Marrero's Guest Mansion

Marrero's Guest Mansion in Key West, Florida, is an adults-only inn — nobody under 21, no children anywhere on the premises. Which is why the reports out of Rooms 17 and 23 unsettle people. Guests say they hear, at night, what sounds like babies crying. Those two rooms were once the nursery.

The house was built around 1890 by Francisco Marrero, one of the cigar makers who ran Key West when the island was the cigar capital of the world — roughly 200 factories crowded onto a strip a mile wide, turning out around a hundred million cigars a year. Francisco built the Victorian home on Fleming Street for the woman he loved, Enriquetta, and the family grew up inside it.

Then he died on a business trip to Cuba, under circumstances the accounts call mysterious. And a woman arrived from the island claiming to be his first wife — with paperwork to prove the couple had never legally divorced. She won the entire estate in court. Enriquetta was put out of the house onto the street. As the story goes, she and the children were dead within about two years, of tuberculosis or diphtheria; no record survives to confirm it.

Before she left, she made a vow. "I will always remain in spirit."

Guests say she kept it. Her room was 18, and the reports there run the same: a smell of lavender, her perfume; a figure sitting at the foot of the bed, or moving as if looking for her hairbrush. Staff say that when Enriquetta dislikes a guest, the chandelier sways back and forth. There's a former playroom door that locks and unlocks on its own — replaced more than once, they say, with a second lock that can only be thrown from inside the empty room.

Still, it's Rooms 17 and 23 that send people down to the desk at night. An inn that turns away anyone with a child, and the thing guests keep hearing in the dark is the crying of children who aren't there.