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Historic haunted places in Asheville, NC. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
5 listings shown.
NC (STREET NUMBER NOT IN SOURCE) / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Legend says Helen lost her daughter in a mansion fire and died on the bridge. Cars reportedly won't restart here, and a woman asks if anyone has seen her daughter.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
NORTH CAROLINA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Helen Clevenger, 19, was murdered in Room 224 in 1936. A staffer was executed but doubts remain, and activity is blamed on Helen or on the convicted man.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
NORTH CAROLINA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The Pink Lady is said to be a guest who fell from a balcony in the 1920s. She appears as a pink mist or a woman in pink, most around Room 545 and near children.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
NORTH CAROLINA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Asheville's oldest surviving brick house, built around 1840. Investigators name two girls, Carrie and Sarah, who died there, and a basement presence called 'the Dark One'.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
NORTH CAROLINA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The boardinghouse where Wolfe grew up. Visitors report a typewriter clacking in empty rooms, a face in an upstairs window and a man in a rocking chair.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Asheville's haunted downtown is a small, walkable grid, and the dated events its tours return to are recorded in the local account collected, 105.9 The Mountain's haunted-places guide. At the Battery Park Hotel in 1936, 19-year-old Helen Clevenger was shot to death. A 22-year-old bellhop named Martin Moore was arrested and executed for the crime, but, in that account's words, "with little evidence against him and a forced confession, he is considered by many to have been an innocent man." The hotel is now apartments for senior citizens. A generation earlier, in 1906, the same guide recounts the night escaped convict Will Harris went on a rampage near what is now Barley's Taproom: Harris shot and killed two police officers and then began shooting random passersby, including a man killed near the corner of Biltmore Avenue and Eagle Street, before a posse hunted him down and shot him dead near Fletcher. Haunted Asheville, the city's original ghost-tour company, describes the same episode on its own list as the spirits "from the madman who executed our city's largest killing spree."
Two more dated anchors stand a short walk apart. Helen's Bridge was built of quarried stone in 1909 to provide access to the nearby Zealandia Mansion, often called the castle on the mountain, in the local guide's account. The Basilica of St. Lawrence was designed by Rafael Guastavino and contains a crypt at the rear of the chapel, in the same account. Church Street, lined with some of Asheville's oldest churches, was built over a graveyard, and in 1918, when many Asheville residents and visitors died from Spanish influenza, mortuaries were said to be flooded with bodies and the remaining bodies were buried in unmarked graves in the area that is now Church Street — again, the local guide's account, kept as its account.
Uphill from downtown stands the city's best-known building. Asheville Terrors' haunted-hotels account dates the Omni Grove Park Inn to 1913 and names Edwin Wiley Grove as its builder, and Visit North Carolina calls it a century-old mountain resort. The local guide adds the documented tragedy at another Asheville institution: at Highland Hospital on March 10, 1948, a fire that broke out in the kitchen area travelled up the dumbwaiter shaft, and nine women, including Zelda Fitzgerald, who was scheduled to undergo electroshock therapy treatment that day, died in the fire. Fitzgerald's death is the history; what is said to roam the campus afterwards belongs to the next section.
Haunted Asheville's own framing of why this mountain city accumulates such stories is on its homepage, recorded here as the operator's framing: "ASHEVILLE is a haunted city. These mountains are the oldest in the country, and bear the residues of Native American spiritualism, the bloody Civil War, and some of history's most dynamic personalities."
This section is folklore — reported by the operators and accounts cited, and never asserted as fact here.
The Pink Lady of the Grove Park Inn is Asheville's best-known named ghost, and the collected sources tell her three ways, kept separate here. Visit North Carolina's version: she has been a guest, in spirit, since the 1920s, in Room 545; "Legend has it she was a guest who fell, or was pushed, to her death from the fifth floor of the historic section of the property, which has an open atrium in the center of each floor." She is a friendly ghost who seems to be fond of children, appears in a flowing pink gown, and is a mischievous ghost, "often turning off lights, closing doors and generally watching over the happenings at the hotel," and the inn offers history tours that mention her. The local guide's version is shorter: she "is reported to have been seen and felt in the halls of the inn for nearly 100 years," the spirit of a young woman who fell to her death from a balcony on the fifth floor in the 1920s, "usually seen in the form of a pink mist, or sometimes as a full-fledged apparition of a young woman in a pink ball gown." Asheville Terrors' haunted-hotels account gives a more specific year and mechanics, and they are that account's alone: tragedy struck in 1920 when a young woman fell from the 5th-floor balcony onto the 3rd floor's Palm Court atrium; she had been staying in room 545, but since the room was in the man's name, her identity has been lost to time; guests in room 545 report unexplained cold spots and electronics that turn on and off, she is known to open and close doors and tickle the feet of sleeping guests, and a paranormal group that investigated in the 1990s collected 50 eyewitness accounts. The year differs between the accounts — the 1920s in two, 1920 in one — and no source collected documents the woman's identity or death as a matter of record. She is carried here as Asheville's central legend, in its three tellings.
Helen's Bridge carries the city's saddest travelling tale, in the local guide's own "legend has it" framing: a woman named Helen lived at or near Zealandia Mansion with her infant daughter; after her daughter died in a fire, the distraught mother hanged herself from the bridge; Helen is said to have been seen frantically looking for her child, and people who have attempted to raise her spirit by calling her name have been said to experience car trouble when they try to leave. Haunted Asheville lists the same stop on its Classic tour as "chilling apparitions from a suicide at Helen's Bridge."
Downtown, the reports attach to the documented deaths without resolving them. The spirits of Helen Clevenger and Martin Moore are said to haunt the Battery Park Hotel, and witnesses have also reported the ghosts of at least two men who died after jumping from its roof, in the local guide's account. At the Jackson Building, many people believe the target or bullseye at its base marks the spot where a man landed after jumping from the building on the day the stock market crashed, and some people believe the building is home to at least one ghost, including that man — the guide's "many people believe" and "some people believe" are kept intact here. At the Basilica of St. Lawrence, Haunted Asheville's list promises "a body entombed in the wall of St. Lawrence," and the local guide says many believe Guastavino's spirit still lives in the building that also contains a crypt, with a priest who died in the church also believed to still be there. On Church Street, a nun and a woman dressed in period clothing are among the spirits who have been spotted in the area built over the graveyard, in the same account. At Highland Hospital, it is said Zelda Fitzgerald's spirit roams the campus where part of the hospital now serves as a recovery home. All of those are reported accounts, attributed in full, and none is asserted here as a documented event.
Hountix lists 5 places in Asheville, NC. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The Omni homepage collected presents "The Omni Grove Park Inn & Spa" at Asheville as a historic mountain resort with dining, a spa, golf and a roster of experiences that includes a History Tour — and, notably, an event it calls "The Pink Lady Party," billed in its own carousel as "Lift your spirits with a Halloween celebration in the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains." The inn's own collected pages publish no Pink Lady narrative, no room number and no haunting account: the party name and the history tour are the whole of its own ghost-adjacent record in the material collected, and this story invents no lore in the inn's name.
The narrative lives with others. Visit North Carolina, the state's own visitor authority, tells it on its Pink Lady page: guests in Room 545 "often find they are not alone," sharing the room with a guest who has been around, in spirit, since the 1920s; she is a friendly ghost fond of children; "The Omni Grove Park Inn offers history tours of the property that mention the Pink Lady," the resort hosts a Halloween weekend event, and "many staff members will share tales with visitors who are curious about her"; she appears in a flowing pink gown, has made her presence known to hundreds of guests and employees, and is mischievous, turning off lights and closing doors. Asheville Terrors' account and the local guide's account, with their differing years and details, are set out in The legend above. By day the inn is Asheville's grand historic resort above the city; after dark it is the first name on both ghost walks downtown, neither of which goes inside it on the material collected here.
*Website: https://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/asheville-grove-park*