Fainting goats and friendly ghosts: One of the most haunted hotels in the U.S. is in Upstate NY

In a tiny town of less than 3,000 people, nestled on the border between New York and Pennsylvania, sits a quaint looking inn. Its grounds along the Susquehanna River are dotted with friendly farm animals, an outdoor gazebo and appropriately-themed farm art.

From its country house charm and unassuming exterior, one might never suspect it has been repeatedly voted one of the most haunted hotels in America.

Welcome to the Fainting Goat Island Inn, a former railroad hotel built along the Erie/Lackawanna line in 1850. This Southern Tier guesthouse has been in the top five on USA Today’s list for at least three years running and is part the New York state Haunted History Trail.

With just five bedrooms, it’s the smallest haunted hotel on the USA Today list, sharing company with grand historic relics like the Hotel Saranac in the Adirondacks, the Stanley Hotel in Colorado and Nashville’s Union Station hotel.

How could one little hotel hold so many ghost stories? We had to find out.

Owner Marnie Streit greeted us as we pulled into the circular driveway. With her welcoming smile and the myriad of rescue cats and dogs coming to say hello, it was still hard to believe we were visiting a haunted hollow.

Streit purchased the home in 2007. Though there was a lot of work to be done, she said as soon as she stepped inside, she could see the inn completely finished. She had no idea it was legend to be haunted, but as a self-proclaimed skeptic, that information would have fallen on deaf ears.

“I wouldn’t have cared because I didn’t believe in that stuff,” she said. “It made no difference to me.”

The property does have an island, which can be viewed by the riverside seating. The inn also has a whole pen of fainting goats. Streit had never owned goats, but after losing a sister to breast cancer, she found herself laughing at so many viral videos of their fainting antics online, she had to have them.

Guests are sometimes given crackers to feed the goats and though they sometimes stiffened a little, we didn’t experience any fainting livestock.

Upon entering the home, the interior has been fully restored and is meticulously decorated with a Victorian flair from the wallpaper to the furniture. Antique dolls are placed throughout the home and aged photographs line the walls.

Streit said her father loved to collect old phonographs and records. She’s continued the tradition by having 14 throughout the house, and some of them still work. The whir of the record winding up, the crackle of Vernon Dalhart from the 1920s singing “The Runaway Train,” was enough to set the spooky scene for all of the ghost stories we were about to hear.

Streit and her partner Bill Gamble led us from room to room telling us stories of paranormal happenings that both they and some of her guests experienced. She also told us that during the restoration process there was a knife that fell out of the ceiling in one room and clothes found stuffed in the floorboards.

The home has been featured on the Travel Channel’s “Hotel Paranormal” and several ghost hunting groups have visited. Streit said there have been haunted experiences reported in every room and once the teams leave, the inn seems very active.

“The house can sometimes get really noisy, even when there are no guests here,” she said.

Each room is named for a different goat breed and each room has different ghosts that frequent them. In one room there’s a little boy who likes to hide under the bed and his laughter can be heard in the night. Two women drinking tea are often seen in the room across the hall. In another guest room, an apparition of a young man in a Civil War uniform is reported time and time again.

Guests are allowed to explore the first two floors of the house. They’re also welcome to go up into the attic — at their own risk.

In addition to the more human spirits, Streit said a ghostly house cat has been said to jump on guest beds and walk across them while they sleep. Though there are friendly mortal cats that live at the inn, guests say their door was locked and there was no cat in the room.

There are small notebooks in each room where guests write reviews of their stay and sometimes tales of the things that went bump in the night. Some of the most frequent reports include the sounds of footsteps up and down the hall, doorknobs jostling, phonographs winding themselves and scratching along the walls.

Streit herself said she’s experienced furniture moving across the room, disembodied voices, the sound of chains being dragged across the ceiling and being pushed off the bed. She regaled us with many stories from both her and her visitors, but gave an account for one particularly unexplainable experience in one of the guest rooms.

“It was one o’clock in the morning and it was a school night. I left downstairs and came upstairs and I heard someone walking up and down the hall, which is not unusual in this house, but nobody was here. You could hear someone going through the hall closing the open doors — ‘click’ ‘click’ — I get up finally and look out and there’s nothing there and the doors are all open.

I ended up laying down again and I got a Hardy Boys and I finally got tired enough that I turned out the light. It was just a minute or two when I felt something and then I heard it. It was like a raspy ‘Get out.’ That was scary,” she said. “I still can’t explain that away.”

The ghostly activity can sometimes get to an exhausting point where Streit tells the spirits she needs to sleep for her day job as a physical education teacher.

Though the haunted tales and paranormal activity seem endless, not every group experiences the phenomena. However, Marnie and Bill’s visitors fill the guest books with everything from their comfortable accommodations and cinnamon buns in the morning, to the friendly hosts and visiting with the endearing farm animals.

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