Haunted Hotels You Can Actually Stay In Overnight

Most people visit haunted places from a safe distance, on a guided tour, out before dark. These are not those places. Each of the properties on this list will let you sleep inside them, if you're willing.

The Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, Fall River, Massachusetts

The Lizzie Borden House – Copyright US Ghost Adventures

On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, were found ax-murdered in their Fall River home. Their daughter Lizzie was arrested, tried, and acquitted, and the case has never officially been solved. The house at 92 Second Street still stands, and today it operates as a bed and breakfast where guests can sleep in the same rooms where the bodies were found.

The most requested room is the one where Abby Borden was killed and struck more than eighteen times while making the bed. Guests who stay there report waking to the sensation of someone sitting on the mattress beside them. Others describe a cold pressure at the foot of the bed and the sound of footsteps in the hallway when no one else is on the floor.

The Lizzie Borden House offers full overnight stays as well as evening crime scene tours for those who want the experience without committing to a night. Most guests who do stay overnight report that the hardest part is not falling asleep, it is waking up at 3 a.m. and remembering exactly where you are.

The Villisca Axe Murder House, Villisca, Iowa

The Villisca Axe Murder House – Copyright US Ghost Adventures

On the night of June 9, 1912, someone entered a modest white house in Villisca, Iowa, and killed eight people with an axe, including six children. Josiah and Sarah Moore and their four kids were staying home that night, along with two young friends who had come for a sleepover. None of them survived. The killer was never identified.

The house was restored to its 1912 condition and opened for tours and overnight stays in the 1990s. It is one of the few places in the country where you can sleep in a legitimately unsolved murder scene. Guests are given a lantern and a key and left alone from dusk until morning. 

The activity reported here is among the most physical of any haunted property in the country. Guests describe objects moving without explanation, sudden and overwhelming feelings of dread in the children's bedroom, and voices recorded on audio equipment that were not audible at the time of recording. Several overnight guests have left before morning, unwilling to stay until sunrise. A paranormal investigator in 2014 was reportedly struck in the head by a metal object while alone in the attic room.

The house is modest and cold and absolutely without atmosphere in the way that a Victorian Gothic mansion has atmosphere. That is, somehow, what makes it worse. Are you brave enough to spend a night at the Villisca Axe Murder House? 

Brickhouse Inn and the Welty House, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

The Brickhouse Inn – Copyright US Ghost Adventures

Gettysburg is arguably the most haunted place in the United States. Over three days in July 1863, roughly 50,000 men were killed or wounded on its fields and in its homes, churches, barns, and streets. The ground has never fully recovered from that weight, and neither, it seems, have many of the buildings that survived it.

The Brickhouse Inn, and the adjacent Welty House, sit in the heart of town and operated as a Confederate field hospital during and after the battle. Surgeons worked continuously through July and into August, and men died in every room of both structures. The Welty House in particular saw some of the most concentrated suffering, as it received the most critically wounded from the fighting on nearby Seminary Ridge.

Guests staying in the Welty House rooms report audible moaning from adjacent rooms that are unoccupied, the smell of blood and antiseptic with no identifiable source, and apparitions of men in gray lying on the floors. One of the most frequently reported experiences is the sensation of someone gripping your wrist while you sleep, firmly, as if asking you not to leave. The innkeepers have documented these reports for decades and maintain a guest log of unusual experiences that makes for unsettling reading before bed.

The inn is also well-reviewed as an actual place to stay, with good breakfasts and a comfortable common area, which somehow makes the contrast with nighttime sharper.

The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colorado

Freelan Oscar Stanley built his grand hotel in the mountains above Estes Park in 1909, intending it as a summer retreat for wealthy guests seeking Colorado's thin, clean air. The hotel is magnificent, white and Georgian against a backdrop of Rocky Mountain peaks, and it has operated continuously for over a century.

In 1974, Stephen King checked into room 217 with his wife Tabitha, nearly alone in the hotel at the end of the season. He had a nightmare that night involving his young son running through the corridors, woke up, walked to the balcony for a cigarette, and by the time he went back inside had the outline of what would become The Shining. The book was published in 1977, and the hotel has never been the same since.

Room 217 is the most requested room in the hotel, booked months in advance by guests hoping for a scare. The activity most often reported there involves unpacked luggage being found moved or repacked, lights flickering on a pattern that feels deliberate, and a figure at the foot of the bed. The figure is described consistently as a large man, standing still, watching.

The fourth floor is considered the most active part of the hotel overall. It was originally staff quarters, and whatever energy lives there seems to belong to people who worked here rather than visited. Children are frequently seen in the hallways of the upper floors and found to have vanished when guests look closer. The ballroom, still used for events, produces cold spots and unexplained piano notes after the room empties.

The Stanley leans into its reputation without apology. It offers ghost tours, spirit talks, and a full overnight paranormal experience. If you are going to stay at a haunted hotel for the first time, this is probably the right choice: beautiful, well-staffed, and genuinely strange.

The Maryland Inn, Annapolis, Maryland

The Maryland Inn – Copyright US Ghost Adventures

Built around 1782 on Church Circle, the Maryland Inn is one of the oldest continuously operating inns in the United States, and one of the few where the haunting feels genuinely colonial rather than theatrical. There are no gift shops selling ghost tour tickets at the front desk. The history simply lives here, quietly, and makes itself known on its own schedule.

The most reported presence is a man in a gray coat seen in the corridor outside room 12. He stands with his back to guests, facing the wall, and does not respond when spoken to. He has been described in nearly identical terms by guests who had no knowledge of previous reports before their stay. Staff working early morning shifts describe hearing harpsichord music from the parlor before anyone else is in the building.

The inn sits at the center of one of the most historically layered blocks in the country. Church Circle was the beating heart of colonial Annapolis, a city that hosted Continental Congress sessions and sent more men to the Revolution than almost any other American port. The ground beneath the Maryland Inn has absorbed two and a half centuries of arrivals, departures, celebrations, and deaths. Some of those, apparently, are still in residence.

The inn is understated and well-run, with none of the costumed supernatural theater that plagues some haunted properties. If something happens during your stay, it will feel unplanned, which is exactly what makes it worth the trip.

A note for first-time overnight ghost hunters: the scariest part of staying in any of these places is rarely the moment something happens. It is the hours beforehand, lying awake in the dark, waiting to find out if something will.