The Drake Hotel

At the Drake Hotel in Chicago, the ghost everyone tells you about is the Woman in Red. The story goes that she came to the New Year's Eve gala in 1920, on the hotel's opening night, caught her fiance with another woman, and threw herself from a tenth-floor window. Guests and ghost-tour guides have reported her ever since, drifting near the Gold Coast Room and the Palm Court, the ballroom where the party was held.

She may never have existed.

A Chicago historian named Adam Selzer spent years looking for her in the newspaper archives. The gala drew 2,000 of the city's most prominent people, and a death that night would not have gone unprinted. He found nothing. "If this suicide truly happened, it doesn't seem to have made the papers," he wrote. "I've never seen anything to back it up." The most-told ghost story at the Drake is the one with no record behind it.

What the Drake has on the record came two decades later, and it left a paper trail.

On January 19, 1944, a society matron named Adele Born Williams came back to her eighth-floor suite with her daughter and found the door open. A gray-haired woman in a black Persian lamb coat stepped out of the bathroom, fired at the daughter and missed, then shot Williams in the head with an antique pistol. She died the next day. The killer was never caught. The pistol turned up shattered in a stairwell police had already searched, and a missing spare key reappeared at the front desk that same night.

There's another suite, a few floors up, where Jacob Franks died in 1928. His son was Bobby Franks — the 14-year-old murdered by Leopold and Loeb in 1924. After they buried the boy, his parents sold the family home and moved into the Drake. The father lived out his last years there.

Two real tragedies, both documented. Neither one became a ghost.