The Crescent, restored, is still open and more popular than ever. In part because it bills itself as America’s Most Haunted Hotel. On the ghost tour they tell you these stories: Michael, the stonemason flirt from Ireland falling to his death during the hotel’s construction, now and forever romancing guests in Room 218; Breckie, the 4-year-old boy taken up by illness a hundred years ago, lately playing in the hall and photobombing tourist selfies and snapshots; Theodora, 80 years dead and still trying to find her key in front of Room 419, an obsessive-compulsive packer of guest suitcases when angry; the Nurse, pushing a gurney through eternity on the third floor; and perhaps most famously, the Girl in the Mist, who from time to time to time—always around 10:30 in the moonlight—will fall or fling herself from one of the east side balconies into the garden below. She is shrouded in mist as she falls, as is her story. There’s no record of an event like this at the hotel, but folks claim to have seen the ghost, a white radiance plummeting from darkness to darkness, and they wonder...was she pushed? Did she jump? Was she—is she—a character straight out of Dreiser, pregnant and unwed and ruined, killed by despair and Victorian convention?
