Haunted Places in Chattanooga, TN

The history

Chattanooga's haunted ground is a river city that was fought over, flooded, and then partly buried by its own remedy — and its oldest ghost-tour company says so on its own About page in one compressed sentence: the city's ghosts arise "not just from the Civil War and Trail of Tears, but from the city's bloody past, ranging from the famous murder at the Read House, to the ghoulish disinterment of numerous bodies from the pauper's cemetery." US Ghost Adventures' Chattanooga page frames the same layers from the riverfront its tour walks: forced displacement along the Trail of Tears at Ross's Landing, devastating Civil War battles, and destructive river floods, layered over limestone deposits and the flowing Tennessee River. That operator's history framing is its own; the documented spine below is carried by the hotel and the local press sources collected.

The Read House's own history page supplies the city's best-documented haunted address in dated chapters. Thomas Crutchfield built the Crutchfield House in 1847 across from Union Station, and the hotel became, in the history page's words, "the political, social, and economic center of Chattanooga." In 1863 the Crutchfield House "is called into service as a military hospital to serve both Confederate and Union troops. Hundreds are treated and many die." In 1867 "the river rose 57 feet and several feet of water filled the lobby of the Crutchfield House. Steamboats paddle by the front door" — and on September 10, 1867, the same page records, the building burned to the ground. The present hotel's line begins again on the same site: the Read House opened in 1872, Samuel Read acquired sole ownership in the 1880s, and in 1926 a new ten-story, 400-room Read House opened after a four-day celebration, "fashioned after the Palmer House in Chicago," at a total cost of $2,500,000, built without the hotel closing a single day. The hotel's own summary of itself is exact: "The Read House is the longest continuously operating hotel in the southeast, and holds a spot on the National Register of Historic Places" — it was added to the Register on February 22, 1976, per the same history page — and it "has endured floods, The Civil War, epidemics, the Great Depression and an ever-changing Chattanooga." In 2018 it completed a $25 million renovation restoring its 1920s character.

The flood chapter did not end at the hotel lobby. The Chattanooga Pulse's account of Chattanooga Ghost Tours' research, given by founder Amy Petulla, records what she learned in that research: floods inundated Chattanooga, killing hundreds of people, and to prevent another catastrophe city engineers rebuilt Chattanooga above the old streets, creating underground tunnels below the raised city.

Downtown's second documented anchor for the ghost tours is a cemetery and a hospital site, both carried here only as the Pulse reports Petulla describing them. Citizens Cemetery and the adjoining Confederate Cemetery sit adjacent to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus, and form the ground of the local company's adults-only ghost hunt. The former Newell Sanitorium building, described by Petulla in the same account as currently vacant and condemned, stands near a hospital connected to it, she was told by hospital staff, by a tunnel running between the two buildings.

The legend

This section is folklore — reported by the hotels, the tour operators and the local press cited, and never asserted as fact here.

Room 311 is Chattanooga's central legend, and unusually, the hotel itself tells it. The Read House's homepage states it under the heading "Room 311" in the hotel's own words: "Legend has it that Room 311 is haunted by the spirit of Annalisa Netherly, who was allegedly beheaded in the bathtub by a jealous lover. Over the years, numerous guests have reported paranormal activity in the room." The hotel's history page gives the legend a date and a fuller form in its 1927 entry: Annalisa "is young, pretty, married, and from San Francisco. She occupies Room 311. Her business is unknown. The legend recounts that her husband returns to the room after a business meeting, finding Annalisa with another man. He slits her throat while she's bathing. Her restless spirit lives on in Room 311. Guests staying in the room experience a strange presence they can't explain."

The local tour company's version, as reported by the Pulse, adds figures the hotel's pages do not name. Petulla said there are multiple spirits at the Read House: Annalisa in Room 311, whom she described as a woman of the night viciously murdered there — some say her client beheaded her, others her jealous lover — with guests reporting they have felt her presence and some saying they have seen her; a little girl who possibly died of illness, seen by several people and, Petulla said, captured by one guest in a photo; and Martha Brown Hulett, named to Petulla by author and psychic Mark Elliott Fults, a spirit who does not like cigarette smoke — not, in Petulla's gloss, because she dislikes smoke, but because "if she can't smoke, by golly nobody can smoke," a dislike the company connects to the years when the hotel's smoking floor had to be moved from the third floor to the fifth because guests could not keep their cigarettes lit. Every element of that paragraph is the tour founder's account as reported by the local paper; none of it is documented in the hotel's own pages collected here beyond Annalisa herself.

The riverfront operator's repertoire is a different set of single-source reports, each attributed to US Ghost Adventures alone. At the Hunter Museum, perched on bluffs the operator associates with Cherokee legends and homicide cases, witnesses frequently report phantom figures gazing down from upper windows and strange, acidic odors around the grounds. At Ross's Landing, the Trail of Tears departure point, visitors near the waterfront often hear disembodied cries and spot mysterious light orbs. Passing the Read House, guests describe sudden drops in temperature and glimpses of Annalisa Netherly. The operator explains the whole city in its own terms — limestone and river water "long believed to channel and retain spiritual energy" — which is presented here as the operator's belief framing, not as geology or history.

The cemetery and underground legends belong to the local company's hunts and tours, again through the Pulse's reporting. In Citizens Cemetery, guides and guests have described a woman who vanishes in front of their eyes: wearing, in Petulla's retelling, "a see-through shroud with nothing underneath it," walking toward the group with a totally blank face and no awareness of them, passing "right through the middle of them…and poof, she disappeared" — an episode Petulla said someone captured on video, which she watched frame by frame with no explanation. The bride in Danforth Chapel, in the company's own visitor-guide account collected in search, "continues to talk only to women, and appeared in full wedding regalia in one of the best ghost photos ever" — that is the company's claim about its own hunt, carried as such. At the Newell Sanitorium site, which Petulla called one of the most active spots on the tour, staff of the neighbouring hospital told her some would not go into the tunnels between the buildings, others talked about hearing a child crying, and people heard noises or footsteps though no one was there; guests, she said, have caught ghostly images and seen movement inside the building.

Haunted today

Hountix lists 4 places in Chattanooga, TN. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.

• Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel — haunted place, 1400 Market St, Chattanooga, TN 37402
• The Read House Hotel — haunted place, 107 W M.L.K. Blvd, Chattanooga, TN 37402
• Tivoli Theatre — haunted place, 709 Broad St, Chattanooga, TN 37402
• Walnut Street Bridge — haunted place, Walnut St at Tennessee River, Chattanooga, TN 37403

Attraction stories

The Read House Hotel

The Read House is the rare haunted attraction whose legend is told first by the business itself, in two places on its own site, and labelled legend by the business in both. Its homepage Room 311 panel invites the brave "on a spine-tingling tour (offered by request)" of the room it says is haunted by Annalisa Netherly, "allegedly beheaded in the bathtub by a jealous lover," with numerous guests reporting paranormal activity over the years. Its history page gives the full timeline that makes the room legible: the Crutchfield House of 1847, political and social centre of the young city; the same house serving as a Civil War military hospital in 1863, where "hundreds are treated and many die" — "It's said that's why the hotel is so haunted," the hotel's own history page says, in its own hedged words; the 1867 flood that filled its lobby and the fire that ended it that September; the Read House opening of 1872; the 1926 ten-story rebuilding; and the 1927 entry in which Annalisa arrives from San Francisco, occupies Room 311, and is found, in the legend the page recounts, with her throat slit by her husband while she bathed, leaving a restless spirit and guests who "experience a strange presence they can't explain." The hotel's documented later chapters are on the same page: National Register listing in 1976, Elvis Presley's incognito stay in 1977, Avocet Hospitality's purchase in 2016 and the 2018 renovation restoring the 1926 grandeur, and the 150th anniversary in 2022 as "the longest continually operating hotel in the southeast." The other operators' additions to its cast — a little girl, and Martha Brown Hulett of the unlightable cigarettes — appear nowhere on the hotel's collected pages; they are carried under the local tour company's account only. The practical position is the hotel's own: a working historic hotel at 107 W MLK Blvd, Chattanooga, TN 37402, phone (423) 266-4121, where Room 311 is a tour by request inside a room in a hotel that never closed — not a haunted-house attraction, and presented by its owners exactly that way.

*Website: https://www.thereadhousehotel.com/*