A whistled tune moves down the halls of the Thomas House Hotel in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee, with no visible source. Ghost hunters book Room 37 for a girl named Sarah, and the pool where a 7-year-old drowned in 1961 was torn out in 2024.
The Thomas House Hotel in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee has a whistler no one can find. A tune moves down the upstairs hallways with nobody there to carry it, and staff and guests have reported it for years. When a SyFy crew came to film the building for a 2012 episode of Ghost Hunters, called "Dead and Breakfast," they say they caught the whistling on their recordings, with no one in the halls to make it.
The hotel's oldest hands have a guess about who it is. A descendant of Thomas Cloyd, one of the brothers who built the place, told a ghost-hunting group that Cloyd was a constant whistler who did it while he worked the halls.
The Cloyds put up the first hotel here in 1890, back when Red Boiling Springs was a mineral-spring resort town and people came from all over for the water. That first building burned in 1924. The red-brick one standing now went up in 1927, more than 50 rooms of it, and the family name stayed on the walls long after the last of the family was gone.
Sarah stayed too, the guests say. She's told as a young Cloyd girl, and she keeps to the upstairs White Hallway and to Room 37, the room ghost-hunting groups ask for first. They bring cameras and meters and wait the night out for her, and they trade stories about balls that roll on their own and flashlights that click on and off. The way it's told, a guest wakes to a girl standing quiet at the side of the bed, watching, and then she's gone. People book the room to wait for exactly that.
The one death here with a firm date behind it belongs to neither of them.
The pool went in in the late 1930s. On July 29, 1961, the body of 7-year-old Edwin Rush was found in the water. For decades after, people said they saw the boy, around the pool and inside the hotel. He is the one ghost at the Thomas House with a certificate under his name, and the pool was where he stayed.
In November 2024, they tore the pool out. An event pavilion is going in where it stood. The whistler keeps his hallway, Sarah keeps Room 37, and the ghost-hunt weekends run the way they always have. But the one haunted spot on the property anybody could point to, the one tied to a real name and a real date, is gone now, filled in and paved over for parties.
