Stafford's Perry Hotel

At least four ghosts here, from a 1902 suicide named Doris to a headless coachman. The Noggin Room breaks glassware on its own.

Somewhere in the basement of the Perry Hotel, the Noggin Room Pub has a problem with its glassware. Pints have shattered on their own in front of bartenders. Silverware has come off the bar and moved through the air. Staff and regulars have learned to shrug about it and keep pouring.

In 1902, three years after the hotel opened, a woman killed herself in one of the upstairs rooms. Her name is lost. She's the ghost most often tied to the library: an apparition guests call Doris, Victorian-dressed, seen moving books and floating through the upstairs library. One visitor in 2014 watched her walk past and go down a staircase and later described her as "transparent but very easy to see." Another guest, staying for her wedding weekend, saw a woman in white reflected in a glass door and nobody there when she turned around.

Doris isn't the only one. A young girl with yellow curls turns up in the lobby, in the library, peering down from upstairs windows. A guest photographed her standing next to the hotel's Christmas tree one December. A man in a blue suit has been seen on the lower level near what used to be Dr. Perry's office. And then there's the headless figure. A guest on a seasonal ghost tour claims to have caught a photo of a tall stagecoach-looking man in a black cloak with white gloves and no head, standing on the grounds outside.

Dr. Norman J. Perry opened the hotel in 1899 as one of roughly 20 luxury resorts in a resort-hotel boom that hit Petoskey off the back of railroad tourism. It's the only one of that wave still running. The brick four-story building on Lewis Street, between Bay and Rose, is now Stafford's Perry Hotel, part of the Stafford's Hospitality group, and it's been hosting guests continuously for more than 125 years.

The hotel runs ghost tours every October. The staff doesn't push the haunted angle, but they don't deny it. You can book a room at the Perry, eat in the H.O. Rose Room, drink in the Noggin, and never hear a word about the ghosts if you don't ask. If you do ask, the hostess will usually tell you which floor the activity tends to cluster on, which library shelf people photograph, and which bartender has seen the most.

What's unusual about the Perry compared to other Michigan hotels in the haunted category is the number of different apparitions. Most haunted lodgings have one ghost with a backstory, plus ambient creepiness. The Perry has at least four distinct figures people describe in detail: Doris, the girl with yellow curls, the man in blue, and the headless coachman. They don't seem to interact with each other. They just show up, get photographed or seen, and move on.

The suicide from 1902 is the only haunting here with anything like a documented source event. The others are untethered to a single death, a single room, or a single year. Somebody keeps breaking pints in the basement anyway. The Noggin Room bartenders have learned to sweep up the glass, pour the next round, and keep the tab moving.