There’s a logical explanation for everything, right? Doors slam suddenly because the wind gusts through an open window. Stairs creak as old houses shift and settle. Missing objects turn up in obscure places because we forget where we put them. Filmy shapes appear and vanish with the moonlight.

These things we know in our rational minds. Yet there’s that prickly thought that sometimes creeps in, especially when the inexplicable happens, that pushes aside reason and suggests: Maybe it’s a ghost.

Of course, I’m too sensible for that. Like many people, I enjoy hearing a good legend of the supernatural—preferably accompanied by a nice glass of port in front of a stoked-up fire. But do I believe them. Don’t be silly.

Nevertheless, writing about several “haunted” inns sounded like fun. So here I am on the phone, listening with pragmatic detachment as Robin Stanier, co-owner of western North Carolina’s Lodge on Lake Lure, tells me about the strange happenings there. Seems that an apparition, the figure of a man, has appeared occasionally in one of the guest rooms. There have been other remarkable events at the lodge (more on those in a bit), but the ghost in Room 4 is intriguing enough to warrant the trip.

I call back and ask Jack, Robin’s husband, if there are any rooms available on an upcoming Saturday night. He doubts it, because the inn has been reserved well in advance for that weekend, but checks anyway. The inn is indeed booked for days…save for a single previously filled reservation space that he finds mysteriously whited out.

The opening is on the night I’ve requested. It is for Room 4.

An icy chill creeps up my unsuperstitious spine. I begin my tour of haunted inns feeling a little less smugly rational.

The Lodge on Lake Lure “It’s not as if there’s a headless horseman running around here,” Robin Stanier explains as she welcomes me to the Lodge on Lake Lure. But there are those reports of an anatomically intact apparition in Room 4—the one I’ve booked.

The room looks friendly enough, with a pleasant, woodsy breeze blowing in from the lake and homey rose-damask linens creating a cushy nest on the bed. There’s no sign of an unearthly presence when I drop off my luggage, but if someone is haunting this wonderful lodge, located about 30 miles southeast of Asheville, N.C., it might be George Penn.

In August 1937, Penn, a highway patrolman, was gunned down as he pursued two criminals; the lodge was built in his memory as a retreat for state troopers and their families. Decades later it became a bed-and-breakfast; the Staniers took over the property in 1990.

At first, they noticed nothing unusual. But several months after they arrived, a guest from Room 4 walked into the Great Room and pulled Robin aside. “There’s a ghost in our room,” the woman whispered. She said that in the night she had awakened to see a man walking around the room. Thinking he had blundered in by mistake, she called out, “Wrong room!” she then saw him go into the hallway and pace up and down.

When the woman’s husband awoke, he told her that what she had seen was impossible: The door was closed and locked. But she insisted that she had seen the figure through the door, as if she were looking through wide slats.

A few weeks later, Robin told the story to other guests, leaving out which room had been involved. One guest later asked, “That was Room 4, wasn’t it? Because it happened to me, too.” Robin called previous owner Doris Nunn, who confirmed that the inn was haunted. (When I talked to Nunn later, she said she became so exasperated with the ghost’s antics—repeatedly hiding a lamp bowl under a bed, slamming doors behind her while she cleaned—that she used to scold it out loud.)

The ghost didn’t manifest itself to the current owners until their first Christmas at the inn. Friends and family had gathered in the dining room, which runs across the back of the lodge and has a spectacular view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and part of the 1,500 acres of Lake Lure. In front of the windows, a buffet table had been set with china and glassware.

The guests had been discussing the baffling events that none of them had witnessed. Robin’s 38-year-old daughter, Betsy, said, “If there is a ghost, I wish he’d do something.” Minutes later, a 12-inch blue goblet at the back of the buffet table flew off and crashed against a counter on the other side of the room.

At the time, Betsy was walking toward one set of dining-room doors; a friend of Robin’s was standing near another; and Robin was just coming into the room from the kitchen. All three women agreed on what they had seen. “It didn’t roll off,” says Betsy, who was standing nearest the goblet. “It didn’t topple over.” Months later, when she was giving some prospective guests a tour, a potted plant flew off an end table in the library. No one had been standing near it.

During my visit there is no airborne glassware, although the lodge flag outside falls down while we’re in the Great Room talking about ghosts. Afterwards, I spend a quiet night in Room 4. The only thing that haunts me when I leave is the wish that I lived closer to such a tranquil spot.

Henry Ludlam Inn
Jean L’Heureux, a typographer from Freehold, N.J., sounds like a levelheaded guy. But he has no rational explanation for the story he tells about his stay at Dennisville, N.J.’s Henry Ludlam Inn. He knows one thing for sure, though—he was wide awake that night.

L’Heureaux and his wife, Judy, had spent a pleasant evening at the 18th-century inn, built as a home for the wealthy Ludlam family (one of whom was rumored to have been a pirate). At about 3 a.m., a few hours after they turned in, L’Heureux heard music playing faintly as he returned from the bathroom.

He thought it was a radio in the dining room, directly below. Then the music came up the stairs and into their room. “It sounded like old marching music,” he says. “I heard voices, like names being called in a muster or roll call.” A woman began singing in an operatic soprano. “That made me get out of bed,” says L’Heureux. “But as soon as my feet hit the floor, it all stopped.”

Judy had been sleeping with earplugs, and no one else in the inn heard anything. “I never believed in ghosts. I still don’t, really,” L’Heureux says. “But I looked for wires, a radio—there was nothing.”

Other Ludlam guests have reported waking with “a chilling sensation,” finding coins left in their shoes or smelling bacon cooking in the middle of the night (innkeepers Ann and Marty Thurlow serve no breakfast meats because Marty has a heart condition). The Thurlows themselves, from time to time, have witnessed lights and a TV turning on by themselves, an unlockable bolt somehow locking itself, and mysterious knocking at the front door. Once, says Ann, “we both woke up to a terrible sound of smashing glass.” When they checked, nothing was broken.

Then there are the visions. A previous tenant showed the Thurlows the spot in a second-floor bedroom where he had seen a spectral woman wearing a blue dress. One visiting psychic saw the phantasms of a tall, bearded man and a woman making candles in a second-floor bedroom; another said several former occupants were haunting the place.

I have to find out for myself. I ask to stay in the Wicker Room, warmly decorated, like the other four guest rooms, with country details. Unlike the others, though, this is the room in which Ann’s mother once awakened to see the image of a small child sleeping at the foot of the bed. I go to sleep in the high, comfy bed, half-hoping for a return engagement. No such luck.

The Thurlows downplay the inn’s spookier attractions. “Some guests are very skittish about it, some just think it’s funny,” Ann explains, “and some people knock on our door and ask to see the ghost.” But as I was disappointed to learn, the spirits do not perform on request.

Kitty Knight House
When the British advanced up the Sassafras River to tiny Georgetown, Md., during the War of 1812, they threatened to burn homes unless residents surrendered. Most citizens evacuated, after a defense against the better- armed British failed. But not Kitty Knight. On May 6, 1813, Miss Kitty met the conquerors “with head erect and flashing eyes,” saying, “I shall not leave; if you burn this house, you burn me with it.” Her home and the one next to it, both situated high on a hill overlooking the river, were virtually the only ones spared.

Today, the two buildings are joined to form the Kitty Knight House, a restaurant, bar and inn, and some believe Miss Kitty is just as stubborn about staying put as she was 180 years ago. Most visitors see only her portrait, over a fireplace in one of the colonial-décor dining rooms, in which she appears translucent in a lace-trimmed rose gown. But Robert Garvine, the inn’s dining-room manager, thinks he’s seen the real thing.

About seven years ago, he and a waitress were walking through a back hallway one night at closing time. “There was an image of a woman standing near the door,” Garvine remembers. “She looked identical to the woman in the picture. It sort of frightened us a little bit.” The woman appeared ephemeral, as in the painting.

Garvine has never seen Miss Kitty again, but he does mention that doors in the inn have a way of opening and closing on their own. And owner Charles E. Metzger has noticed lights in the second- and third-floor bedrooms and seen someone walking around in rooms that haven’t been booked. When he goes inside to check, the lights are off and the rooms empty.

If there have been any ethereal trespassers in my room, they haven’t left a trace. I pause at the room’s small deck to savor the view of several hundred boats bobbing in the Georgetown harbor, and settle in for the evening.

Sometime in the night, I awaken to a screaming sound, but it’s only the wind shrieking around the corners of the roof. No mystery lady walks the halls on my watch.

The Rexmont Inn
Janet Ruby noticed something odd at the Rexmont Inn almost from the moment she and her husband, George, bought the elegant Victorian mansion two years ago. The house, located in Rexmont, Pa., near Lebanon and Hershey, had been built in 1875 for Cyrus Rex, a wealthy 19th-century backer and store owner who endeared himself to locals by arranging mortgages for their homes. A small, intense-looking bachelor, Rex lived there with his niece, Susan Amanda.

In the 90 years after Rex’s death, the house’s imposing front tower was removed and the building deteriorated. As the Rubys and their contractors were transforming it into a lovely inn, the workers told Janet Ruby of often feeling as if someone were standing behind them when they were alone.

At first, she laughed off such comments. Then, the night before the inn opened, it happened to her. “I was in the Cyrus Rex Room,” Janet recalls, “and I felt it, too. When I turned around, no one was there.” Weeks later, she saw “something that looked like shimmering smoke” in the second-floor hall, where the tower door used to be.

Janet’s father, who was living with them at the time, reported feeling someone brush against him and hearing what he described as the rustle of a woman’s gown behind him. Janet and her father have also heard footsteps and doors slamming upstairs during the day, when no guests are there, and seen lights turn on and off when no one has been near them.

George Ruby, Janet’s husband, is a skeptic about this ghost business, but recent occurrences at the inn have given him pause. A wonderful grandfather clock that has been in his family since the 1700s worked perfectly until it was moved into the Rexmont’s tasteful sitting room. Now the pendulum stops capriciously, or the time changes inexplicably. A library clock and a new kitchen clock also seem to reset themselves at random, and sometimes they’ll strike too many times.

Judy and Richard Carlo knew none of this when they came to stay in the Susan Amanda Room early last fall. In the middle of the night, Judy awoke when she felt someone sit down on her side of the bed. She thought it was her husband, but rolled over and saw him sleeping. She looked back as the form rose and stood at the foot of the bed. “I didn’t feel it was anything to be frightened of,” she says. “It was just a presence. It felt harmless.”

Carlo has never had another such experience, before or since. And, yes, the room’s door was locked. Later, in front of some other guests, she mentioned the apparition to Janet Ruby, who says, “I just about dropped dead!”

Janet needn’t have worried that the news would scare off potential customers. After a psychic visited the Rexmont and declared that “an energy” from the demolished tower was still present, Janet invited her back for a Psychic Weekend. The soothsayer gave inn guests private one-hour consultations about their futures and, in a group session, described their past lives. The weekend was so popular that the Rubys scheduled another five this year, and more are in the works.

Frankly, I don’t care if the Susan Amanda Room is haunted, because it’s gorgeous. Rose-and-green floral patterns adorn antique butter-print oak furniture, and a goodies basket of Hershey bars and pretzels (regional fare) waits on a night table. Still…I lock the door before bedtime.

My sleep is unbroken by wraithlike visitors. On my way to breakfast the next morning, I’m stopped momentarily by an overpoweringly sweet, heavy floral scent in the main hall, which contains an imposing mirror once owned by Cyrus Rex. Strange—the odor is nowhere else in the inn. I settle in with my coffee and, out of courtesy, don’t mention the smell to Janet when she joins me for a chat.

Our conversation wanders, eventually coming back to puzzling episodes at the Rexmont. Janet tells me her sister has spoken of an oddity she’s noticed when visiting from Canada. “She often smells what she describes as funeral flowers in the downstairs hall,” says Janet, who has never detected such an odor.

I race back to the spot where I caught the scent, but there’s no trace of it.