In Brief
The Palmer House in Sauk Centre, Minnesota has a name for its ghosts: the "unregistered guests." A boy bounces a ball on the stairs, a man in 1920s clothing stands at the foot of a bed in Room 17, and the owner just says there's stuff here she can't explain.
The Full Story
The staff at the Palmer House in Sauk Centre, Minnesota have a name for the ghosts they keep finding. They call them the unregistered guests, and the most-reported of them is a boy with dirty blonde hair and green eyes, seen near the third step of the stairs to the second floor, bouncing a ball down the hallway. No record names him. He's known only by how he looks and what he does, and guests have logged him the same way for years.
The hotel went up in 1901, on the corner where the town's original hotel had burned to the ground the June before. It was the first building in Sauk Centre with electricity, among the first businesses outside the Twin Cities to have running water and power. A teenager named Sinclair Lewis clerked the front desk two summers here, hired and fired more than once before he left, won the Nobel Prize, and put the place in his novel *Main Street*. The hotel later landed on the National Register, the crown jewel of the town's historic district.
The guests who stayed are the ones people report now. In Room 17, a newlywed's wife said a lanky man in 1920s clothing stood at the foot of the bed. Room 11 runs cold and heavy, and one guest woke to the feeling of fingers stroking his legs as he slept. On the top floor, paranormal researchers tie a room to a spirit they call Raymond, said to have run a brothel up there a century ago, though no record confirms the brothel ever existed; researcher Cathy Vanderhoff calls it "Raymond's room." Down the years people have logged children's voices, the ball bouncing in empty halls, glasses thrown in the bar, and electrical trouble that kept up even after the wiring was replaced.
The basement is the worst of it. People describe a terror down there with no object, and a *Ghost Adventures* investigator said something dark came out from under the stairs. The show came; so did *The Dead Files*. The Palmer House is named among the most haunted hotels in Minnesota, and the country.
Owner Kelley Freese never pushed any of it. "I tell people there's stuff that happens here all the time that I can't explain," she said. At the end of 2025 she sold the hotel to paranormal podcast host Dave Schrader, who had investigated the building himself.
The ghosts kept their rooms. Now the man who hunts them owns the place they won't leave.
