The Haunted Balsam Mountain Inn (Grand Old Lady Hotel), Balsam, NC

The Balsam Mountain Inn sits on a hillside above the old Balsam railroad stop on the Jackson and Haywood county line, about 3,750 feet up, between Waynesville and Sylva. Built from 1905 to 1908 as the Balsam Mountain Springs Hotel, it is a three-story wooden inn with a 100-foot double front porch, 10-foot-wide hallways and 50 rooms. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is one of the best-known entries on our list of haunted hotels in North Carolina.

From 2019 to about 2022 it traded as the Grand Old Lady Hotel, and many ghost stories online use that name. Its owner then, Marzena Wyszynska, told local TV the hotel came with “a family of spirits,” led by one known as Sheriff. The inn closed in 2020, and in 2022 Rodney and Lorraine Conard bought it, brought back the Balsam Mountain Inn name and reopened it in stages. The new owners focus on music, food and history rather than ghosts, but the stories have not gone away.

The ghosts of the Balsam Mountain Inn

The owner who became a believer

Marzena Wyszynska bought the inn in December 2017. Staff warned her early on: “We have ghosts, and they are everywhere.” She was skeptical until she spent a night there before the sale closed. She told WLOS that she woke to find her blanket being pulled off the bed, and later heard what sounded like nails scratching the wall of an empty room next door.

She first asked a priest from Sylva to bless the building. When the activity carried on, she called in a local group, TLC Spirit Consultants, and decided to live with the spirits rather than fight them. “I am very happy, and we are one large family. They don’t scare me,” she said in 2019.

Sheriff and Room 205

The best-known spirit is the one the investigators called Sheriff. The story they gave is that he was a visitor who was shot outside the hotel in 1928, carried inside and died in Room 205. Wyszynska described him as “a very handsome man, womanizer,” and the investigators said he is more likely to make himself known when only women are in the room.

There is a real event behind at least part of this. Histories of the inn record that in 1928 a visitor was shot outside and died in a second-floor room. Whether he was a sheriff, and whether it was Room 205, comes from the investigators rather than any record we could find.

Footsteps, voices and tugged blankets

Guests report phantom footsteps in the wide hallways, a presence just outside their door, banging on doors and walls, and doorknobs that rattle or turn. Some hear their name, or someone else’s, whispered at night. Others have felt the bedding pulled, as Wyszynska did, or heard giggling with no one around.

Under Wyszynska the inn left journals in the rooms for guests to record what they experienced, and small iron “welcome” signs hung above the doors of rooms said to have a resident spirit. Those were her touches; ask the current owners what remains.

Balsam: A Paranormal Investigation

In August 2020, while the inn was closed, a film crew led by actor Kane Hodder, best known as Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th films, spent three nights in the empty building. The documentary Balsam: A Paranormal Investigation came out in December 2021. The team reported slamming doors, cold air and footsteps, and singled out Rooms 205 and 207 as repeat offenders. The filmmakers say they leave viewers to decide for themselves.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 205: Where Sheriff is said to have died in 1928; the most requested room.
• Room 207: Next door, and named with 205 as the most active by investigators.
• Second-floor hallways: Footsteps and a presence outside guest doors.
• Guest rooms generally: Tugged blankets, whispered names and knocking at night.

History of Balsam Mountain Inn

Around 1900, brothers-in-law Walter Christy and Joseph Kenney came to Balsam from Athens, Georgia. They built the hotel between 1905 and 1908 on a hillside fed by seven springs, which gave it its first name, the Balsam Mountain Springs Hotel. It was modeled on a Saratoga, New York, resort, planned as two stories and given a third with a mansard roof once framing began. It opened with 125 small bedrooms and shared baths, with 10-foot hallways wide enough for travelers’ steamer trunks.

The railroad made it. Four passenger trains a day stopped at Balsam, which the inn advertised as the highest railroad station east of the Rocky Mountains, and summer guests paid $5 a day with meals for cool mountain air, tennis, golf, riding, fishing and dancing. Fires were lit even on summer nights. Over time locals took to calling the hotel the Grand Old Lady.

The Depression hit hard. The hotel was foreclosed in the mid-1930s and auctioned on the steps of the Jackson County courthouse, where Ephriam Stillwell of Sylva bought it; his family owned it for decades. The last passenger train came through on July 4, 1948, and the inn slowly declined. In 1982 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1988 the health department closed it.

In 1990 Merrily Teasley, an innkeeper from Tennessee, bought it from the Stillwells. She added heat, halved the rooms to give each a private bath, reopened the first two floors in July 1991 and the third in 1996, and won a Preservation North Carolina award for her dining porch. Marzena Wyszynska bought the inn in December 2017, reopened it in 2018 after more repairs and renamed it the Grand Old Lady Hotel in January 2019.

The inn closed in 2020 and went up for sale. In 2022 Waynesville couple Rodney and Lorraine Conard, who had restored the Boone-Withers House in Waynesville, bought it, restored the Balsam Mountain Inn name and reopened it in phases from late 2023. Today all 50 rooms are bookable again, the dining room is open to the public, and live music on the porch on Tuesday nights carries on an old resort tradition.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Book by phone and ask for Room 205 or 207. The online booking engine sells room types, not numbers.
• Choose a Heritage room if you want an antique clawfoot tub and the most old-fashioned feel.
• Bring the dog: the north hall on the first floor and the Signature rooms are set aside for dogs, and they are welcome on the porches.
• Go midweek in the shoulder season for the emptiest hallways, and spend the evening on the porch.
• Watch Balsam: A Paranormal Investigation before you go, then compare notes.
• Make a mountain trip of it with the Grove Park Inn and the rest of haunted Asheville, about an hour east.

More haunted hotels nearby

• The Omni Grove Park Inn: the Pink Lady of Room 545 in Asheville, about an hour east
• The Historic Brookstown Inn: Sally and Room 401 in an 1837 cotton mill in Winston-Salem
• The Duke Mansion: a 1915 Charlotte estate with a dead-or-alive love story
• Haunted hotels in North Carolina

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• Balsam Mountain Inn (official site)
• Wikipedia: Balsam Mountain Inn
• WLOS: At Grand Old Lady Hotel, ghostly guests are like family
• The Mountaineer: Ghostly secrets at former Balsam Mountain Inn revealed in upcoming documentary
• The Mountaineer: Historic Balsam Mountain Inn gets a new lease on life
• The Mountaineer: Storied legacy of Balsam Mountain Inn lives on

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