The Read House Hotel

Room 311 at Chattanooga's Read House was restored to 1927 condition, clawfoot tub included. Annalisa Netherly allegedly died there. The room is still bookable.

Room 311 at the Read House Hotel has a clawfoot bathtub, an antique AM radio, and a dead woman who doesn't like men who smoke. Her name is Annalisa Netherly. According to the hotel's own telling, she was beheaded in that bathtub in 1927 by a jealous lover after he found out she was entertaining other company. Guests keep booking the room anyway. Chattanooga has embraced her as a feature rather than a bug.

The current Read House building opened in 1926 at Broad and MLK, a ten-story brick-and-terra-cotta hotel on the site of the old Crutchfield House that had welcomed Union generals and Confederate officers before it burned in 1867. The new Read House was the grandest hotel in the city, with a marble lobby, walnut paneling, and the quiet moneyed atmosphere that attracts scandals.

Versions of Annalisa's story split. The bloody version, which is the one the hotel puts on its own website, has her murdered in Room 311's bathroom. The gentler version has her abandoned by her lover, dying of a broken heart in the same room. A strain of local retellings describes her as a working woman given the era and the circumstances, though no primary source ties that detail to any specific person. Across every telling, one detail stays fixed: she dislikes men, and she especially dislikes the ones who light cigarettes in her room.

Hilton Curio's recent restoration rebuilt Room 311 specifically to 1927 condition. The clawfoot tub stayed. A manual key lock replaced the keycard reader to match the period hardware. An antique AM radio sits on the dresser. The room can be booked directly on the hotel website with a disclosure that it's haunted. Tours, both virtual and in-person, run on request.

The three incidents that get repeated most often are also the most specific. A businessman checking out in 2014 told the front desk he'd woken up at 3:40 a.m. to find his lit cigarette drowned in a glass of water on the nightstand, a glass he hadn't filled. A different guest, a few years later, came back to Room 311 to find his pack of cigarettes soaking in the clawfoot tub, which was full of cold water. A ghost-tour guide reported a guest stepping out of the bathroom fully dressed because the shower cranked on while he was standing in front of the mirror with a lighter.

Chattanooga Ghost Tours puts the Read House near the top of every downtown walk, and Room 311 has a waiting list. The hotel built the marketing around her with a dedicated web page, virtual tours, and themed merchandise. It's an entrepreneurial approach to a haunting. Annalisa is Annalisa whether or not the Read House signs a check. The hotel just figured out that guests who believe in her will pay extra to stay in her room.

Whether she's a murdered lover or a jilted one or an invented marketing ghost is less interesting than the fact that Room 311 is one of the few haunted hotel rooms in America you can actually book, in the actual room, with the actual tub, and the original 1927 story attached. A man walks out of the bathroom fully dressed at 3:40 in the morning because his cigarette is floating in a glass he never filled, ninety-plus years after the woman the room belonged to is supposed to have died in it.