In Brief
The Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina has a ghost in a pink ball gown. She's said to be fond of children, and one doctor checked out leaving a note thanking the front desk for the woman who'd kept his kids company all weekend. There was no such employee.
The Full Story
The Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina keeps a ghost called the Pink Lady, and the desk staff once got a thank-you note about her. A doctor checking out left word asking them to thank the woman in the pink ball gown who had kept his children entertained all weekend. There was no woman in a pink ball gown on the payroll.
People describe her two ways. Sometimes a faint pink glow or a dense pinkish smoke. Sometimes a full apparition of a young woman in a pink gown. "Some describe it as this slight pink glow or dense smoke," the hotel's brand manager told a local station. By most accounts she's gentle, even mischievous, and especially drawn to children, said to appear at the bedsides of sick kids, stroke their hands, and speak to them softly.
The story ties her to one place. Around 1920, a young woman is said to have fallen from the fifth-floor railing to the Palm Court below, the granite-and-glass atrium at the heart of the lodge. The lodge opened in 1913, built of uncut granite boulders quarried from the mountain above it, with walls reported up to five feet thick. She was never a registered guest. "She was rather a guest of a guest," the brand manager said, which is part of why no name survives. When a paranormal researcher named Joshua Warren went looking in the 1990s, he combed hotel registers, police records, and death certificates and turned up no record that anyone had ever died from a fall here. The date, the woman, the death itself are legend, not documented fact.
The hotel didn't shrink from it. It was Warren the management hired, the first person brought in to officially study the Pink Lady, and he reported large fields of electromagnetic energy around the room she's tied to. That room is 545, two floors above the Palm Court. It's still bookable, still requested, often because of her. She's reported elsewhere in the lodge too, near the big lobby fireplaces and down in the atrium she's said to have fallen into.
Guests in 545 report lights and televisions switching on and off, doors opening, objects moved, cold drafts, the feeling of someone sitting on the edge of the bed. One night a news photographer watched a toiletries bag drop to the floor on its own. The next morning the brand manager had an answer ready. "I have heard stories about the Pink Lady dropping makeup items on the floor before."
