Captain Jim.
The family who ran the hotel for 35 years didn't always advertise any of it. "We used to keep all those stories quiet, because we thought it would be bad for business," Ruth Finley said in 2007. Her husband Rush, asked by Nickell in 2011 whether he had ever experienced anything, said he was "not of that mindset."
The Lowe sold in March 2025 to a local attorney who has never let his name be printed, and it has been closed for renovation ever since. The new owners have put up a page called Legends. There is no ghost on it. It reads: "Our collection of stories is growing."
