The Haunted Historic Clewiston Inn, Clewiston

Clewiston is a sugar town on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee, and the Historic Clewiston Inn is the building the sugar industry put up as its front door. The first inn opened in 1926 for the company that founded the town. It burned in 1937 and was rebuilt in concrete in 1938, and that is the stately Classical Revival building that still faces U.S. 27 today.

It is also one of the few small-town Florida hotels where the people running it have spoken on camera about ghosts. In 2009 the general manager and a co-owner told WFLX that paranormal investigators had found several spirits in the building, and they named the rooms where guests report the most: Room 255, tied to a woman who lived at the inn for years, and Room 118, where a woman is seen at the window.

The ghosts of the Clewiston Inn

Anita Conklin in Room 255

The inn’s best-known ghost story belongs to Anita Conklin, a woman who lived at the Clewiston Inn for years and died in 1994. Co-owner Floyd Salkey told WFLX that guests in Room 255 report having their hair grabbed, as if someone wants them out of the room.

His explanation was simple: she seems to think the room is still hers. Most people who tell the story describe her as territorial rather than frightening, a resident who never accepted that anyone else had checked in.

The woman in the window of Room 118

General manager Christa Hill described reports of a woman seen standing in the window of Room 118. Nobody has put a name to her, and the inn has never claimed to know who she is. The sighting is usually reported from outside the building, looking up from the grounds.

The kitchen at night

Staff told WFLX that pots clang and bang in the kitchen late at night when nobody is cooking, and that the kitchen scares most of the staff after dark. The inn no longer serves full meals, so the kitchen is quiet these days, which makes the noises harder to explain away.

Four spirits, according to investigators

Hill said the inn had hosted a number of paranormal investigations and that the teams reported four different energies or spirits in the building. These are the investigators’ findings as the staff described them, not anything that can be checked, but they explain why ghost hunters still ask about the place.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 255: The room linked to Anita Conklin and the one ghost fans ask for first. Reported activity is hair tugging and the feeling of not being welcome.
• Room 118: Linked to the woman seen at the window. Worth requesting if Room 255 is taken.
• The kitchen corridor: Where staff report clanging pots late at night. It is not a guest area, so ask before wandering.
• The Everglades Bar and Lounge: Not haunted by any named ghost, but the best room in the building: a full wraparound wildlife mural from the 1940s and the natural place to spend the evening.

History of Historic Clewiston Inn

Clewiston was laid out in the 1920s by Bror Dahlberg’s Southern Sugar Company. Its development arm, the Clewiston Company, built the first inn in 1926. That building, with celotex board walls, survived the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928.

Southern Sugar went bankrupt in 1929, and in 1931 the United States Sugar Corporation, formed by Charles Stewart Mott, took over its assets, inn included. On September 19, 1937, a fire gutted the original building. Nobody was hurt. U.S. Sugar hired architects L. Phillips Clarke and Edgar S. Wortman to design a replacement in reinforced concrete, and the new Classical Revival inn opened on June 2, 1938.

In the early 1940s the wildlife artist J. Clinton Shepherd stayed at the inn for several months and painted the 360-degree mural of Everglades plants and animals that wraps the walls of the Everglades Lounge: deer, herons, an alligator, wild turkey and more. During the floods of 1947 and 1960 the inn sheltered displaced residents and farmers, with cots in the lounge and communal pots of gumbo.

The inn was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 21, 1991. U.S. Sugar sold it in 2007 to Big Lake Hotels, which sold it in 2011 to Clewiston Hospitality LLC. It now trades as the Americas Best Value Inn Historic Clewiston Inn, and it was listed for sale in late 2024, so check the current setup before you travel.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for Room 255 by number. Third-party sites rarely let you pick a room, so call the inn after booking and request it.
• Time your stay for a lounge night. The Everglades Bar and Lounge opens Thursday to Sunday evenings, and the mural alone is worth the trip.
• Bring dinner plans. Only a continental breakfast is served now, so eat in town.
• Walk down to the lake. Lake Okeechobee is close by, and staff can point you to lake tours.
• Pair it with the coast. Clewiston sits between Fort Myers and West Palm Beach on the routes across the state, an easy stop on a Florida haunted road trip.

More haunted hotels nearby

• The Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables: Florida’s grandest haunted hotel, about two hours southeast
• The Don CeSar, St. Pete Beach: the pink palace and its lovelorn founder, on the Gulf coast
• Haunted places in Miami: more South Florida ghost stories
• Haunted hotels in Florida

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.

• WFLX: Spirits felt at historic Florida inn
• Wikipedia: Clewiston Inn
• Florida Backroads Travel: Clewiston Inn
• Roadside America: Everglades Mural and Bar

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