Windsor Hotel

At the Windsor Hotel in Americus, Georgia, the staff say a bellman named Floyd Lowery never really clocked out. He worked here for about 54 years, running the elevator and carrying bags, and people who work the floors today say he still walks the building, still welcomes guests in.

Floyd Lowery was real, and the record is clear about him. Floyd Ardell Lowery, 1905 to 1982. A lifelong teetotaler who lived with his mother. In 1928, when Franklin Roosevelt spoke from the hotel veranda, it was Lowery who pressed his suit. The second-floor bar carries his name now — Floyd's Pub, named for a man who never took a drink.

The Windsor opened in 1892, a five-story Victorian pile built to draw wealthy Northerners south for the winter. Over the decades it kept a long ledger of real deaths. Two men fell down the elevator shaft in the early years and lived. A bank cashier killed himself in the lavatory in 1908. The head waiter, Lucius Frazier, was convicted in 1916 of killing a laundress named Lillie Lewis, served years on a chain gang, and went into an unmarked grave at Eastview Cemetery.

Then there's the story the ghost tours actually sell. The legend says a housekeeper named Emily Mae and her young daughter Emma fell three stories down an open elevator shaft in the early 1900s, pushed, the tellers say, by Emily's lover during an argument upstairs. Guests report a child's footsteps in the third-floor hallway, a woman in a long black dress in a third-floor mirror.

Here's the part the tours leave out. No document anywhere confirms that mother and child ever existed. A historian who combed the newspaper record found the real dead — named, dated — and not a trace of Emily Mae. As one researcher put it, ghost stories about marginalized people "are often based in, and perpetuate, stereotypes."

So the hotel sells a haunting no record supports. And the one ghost the record can almost vouch for is the bellman, still working the floor he never left.