Jamie Davis Whitmer - Americas Most Haunted Hotels

About the Author

Jamie Davis Whitmer is a writer, traveler, and investigator of lost things. She lives in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia.

Introduction

By Jamie

I began officially looking for ghosts in 2008. In 2012 I wrote Haunted Asylums, Prisons, and Sanatoriums with my coauthor Samuel Queen, and it was published the fall of 2013. For that project, we traveled to and investigated ten locations with extremely haunted histories. If you enjoyed my first book, I think you will like this book, although it is certainly very different from my first project. There is an innate creepiness that goes along with abandoned hospitals and prisons that is not as blatantly obvious for haunted hotels. I also ask the reader to please bear in mind that there is a cost-of-the-project factor involved with investigating abandoned asylums versus investigating operating hotels. Remember that in order to actually do a paranormal investigation, you have to pay to shut the building down so you can control the investigation. Sam and I were able to do that in many of the locations we investigated for our first book because the cost was not so prohibitive. Many of the locations featured in Haunted Asylums, Prisons, and Sanatoriums cost less than $750 for the two of us to have full access to the building for twenty-four hours. It was not a cheap project, but it was something that was important to me. So when I was able to, I paid out of pocket and shut the show down for other players so I could get in there and investigate the building.

With hotels, you are talking about shutting down a viable business and buying out the occupancy for a day. To shut down even the smallest featured location in this book would have cost a minimum of $8,000 per night, and that unfortunately is beyond what my husband Bob and I can personally fund. In saying that, I would imagine that price point is beyond the capabilities of other people as well. So, we traveled and wrote and investigated to the extent possible under the limitations that are going to exist for the average guest. I think that has value because you can read this book from a real persons perspective. This is a nonfiction work written from a working-class persons perspective. This is not a fantasy investigation report of what only someone with an unlimited travel budget could make happen. My best tip for bookings if you are trying to get into one of these places and wind up alone in the building is to look at the first week of January, just after the New Years holiday celebrations. This strategy worked for us at the Myrtles Plantation and at the Jerome Grand Hotel.

Hotels are strange places. One of the creepiest things about any hotel, regardless of its history, is the hallways. There is something unsettling about a long, dimly lit hallway of a hotel. You are surrounded by what appears to be an unending line of closed doors. You have no idea what is behind any of them, or whoor whatcould be watching you as you walk a seemingly empty hall. People are passing through hotels constantly, and some times all of this traffic can leave emotions behind as residual imprints.

Interestingly enough, many of the locations we covered have rich histories of being used as hospitals, although I have to tell you that I did not specifically set out to find them when our journey started. There are stories of mysterious deaths, murders, and suicides connected with the hotels featured in this book. The RMS Queen Mary was a war ship that collided with the HMS Curacoa in 1942, resulting in 338 deaths. Many believe that this accident has contributed heavily to the paranormal reports on the ship. The Kehoe House was a former funeral home. Every hotel that is featured has been heavily reported as haunted, either by the locals or the national media, and many times a combination thereof. All of the locations I scouted and chose to feature have signed photo releases, all are open-minded about their respective paranormal legends (many are more than open-minded and outright encourage the exploration of the subject), and most are smaller venues. Some are even small family businesses.

My opinion after researching and traveling for two books is that the former hospitals seem to be the most actively haunted places. My theory for this: when you go into a hospital, you go in at least with the expectation that youre going to be saved. People who are confined inside prisons and asylums know that they have already lost. It is almost as though the energy does not feel as desperate and that there is a resigned feeling.