In Brief
The Westin Poinsett in Greenville, South Carolina keeps an elderly ghost in a long black coat who appears in guest rooms and is gone in seconds. The local rule: if you find a stray black coat during your stay, don't turn it in to lost and found, because he'll be back for it.
The Full Story
The elderly man who appears in the guest rooms at the Westin Poinsett, in Greenville, South Carolina, never stays long. Guests have reported the same thing for years running: he shows up in a long black coat, takes it off, and is gone within seconds.
The coat is where it turns strange. Local tellings hold that if you find a stray black coat during your stay, you should not turn it in to lost and found. As the state tourism office puts it, "Just before he disappears, he removes his black coat, so if you happen to find one during your stay, don't take it to lost and found." He'll be back for it.
He isn't the only account. One businessman kept finding his bathroom light on after he'd switched it off. Stepping into the hall to check a noise, he caught an elderly man disappearing around the corner, and the front desk told him no cleaning staff were working, and that he was the only guest on the floor.
A woman had it worse. The story goes she was pushed into a closet, and the door was held shut against her for roughly 15 minutes, as though a hand were gripping the knob from the outside. She refused to stay another night.
The hotel opened in 1925, a 12-story Beaux-Arts tower on South Main Street named for Joel Roberts Poinsett, the diplomat who brought the poinsettia home from Mexico. It was billed as Carolina's Finest, then travelers drifted to the motels and it closed as a hotel in 1975. The building sat vacant and deteriorating long enough to land on the state's most-endangered list, before a roughly $20 million restoration reopened it as the Westin in 2000.
The ground under it is older than the tower. The Poinsett stands on the site of the Mansion House, a hotel that had been there since the 1820s. On September 8, 1838, William Lowndes Yancey, a former Greenville newspaperman and later the secessionist "Orator of Secession," shot his wife's uncle, Dr. Robinson Earle, dead in a Main Street brawl over a political slur. He was convicted of manslaughter, served a few months, and was pardoned. Local retellings place the killing directly in front of the Mansion House.
Nobody knows who the man in the coat is. The guesses run to a former guest, a resident from the building's retirement-home years, a drifter from the vacant decade. Earle was buried a few blocks off, at Springwood Cemetery. Locals prefer the theory that he never got that far.
