Westin Poinsett Hotel

A twelve-story 1925 hotel in downtown Greenville where guests on the upper floors keep waking to an elderly man watching them from across the room. A woman was once pushed into a closet by an unseen force and held there for fifteen minutes.

A businessman staying at the Westin Poinsett woke up twice to find his bathroom lights on after he'd shut them off. When he stepped into the hallway to investigate, he saw an elderly man disappear around a corner. The front desk confirmed he was the only guest on that floor.

The Poinsett Hotel opened in June 1925 as a twelve-story landmark on South Main Street in downtown Greenville, designed by architect William Lee Stoddart and named for Joel Roberts Poinsett, the South Carolina statesman who brought the poinsettia to America from Mexico. Under J. Mason Alexander's management from 1930 to 1960, the hotel hosted Amelia Earhart, John Barrymore, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Bobby Kennedy, and Liberace. The guest book reads like a time capsule of mid-century celebrity.

The building declined by the mid-1970s and closed in 1975. It served as a retirement home through the 1980s, housing elderly residents on its upper floors, then sat vacant and deteriorating from 1987 to 1997 before a full restoration reopened it on October 22, 2000.

The property occupies land where the Mansion House Hotel stood since 1820. In September 1885, Dr. Robinson Earle was fatally shot on Main Street directly in front of the Mansion House by William Yancey, a former journalist who was also Earle's niece's husband. The confrontation started over a political slur. Yancey received a one-year manslaughter sentence. Earle's body is buried at Springwood Cemetery, but some local historians wonder whether his spirit stayed closer to where he fell.

Guests on the upper floors describe knocking in empty hallways late at night. Multiple people have woken to find an elderly man standing in their room, watching them, before he fades away. A young woman staying with her boyfriend was pushed into a closet by an unseen force, and the doorknob felt held from the other side for roughly fifteen minutes while she tried to escape. She left the hotel immediately afterward. Staff have noticed elevators stopping at floors where nobody called them, and housekeeping has found rooms disturbed after being cleaned when no guest had access.

Jason Profit documented the hotel's haunted history in his 2011 book Haunted Greenville, South Carolina. The identities of the spirits remain unclear. They could be former guests from the hotel's golden age, elderly residents from the retirement home era, or vagrants who sheltered in the building during the years it sat empty. The man watching from a third-floor window, visible from Main Street in a room that management says is unoccupied, hasn't been identified either.

The Westin Poinsett turned one hundred in 2025 and remains a landmark on the Greenville skyline. Greenville Ghost Tours includes the hotel as a regular stop.