Ruebel Hotel

At the Ruebel Hotel in Grafton, Illinois, things keep going missing. Small things — a guest sets one down on a nightstand and can't find it an hour later. The staff have a name for whoever's taking them. They call her Abigail.

She's a little girl. The staff say she turns up at the top of the stairway and in the upstairs hallway, and runs the halls back and forth on a still winter morning when the hotel is nearly empty and nobody else is up there to hear it. She pockets the small belongings guests set down, the way a kid plays keep-away. Now and then a smell shows up with no source. Now and then an orb turns up in a photograph that had nothing in it.

How she died is the part nobody can settle. Some at the hotel will tell you Abigail died of tuberculosis inside the building; others say she died in the fire. No death record survives to settle which. Just two versions of the same little girl, and a building that's old enough to have lost the truth.

The fire is real. Michael Ruebel built the original hotel here in 1879, and it burned to the ground in 1912. He rebuilt it on the same spot the next year — the brick storefront that stands today, 32 rooms that once went for a dollar a night to the river travelers and quarrymen who passed through. Grafton sits where the Illinois and Mississippi meet, and back then its quarries cut the limestone that built the Eads Bridge down in St. Louis. The Ruebel is the last hotel left from any of it.

So the building has two birthdays, and Abigail may have two deaths, and the staff still can't tell you which. What they can tell you is that the small things keep disappearing — most of all in winter, when the halls are quiet and there's no one up there but her.