Omni Grove Park Inn

The Pink Lady fell from the fifth-floor balcony around 1920. She haunts Room 545 and is famously kind to sick children.

A doctor staying at the Grove Park Inn once left a thank-you note at the front desk on his way out. He wanted to thank the woman in the pink ball gown who'd entertained his kids all weekend. The desk had to break it to him gently: no one by that description worked there.

His children had been playing with the Pink Lady.

She's the most famous ghost in Asheville, and the Omni Grove Park Inn has spent a century not running from her. The inn opened July 12, 1913, built into the western slope of Sunset Mountain out of granite boulders pulled from the property itself. Edwin Grove wanted something unlike any hotel in the country, and he got one. Presidents, novelists, movie stars, Manuel Quezon running a government-in-exile from the fourth floor during World War II. Thousands of guests across a hundred years.

The Pink Lady turned up sometime around 1920. A young woman in a pink dress, with pink luggage and pink everything, checked into Room 545 on the fifth floor. One evening after dinner, she went over the interior balcony outside her room and fell five stories to the marble floor of the Palm Court below. She died on impact. The inn's records have never named her. Theories still circulate in Asheville: an affair with a married man who'd just ended things, a drunken slip, a push. No version has ever won.

Whatever the circumstances of her death, her afterlife is well documented. In 1996, the inn hired a parapsychologist to catalog the phenomena, and the resulting report centers on Room 545 and the fifth-floor corridor around it. She shows up two ways. Sometimes she's a wisp of pink mist drifting down a hallway. Sometimes she's a complete woman in a pink ball gown. Guests in Room 545 have reported being tickled on the soles of their feet while falling asleep, feeling a pair of invisible arms wrap around them, and watching the room temperature drop ten degrees for no reason. Lights flip on and off. Doors open and close up and down the fifth floor.

Here's what separates her from the average hotel ghost: she is extraordinarily kind to children. Staff have documented her sitting at the bedsides of sick kids, stroking their hands, speaking softly to them. Parents in adjoining rooms have had their kids ask where the nice lady in pink went. The doctor's thank-you note at the front desk was not an isolated incident. It was a pattern.

Employees treat her like a coworker. Housekeeping will tell you she rearranges things in the guest rooms, not to spook anyone, just to straighten them. Workers in the utility tunnels beneath the hotel tell a different story, one most of them will not put into words. The tunnels are where the staff stops joking.

Room 545 is bookable. The Omni Grove Park Inn is on the National Register of Historic Places, and unlike most hotels with a body count, this one puts its ghost on the brochure. The guide at the front desk will show you the Palm Court balcony on the way up.