Daneville Inn
Daneville Inn is an inn in Viborg, South Dakota. Inn associated with documented cultural history. It sits in the archive under haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Daneville Inn haunted?
The record holds 1 claim, 1 legend — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed local folklore. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.
The record — long form
The inn's name is a memorial to a town the railroad skipped. Daneville began in 1872 as Mads Rasmussen's store and post office on his homestead claim half a mile south of present-day Viborg — a thriving little Danish hamlet that soon had a creamery and a blacksmith shop. When the Sioux Falls, Yankton & Southwestern Railroad — later folded into the Great Northern — laid its line in 1893, it missed Daneville entirely. The businesses packed up and moved to the new townsite, named for Viborg, Denmark, in what became one of the largest Danish colonies in the United States.
What's reported
The Main Street building keeps the vanished village's name and has worked in recent years as a local restaurant and bar — brick-oven pizza and a steakhouse in the tellings. 'The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South Dakota' files the reports: a strange glowing apparition floating through the bar area after closing, plus disembodied footsteps and noises in the empty room.
The file treats the sightings the way the record supports — neighborhood knowledge, retold locally, verified nowhere. What is verifiable is the ghost behind the ghost: Daneville itself, the settlement that disappeared into its neighbor and left its name on the inn.
The record of claims
A luminous apparition is reportedly seen after closing. Daneville Inn, a hotel in Viborg, South Dakota, has kept the story in circulation longer than most of its guest registers. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. The report is preserved in sources like 'The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South Dakota'. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.
A luminous apparition is reportedly seen after closing. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. It survives as local folklore, which is to say it survives because people keep telling it. The account appears in 'The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South Dakota'. Legends accrue where records go silent; this one filled the gap and stayed.
Sources on file
- 01The Haunted Indoors of Eastern South DakotaTravel South Dakota · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.