DeSoto House Hotel

The DeSoto House Hotel opened on April 9, 1855, and is billed as the oldest operating hotel in Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant are said to have stayed. Its best-known ghost is the Lady in Black, a woman in a Victorian black dress and hat whom employees and guests have described descending a staircase and walking into a solid wall. After a flood in 2011 workers opened the lower-level wall and found a bricked-up doorway exactly where she was said to vanish, and the hotel covered it with plexiglass and added a sign telling her story. Illinois tourism lists the hotel among its haunted stays, and it is a stop on Galena ghost tours. Guests have also reported children and Union soldiers, and the stories are guest and staff lore.