The Kehoe House

At the Kehoe House on Columbia Square in Savannah, Georgia, guests in Room 201 say a child visits in the night. One woman reported "tiny hands gently brushing her hair and cheek, then seeing a young boy standing near the foot of her bed." Down the hall in Room 203, guests have felt "the mattress dip, as if someone had just sat beside them, followed by a fleeting warmth or a whisper." You can book either room. People do.

The house was finished in 1892, a cast-iron mansion built by William Kehoe, an Irish immigrant who ran an iron foundry in town. He made the place an advertisement for it — the stairways, the columns, the window treatments, the fences and gates are all cast iron, not wood. He and his wife Anne raised ten children here. At least one of them, a daughter named Annie, died in infancy in 1876, and when William died in 1929 only seven of the ten outlived him.

The ghost tours skip past all of that. They tell a different story — that Kehoe twins suffocated inside a chimney during a game of hide-and-seek, their mother finding them too late. It's a good scare, and it has been debunked pretty heavily — there's no record of it, no names, no chimney. The famous version of this house never happened.

What guests actually report is gentler. Child-like laughter in the halls. The scent of an older woman's perfume drifting through rooms with no source. The female presence in 203 is described by one site as "a kind female spirit believed to be a former housekeeper or perhaps Anne Kehoe herself."

Which is the quiet, strange thing about the Kehoe House. The legend made it a place where children died screaming. The documented haunting is a woman sitting on the edge of a guest's bed, and small hands in the dark that only ever brush your hair — a hostess, still checking on the people in her rooms.