The Partridge Inn

At the Partridge Inn in Augusta, Georgia, the staff have a ghost they talk about like a coworker. They call her Emily, and when fifth-floor doors slam with no one near them, that's just Emily in one of her moods.

The man who says that is Herman Duncan, the inn's Director of Housekeeping, more than 25 years on staff. "Emily being in one of her playful moods," he calls it. Guests on the fifth floor report her the most — a woman in a white wedding gown with long chestnut hair, drifting the corridors.

The story behind her is told the same way everywhere, and no record anywhere proves a word of it. More than a hundred years ago, the legend goes, Emily was dressing for her wedding in a custom Atlanta gown when word came up that her fiance had been shot on the road into town. He'd been riding in for the ceremony, the story says, and someone mistook him for a soldier wanted for treason. He was dead before he hit the ground. Emily refused to take the dress off for weeks. She was courted for years afterward, never married, and died, the way every version puts it, of a broken heart.

No newspaper names her. No death record, no marriage record, nothing. This is the inn's legend, not its history — and the people who work there tell it anyway.

The one incident that comes with a room number happened on the fifth floor. A guest in Room 527 stepped out to shower. When he came back, the fogged glass of the window read "Time for you to leave." He checked out on the spot, saying the room had gone cold. A staff member who went up to look found no words on the pane. The room was cold.

It lands because of where it happens. Augusta isn't Savannah — nobody comes here primed for ghosts. The Partridge fills every April for the Masters, the closest hotel to Augusta National. People show up for golf, and meet Emily anyway.