Where to Stay in Thriller

★★★★★

The haunted-hotel summit — the 1909 Georgian grande dame that gave Stephen King The Shining, with room 217's resident housekeeper, the fourth floor's children, a whiskey bar for the nerves, and the Rockies filling every window.

★★★★★

The French Quarter's 1886 grande dame — the revolving Carousel Bar, the literary ghosts (Faulkner, Capote, Williams all checked in), and the fourteenth-floor hauntings that made it one of America's most storied hotel addresses.

★★★★★

Savannah's oldest hotel — an 1851 Broughton Street landmark that served as a Civil War hospital, now candid about its hallway apparitions and basement history, with the squares and ghost tours outside the veranda doors.

★★★★★

Witch City's 1925 grand hotel — on the common where militia once mustered, steps from the trial sites, with room 325 and the sixth floor carrying the house reports and October running the best Halloween ball in America.

★★★★★

The Ozarks' self-titled most haunted hotel in America — a mountaintop Victorian resort whose darkest chapter was a 1930s cancer-quack hospital, now running nightly ghost tours, a morgue in the basement, and full-service spa upstairs.

★★★★★

The 1859 grande dame next door to the Alamo — Teddy Roosevelt recruited Rough Riders in its bar, chambermaid Sallie White still makes her rounds by report, and thirty-some spirits share the oldest continuously operating hotel west of the Mississippi.

★★★★★

The 1888 red-turreted beach palace of San Diego — and the home of Kate Morgan, the guest who checked in alone in 1892 and never left, whose room 3327 remains the most famous haunted booking on the Pacific coast.