By the Read House's own telling, a woman named Annalisa Netherly was beheaded in the clawfoot tub of Room 311 in 1927. Rather than bury the story, the Chattanooga hotel restored the room to that year and rents it out — tub, brass key, and ghost included.
The clawfoot tub in Room 311 is the one the Read House will tell you a woman was beheaded in. By the hotel's own account, it happened in 1927: a guest named Annalisa Netherly, killed in that bathtub by a jealous lover. Most hotels would quietly tile over a story like that. The Read House, a ten-story red-brick landmark on Broad Street in downtown Chattanooga, did the opposite.
When Avocet Hospitality Group renovated the building and reopened it in 2018, they restored Room 311 to its 1920s state and kept the story bolted to it. The tub stayed. So did an AM radio on the dresser and a lock that takes a physical brass key, the kind a guest would have carried in 1927. Then they listed the room for booking, with a haunted disclosure, and began running tours of it in 2019. It is one of the few haunted hotel rooms in America a guest can actually book, in the real room, with the real tub, the original story attached.
Annalisa, the tellings agree, does not care for men. She reserves particular dislike for the ones who arrive smelling of cigarette or cigar smoke. Guests in 311 report water running on its own, toilets that gurgle and flush with no one near them, lights that flicker, a feeling of being watched. The hotel's own page states it flatly: guests "swear to have felt Annalisa's presence, and some say they have even seen her."
How she died depends on who is talking. The hotel tells the violent version, her throat cut so deeply her head was nearly severed, her body left in the tub. Ghost-tour guides tell a gentler one in which no one killed her at all: her lover abandoned her for other women, and she died in the room of a broken heart. Both have circulated for a hundred years.
Neither has a document behind it. Sift the official record of 1927, the death certificates and newspapers and police reports alike, and Annalisa Netherly is simply not there, in Chattanooga or anywhere else. Every source that repeats her story treats it as folklore, and the hotel rents the room anyway.
One thing in 311 isn't a story at all. Iron bars run across the window, and the tale there is that Al Capone was held in this room in 1931 while he waited to be sentenced on federal charges, the bars bolted on to stop him climbing out. The Capone part, like Annalisa, appears in no record that confirms it. But the bars are real. Whatever you make of Capone or Annalisa, the iron bolted across that window is the one thing in 311 that answers to no version of the story and asks no one to believe it.
