The Lofts Hotel

The Lofts Hotel in Columbus occupies an 1882 warehouse on the National Register of Historic Places. A white-haired Victorian woman called the Lady of the Lofts appears in the back stairwell, a blonde figure vanishes in the elevator around 4 AM, and a security guard once spent twenty minutes searching for the source of horrific screaming on the empty second floor.

Security guard Kevin was on his afternoon shift at the Lofts Hotel in Columbus when he heard a woman screaming on the second floor. Not a yelp, not a startled gasp. Horrific screaming, the kind that sends you running. He searched for twenty minutes. Every room, every hallway, every closet on the floor. He found nothing.

The building at 55 East Nationwide Boulevard started life in 1882 as the Carr Building, a warehouse that housed manufacturing and supply businesses for over a century. NBBJ, the architecture firm, had offices here before the space was converted into a boutique hotel in 1998. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The hotel's ghost is a white-haired woman in Victorian clothing. Staff call her the Lady of the Lofts, though nobody knows who she was. She appears most often in the back stairwell of the lobby, visible from the corner of your eye but gone when you turn to look. Employees who use the stairs regularly have come to expect her.

Around 4:00 AM, a blonde woman has been seen entering the elevator. She fades away as the doors close. Whether this is the same spirit or a second one is unclear, but the timing is consistent across multiple reports.

Clocks throughout the hotel change time on their own. Staff have reset them only to find them wrong again within hours, with no pattern to the adjustments. Murmuring voices drift through the hallways, indistinct but definitely human, audible to employees working alone after the last guest has gone to bed.

The Carr Building spent 116 years as a warehouse before anyone slept here. Whatever businesses operated in this space between 1882 and 1998, their workers, their routines, their daily lives left no public record worth noting. The Lady of the Lofts could have been anyone: a factory worker, a bookkeeper, a cleaning woman. The Victorian dress suggests she predates the building's 1998 hotel conversion by a wide margin.

Columbus's Arena District has transformed dramatically around the building. Nationwide Arena sits a block away. The neighborhood is loud, modern, and crowded on game nights. The Lofts Hotel is a quiet pocket of 1882 brick in the middle of all of it, with a stairwell ghost who has been climbing the same steps since before the Blue Jackets existed.