Thomas House Hotel

Sarah, daughter of one of the Cloyd brothers who built the place in 1890, moves the rocking chair in Room 37 of this Red Boiling Springs B&B.

Room 37 at the Thomas House Hotel is the room ghost-hunting groups book first. They drag in cameras, EMF meters, full-spectrum flashlights, and all night they wait for Sarah, the little girl who's been opening doors and tugging at hands in the upstairs hallway since long before the SyFy channel ever showed up.

Sarah is the daughter of one of the Cloyd brothers who built the original hotel in 1890. The Cloyds, Zack and Clay, were local store owners cashing in on the Mineral Spring Boom, and their first building was a long white weatherboard with two-story verandas and elite clientele who came to drink the water. That building burned in 1924. The current red-brick hotel went up in 1927, designed by Joseph H. Peters in the period's "Early twentieth century resort" style, and got onto the National Register on September 11, 1986. A second fire in the 1990s took out a wing and forced another rebuild.

Three fires, decades of guest deaths, a stretch in the 1970s when a religious cult is rumored to have rented the place out, a child drowning in the pool. The Thomas House has had more than its share of bad days, and the current staff treats the ghost roster as the bill still coming due.

Sarah is the headliner. She gets blamed for the doorknobs that turn at 3 a.m., the impressions that appear on freshly made beds in the White Hallway, and the small handprints that staff wipe off the mirror in Room 37 most mornings. The other named figure is Mr. Cloyd himself, described as a tall shadow in the back hallway who whistles a tune nobody can quite place. Photographs of him exist, taken by ghost hunt guests, and they're exactly as ambiguous as you'd expect.

Then there's Edwin Rush, age seven, who drowned in the hotel pool in 1961. His ghost is the one most associated with the pool area now, though the pool itself has been through several reconfigurations since. People who've never heard the Edwin story still report a kid laughing in the courtyard at dusk.

The hotel has given up on being a normal bed and breakfast. The Thomas House sells "Ghost Hunt Weekends" as its primary product. You get overnight lodging, dinner, breakfast, a history-and-hauntings presentation, and unrestricted access to investigate the building until sunrise. SyFy's Ghost Hunters filmed here in the early 2010s, and that episode is still what brings most paranormal tourists in.

Whether it's the second-most-haunted location in the United States, as the hotel itself claims, is wildly unprovable. There's no leaderboard for that. But the density of stories per square foot at the Thomas House is unusual, and the building's track record (three fires, the cult era, the drownings, the deaths the records don't fully account for) gives those stories a foundation that most B&Bs would struggle to match.

For a hotel with a SyFy episode in its back pocket, the staff talk about the ghosts with surprising flatness. Ask about Sarah and the answer comes back calm and almost rehearsed: she likes the White Hallway, she's gentle, she's been here longer than any of them. The night manager might mention that Sarah's favorite trick in Room 37 is moving the rocking chair an inch or two during a guest's shower. Then the manager walks away to deal with check-in, and the line between marketing pitch and shift report is gone.

Sarah has been moving that rocking chair since before the Cloyd brothers were dead.