The Read House

A hotel has stood on the site since before the Civil War — the Crutchfield House, left in rubble by the war, was where Dr. John T. Read and his wife Caroline built their hotel, opened New Year's Day 1872 with rooms from a dollar a day, a restaurant, café, grill, Turkish bath, and an in-house railroad ticket office. Their son Samuel took over in 1879 at nineteen and eventually replaced the old pile: in 1925 most of it was demolished for the present ten-story building.

The guest register is unusually quotable. Winston Churchill stayed, as did Gary Cooper and, later, Oprah Winfrey. Al Capone passed a stretch in the hotel in the early 1930s while in town for a federal matter, and custom iron bars were fitted to the window of the room he occupied — the iron survived into the modern building as a talking point, the only amenity in the archive credited to a federal prosecution — room 311, which is either a coincidence the archive declines to explain or the room's second famous tenant.

As the accepted version goes — hotel management's own phrase for it — Annalisa was, shall we say, getting around; her husband took exception and ended the relationship in the bathtub, taking her head with the gesture. Variants put the year at 1927 or 1929 and trade the husband for a jealous lover. The hotel tells the story with a straight face and a wink at once; general manager Ken Merkel delivers the line that the husband ended her life in the bathtub, then declines the details, on grounds of taste. Local researchers have noted that the city's ninety-year-old records appear never to have yielded the crime, which is the sort of detail that would end most legends and has not ended this one.

The claims for 311 are the standard suite, filed consistently for decades: unexplained noises, flickering lights, running water, and shadowy figures, plus the harder-to-catalogue sense of not being alone in the bathroom. Guests report feeling Annalisa's presence; some claim to have seen her.

The hotel's 2018 renovation under Avocet Hospitality — roughly twenty-five to twenty-eight million dollars, depending on the count — deliberately restored 311 to its 1920s state rather than updating it, and the room now books as the Room 311 Experience, seasonally, at a premium. The dead, it turns out, can be excellent for occupancy. At least one guest interviewed by the local paper reported arriving as a disbeliever and leaving as a paying convert — the hotels preferred ratio.