In Brief
A guest at the Walnut Street Inn in Springfield, Missouri lay down in the Rosen Room and looked up to find an elderly woman seated at the table. He said it was his room. She said it was hers, then vanished. Staff aren't sure who she was.
The Full Story
A man lay stretched out on the bed in the Rosen Room of the Walnut Street Inn in Springfield, Missouri, and looked up to find a woman sitting at the table against the wall. He told her, more or less, that this was his room. She answered that it was hers. Then she was gone.
He wasn't the first guest she had corrected. The stories describe her the same way every time: an elderly woman in Victorian dress, hair pinned up, composed and territorial. She tells people to get out of her room. She sits at the table, or at the foot of the bed. And she disappears the instant anyone moves toward her, the way she did when the man swung his feet to the floor.
The house she keeps was built in 1894 by Charles McCann, a Springfield grocer who ran the railroad-shop campaign and helped fund the city's first public library. He spent nearly $6,000 on it, in years when good carpenters earned two dollars a day. "I had Henry Hornsby cast for me 20 iron Corinthian columns, which gave the house a very handsome appearance," he said of the build. After the McCanns it passed through a chain of owners — newspaper publishers, then Dr. Max Rosen, who ran a medical practice out of the home from 1953 and raised five children inside it. The Browns bought it in 1987 and opened Springfield's first bed and breakfast there the next spring. The rooms still carry the old owners' names: McCann, Jewell, Rosen. The most haunted of them is named for the doctor.
The Rosen Room draws the most accounts, but she travels. One guest in the Carriage House woke around 2 a.m. to the covers being pulled back, and saw a woman in Victorian dress sitting on the bed before she vanished. Others report her reflection in bathroom mirrors, lights coming on by themselves in the Main House, footsteps crossing hallways with no one in them. For all of it, she never throws anything or slams a door. She just wants the room.
Staff once put a Ouija board to her and came away believing she was a former guest who died in her seventies, never the woman who built the house. Some accounts still want her to be Katherine McCann, the grocer's wife, and the house does carry her husband's name. But the version most tellers settle on is plainer, and worse. Nobody got a name out of her. She only ever made the one thing clear, to every guest who took the bed: the room is hers.
