Windsor Hotel

A housekeeper named Emily Mae and her daughter Emma were pushed down an elevator shaft in this 1892 Americus hotel, and guests still hear a child running on the third floor and see a woman in black in the mirrors. Floyd, the bellman who worked here for 50 years and once pressed FDR's suit, greets guests in the lobby decades after his death.

Housekeeper Michelle Maness was vacuuming near Room 401 when she heard a little girl's voice. She was alone on the floor. "The little girl was Emily," Maness told investigators. "She was the daughter of the former housekeeper who worked in the 1920s."

The Windsor Hotel opened on June 16, 1892, in Americus, Georgia, a five-story Victorian showpiece designed by Swedish architect Gottfried L. Norrman. Local visionaries Major Moses Speer and businessman John T. Windsor envisioned a grand destination for wealthy northerners escaping winter. The hotel occupied nearly an entire city block, featured elevators, electric railway access, individualized silver service for each guest, a tower, balconies, and a three-story open atrium lobby. It was, for a small Georgia town, an absurd amount of ambition.

The elevator shaft has a body count. In 1894, Richard Rust fell down it and survived. In 1896, A. A. Martin fell down the same shaft and also survived. Others were not as lucky. In 1908, bank cashier Alonzo John Walters died by suicide in the hotel lavatory. In 1906, Albany businessman J. Eugene Moore died in a third-floor room. A chef was convicted of murdering a laundress on the premises. The building collected tragedies the way old hotels do, one at a time over decades, until the weight of them became the story.

The central ghost legend involves Emily Mae, a housekeeper in the early 1900s, and her young daughter Emma. The story: Emily was having an affair with a local man. During an argument on an upper floor, the man pushed both Emily and Emma into an open elevator shaft. The shaft was empty. They fell three stories, holding hands all the way down. Both died.

No historical documents have been found to confirm this version of events. Scholar Joshua Spellman has noted that ghost stories involving marginalized people often rely on and perpetuate stereotypes, and Emily Mae's story, which involves an African American mother and child and a white politician, fits that pattern. The story should be told with that context visible. Whatever the truth of what happened, guests on the third floor hear a child's footsteps running down the hallway. A woman in a long black dress appears in a third-floor mirror. Pots and pans fly off kitchen counters. The apparitions of a mother and daughter stand near the elevator but never step inside.

When the Shadow Chasers paranormal investigation team asked Emily to show herself, investigator Austin Lee described what happened: "She appeared at the top of the stairs in a long black dress."

Floyd Ardell Lowery worked as bellman and elevator operator at the Windsor for roughly 50 years. In 1928, he pressed Franklin D. Roosevelt's suit. He refused alcohol during Prohibition. He died peacefully in 1982, but guests and staff say he still greets people in the lobby, offers directions, and vanishes before anyone realizes he isn't a living employee. The second-floor bar is named Floyd's Pub in his honor.

The hotel closed in 1972 after 80 years of operation. The Windsor Development Corporation formed in 1986, spent nearly million restoring original Victorian features (marble floors, golden oak woodwork, wrought-iron railings), and reopened the hotel on September 20, 1991. Further renovations followed in 2010 and 2019. The front desk keeps a book of documented paranormal experiences for guests to read. Showers turn on by themselves. Clothes get rehung in different spots in the closet. Someone taps you on the shoulder in an empty hallway. None of it is described as malicious. Emily and Emma just seem to live here, the way Floyd does. The hotel hired them, and they never quit.