The Marshall House

The Marshall House sits on Broughton Street in Savannah, Georgia, and the people who stay there keep reporting children. Footsteps running the halls late at night. Laughter on the fourth floor. Faucets that come on by themselves in empty bathrooms. Room 414 has the worst reputation — guests there describe children's voices, doors locking and unlocking, noise in the hallway with no one in it.

There's a second ghost they tell about downstairs. A one-armed Union soldier who, the story goes, "walks aimlessly through the lobby... with his missing arm in hand as he beseeches guests to find him a surgeon."

That soldier points at the real history. The Marshall House opened in 1851, built by a Savannah businesswoman named Mary Marshall, and it's the oldest operating hotel in the city. In 1864 Sherman's troops took Savannah and turned the hotel into a Union hospital. Earlier still, during the yellow-fever epidemics of 1854 and 1876, it served as a fever hospital — and the 1876 outbreak alone killed more than a thousand people in the city.

So the place is full of the dead. Which is where the most famous story comes from — and where it falls apart.

Nearly every account of the Marshall House tells the same scene: during the 1990s restoration, workers tore up the floorboards and found human bones, amputated limbs left behind by Civil War surgeons. It's a perfect horror image. It's also almost certainly not true. The hotel's own innkeeper, Hugh Osbourne, flatly denied it — "There were no bones in the basement floorboards." One account says what turned up were chicken bones. The architects who ran the restoration never mention any remains. And a writer who went looking for proof couldn't find a single newspaper clipping, the kind a discovery like that would have made in the late 1990s.

So the bones everyone repeats may never have existed. The children on the fourth floor are the part guests keep coming back to describe.