Mission Inn Hotel & Spa

The Mission Inn in Riverside, California is a block-long pile of castle towers, flying buttresses, and a five-story rotunda. The ghost the staff talk about isn't tied to any of it. She kept one corner suite on the fourth floor, and the story goes that she never left it.

They call her Aunt Alice.

Alice Miller Richardson was the sister of Frank Miller, the man who built the hotel up into the largest Mission Revival building in the country. But she wasn't a footnote in his story. She and her husband took over running the place in the 1880s, and when he died in 1906, Alice stayed on and managed it herself for more than thirty years. She was the hotel's buyer. In 1894 she stood up at a hotel-association convention and presented a paper on kitchen and pantry management. The museum that owns the building today published a whole biography of her, calling her "one of California's most successful businesswomen of her time."

She died at the inn in the late 1930s, after better than three decades of keeping it running.

Her suite was the southeast corner of the fourth floor — the room now called Aunt Alice's Suite. Guests and staff have reported for years that she stayed in it after she was gone. They describe a cold spot. A cold touch on the shoulder, with no one near enough to give it. And the one that sticks: the sound of a woman singing in a room where no one is singing. She was remembered in life for a beautiful voice.

There's a quiet symmetry to the floor. Frank Miller's room was the northeast corner, the opposite end — brother and sister at the two far corners of the same hallway. The staff describe his as a presence you feel rather than see. People come and go in that hotel all the time; ten presidents have stayed there, Nixon was married there, Reagan honeymooned there. None of them are the one anybody talks about.

Alice's, they say, you hear.