Union Station Hotel

USA Today voted Union Station the best haunted hotel in America. Abigail lost her boyfriend in WWII and now lives in Room 711.

USA Today's readers voted Union Station Hotel the best haunted hotel in America, ahead of the Stanley in Estes Park. The whole legend rides on one room, one woman, and one set of train tracks she chose not to walk away from.

Her name is Abigail. The story takes place during World War II, when Union Station was still a working L&N Railroad depot, decades before anybody put hotel keys in its hands. Abigail came to the depot to send her boyfriend off to the front in France. He didn't come back. When the news reached her, she returned to the same platform where she'd kissed him goodbye and stepped in front of a train.

Now she lives in Room 711.

The room is on the seventh floor, the top of the hotel, and the window looks down over the rail bed where she died. Abigail seems to need that view. Guests in 711 report a phone ringing with no caller, lights cycling on and off, dragging sounds from the floor above (which doesn't exist, because 711 is the top), and the occasional silhouette in the bathroom mirror. The hotel staff describe her as benign. "She's not mean, she's not vicious," is the line that gets repeated. "But she makes her presence known."

The building they put her in is worth its own paragraph. Union Station opened in 1900 as the Nashville hub of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, a Romanesque Revival cathedral to American rail in its peak decade. The 65-foot vaulted ceiling, the stained glass, the alligator pond they kept in the lobby (yes, a real alligator pond, drained in 1959). Then the trains stopped running. The depot sat dark for years before a mid-1980s renovation turned it into a hotel, which is the form it's held since.

Abigail isn't the only figure people report. A uniformed soldier has been described walking the rail bed below the hotel, and the romantic version of the story (which the hotel does not actively push, but doesn't correct either) has him as Abigail's boyfriend, finally arriving at the platform he never reached in 1944. Most of the soldier sightings come from people on the back patio at dusk. The figure shows up, walks a few yards, and then is gone.

The mood at Union Station is the opposite of every other top-five haunted hotel. The Stanley plays its lore loud. The Crescent has a basement morgue tour. Union Station has a chandelier in the lobby and a quiet line on its website about Abigail liking Room 711. The hotel knows what people show up for and refuses to cosplay it.

Room 711 books out fastest in October, but it books out the rest of the year too. People specifically request it. The desk lets them know what they're getting into, hands them the key, and the new guests take the elevator to the seventh floor, drop their bags, and walk over to the window to look down at the tracks that took Abigail's life and apparently kept her here.

One room, one view, one story Union Station has been telling for forty years, and it's the reason USA Today's readers picked it over the Stanley.