In Brief
Most haunted hotels have one ghost with a story. Stafford's Perry Hotel in Petoskey, Michigan has a crowd of them — at least four figures people report seeing, who never seem to notice each other or anyone watching.
The Full Story
Stafford's Perry Hotel in Petoskey, Michigan doesn't have a ghost. It has a crowd of them, and they don't seem to know about each other.
Upstairs, in the library, people report a woman. Staff call her Doris. She's described moving books off the shelves and floating through the room, and she turns up at the upstairs windows looking down over the garden. The accounts don't agree on her, though — some see a Victorian woman drifting the staircase, others an older woman in white out in the garden, gazing toward Lake Michigan. "I saw a woman dressed in Victorian style garb walk by me and go down some stairs," one witness said. "She was transparent but very easy to see." The story has her as a guest or an employee who took her own life in the early 1900s, though no record carries her name or the year.
She isn't the only one. A young girl with yellow curls is reported in the lobby and at the upstairs windows, and one guest who photographed the lobby Christmas tree is said to have found her standing beside it in the picture, where no child had been when the shutter clicked. On the lower level, near what was Dr. Norman Perry's old office, people report a man in a blue suit, seen and then gone. And out on the grounds, one visitor said a phone camera caught a tall, headless figure in a black cloak and white gloves, dressed like a coachman from a century ago, standing on the lawn outside.
None of them interact. There's no shared story holding them together, no single death they all answer to. They get seen or photographed, and they move on, each one keeping to its own corner of the building.
Perry built the place in 1899, four years after Petoskey became a city. He'd been a dentist until a patient died following a tooth extraction, and he gave up the practice for the hotel trade. It was one of roughly twenty luxury resort hotels in town back then, full of orchestral music and weekend dances, and of all that wave it's the only one still open. Stafford's Hospitality bought it in 1989, and it still takes guests on the bluff over Little Traverse Bay.
Down in the basement, the Noggin Room Pub doesn't get an apparition. It gets the activity. Glasses break on their own. Silverware flies. Books and a water pitcher turn up where no one left them, and it happens in front of the people working the bar.
The bartenders have learned the routine. They sweep up the broken glass, and they keep pouring.
