Terrace Inn

Two workers died building this 1911 Bay View inn. Elizabeth and Edward Sweet haunt Rooms 211 and 308. A boy works the basement.

Two workers died building the Terrace Inn. A beam fell on them during construction in the winter of 1910 or 1911, and at least part of the hotel's haunting tradition traces back to them. Guests have picked up their voices and footsteps in stairwells and hallways that the living have already crossed.

The named ghosts here are Elizabeth and Edward Sweet. Elizabeth is the Lady in White, described as wandering the halls and sitting rooms in a long pale dress. Local lore says she miscarried twins and died after falling in Room 211. Edward, known as the Man in Tweed, died of a broken heart in Room 308 according to the same local tradition. He's seen leaning on the front balcony in a tweed suit, looking out at the street. Guests and staff talk about them as if they were still checked in.

A third figure fills in the tradition: a teenage boy who turns up in the basement and sometimes mingles with guests in the hallways. Nobody's matched him to a name.

The phenomena are small-scale and domestic. Footsteps in empty corridors. Doors opening. Voices when no conversation is happening. One paranormal investigator told Michigan Haunted Houses, "This place is incredibly haunted. My team has stayed there several times and have always captured something." A 1991 interview with the owner acknowledged the ghosts with a "slight laugh," though the inn later tried to soften the quote.

The Terrace opened June 1, 1911, after Indiana banker William J. DeVol Jr. spent the previous fall and winter building it on the grounds of the old Nash House in Bay View, the Methodist resort community that sits just inside Petoskey's northeast edge. It had 40 guest rooms, electric lights and bells, and hot and cold baths on each floor, renting at $2.25 to $3.50 a night. It's still there. It's still operating. The 1911 Restaurant on the ground floor is named after the opening year.

The Terrace Inn doesn't push the haunted story the way some hotels do. It runs an annual Ghost Hunting Weekend in October with paranormal teams, and the staff will tell you about Elizabeth and Edward if you ask, but the lobby pitch is about Victorian summer resort charm, not apparitions. The restraint is probably the right call. Bay View is a registered National Historic Landmark full of cottages and chautauqua architecture, and the Terrace is the central hotel in that community. The haunted reputation is a side dish.

Petoskey has two older haunted hotels. Stafford's Perry Hotel, a few blocks south, has at least four distinct ghosts and runs a more public ghost-tour operation. The Terrace is smaller, quieter, and further from the downtown crowd. Its haunting rests almost entirely on a couple nobody can fully verify existed, turning up in Rooms 211 and 308 a hundred and fifteen years after they supposedly died there.