Guests at Nashville's Union Station Hotel ask for Room 711 by number. On the top floor they hear heavy furniture dragged across the ceiling, from a floor that isn't there. Staff say she's Abigail, who came to see a soldier off to war and never walked home.
Guests at Union Station Hotel in Nashville ask for Room 711 by number, and the staff know exactly why. It's on the seventh floor, the top one, with a window over the old railroad tracks. The people who stay in it report flickering lights, a phone that rings with no one on the line, the temperature dropping for no reason. And they report the sound of heavy furniture being dragged across the floor above them, and it can't be happening. 711 is the highest room in the building. There is nothing over that ceiling but roof.
The ghost is a woman named Abigail. As the legend has it, she came to this depot during World War II to see her boyfriend off, a soldier shipping out for the front in France. He was killed over there. Abigail came back to the station where she'd last seen him, walked out to the platform, and stepped in front of a train. No record names her. No death certificate, no newspaper account, nothing to date the tragedy. She lives only in the telling, and the telling makes her the grief behind everything Room 711 does.
The building she's said to haunt was Nashville's grand rail terminal, a Romanesque mass of gray stone and Tennessee marble that opened on October 9, 1900, under a 65-foot stained-glass ceiling. In its early years the station kept live alligators in pools down by the tracks, an attraction for arriving passengers. Federal agents walked Al Capone through it on his way to prison in Atlanta. Through both World Wars it served as a USO canteen. The last passenger train pulled out in 1979, and after years standing empty with pigeons in the rafters, it reopened as a hotel in 1986. It's a Marriott property now, with that stained-glass lobby restored and a bar named for the alligators.
Abigail isn't the only figure people report. Down on the tracks at dusk, a man in uniform is sometimes seen standing alone, taken for the soldier she waited on, back too late. In the most-repeated account, a woman smoking on the old platform watched a figure in vintage clothes hop the rail and drop toward the rail bed, then found no body when she looked down. Only the man in uniform, waiting. The two of them keep just missing each other.
In USA Today's readers' poll, this was voted the most haunted hotel in America, ahead of the Stanley in Colorado that inspired The Shining. It doesn't perform the part. The hotel's own website calls Abigail "a benevolent spirit" and Room 711 "something of a tribute to her." The tribute is a bookable room. People reserve it on purpose, by number.
