Thomas House Hotel

The town's economy was the springs. New York businessman James F. O. Shaughnessy bought the tract in the early 1880s and developed it as a resort; by 1890, when the railroads reached Carthage and Hartsville thirty miles off, Red Boiling Springs supported a boom of hotels, of which the Cloyd house was among the first. Three of the boom hotels survive on the National Register — the Thomas House listed September 11, 1986, alongside the Donoho and the Counts.

The twentieth century was less genteel. The building did time as a boys' summer camp, and in 1988 it passed to a corporation called Anzara, behind which stood a religious order that took up residence in the town's hotels — described in the local record as an Armageddon-minded cult preoccupied with communicating with the dead. In 1993 Roy and Evelyn Thomas Cole bought the building for back taxes and reopened it as the Thomas House; the Coles' name it still carries. A second fire in the 1990s took a wing, which was rebuilt again.

The hotel does not deny its ghosts; it schedules them. Monthly Ghost Hunt Weekends sell lodging, meals and an all-night lights-out investigation with a resident crew — the rooms themselves now part of the equipment. Guests and staff have filed the standard register for generations: doors that open and close on their own, apparitions in the hallways, moving beds, dark figures, disembodied whistling and children's laughter where no children are checked in.

Two of the reports have names attached. The spirit of a young girl called Sarah is said to frequent the White Hallway and Room 37. And the whistling figure reported in the halls is assigned, by the lore, to Mr. Cloyd himself — captured, the hotel claims, on camera as a tall shadow. That the hotel names a ghost after its own founding family is either evidence or branding; the archive files it under both.

Red Boiling Springs' resort economy is mostly memory — of the boom hotels, two still operate — but the Thomas House keeps the whole apparatus in working order: the verandas, the waters, and now the ghosts, hosted with the same hospitality. A hotel that burned once and rebuilt, housed a camp and then a cult, and outlasted the cure it was built to serve has accumulated the lore to match. The file notes only that the guest register is a hundred and thirty-five years deep, and some of the names are said to still be in the hallway.