National House Inn

For nearly 200 years, a quaint bed and breakfast in a nubilous, Halloween-obsessed small town has watched the state of Michigan grow up. The Mann's Inn opened the New Year's Eve prior to Michigan being granted statehood, hosting the first ball ever held in the town of Marshall. It had been constructed with local clay and timber, making it a point of local pride. Its business model: to host weary stagecoach travelers making the long and exhausting journey from cities like Detroit and Toronto to Chicago. For roughly a decade, it succeeded wildly in doing just that, as well as hosting miscellaneous civic functions such as county meetings. 

The hotel changed with the times when the Central Railroad of Michigan, originally a doomed private rail project, was bailed out by the newly formed State of Michigan and lay tracks past the hotel on the same route the stagecoaches had taken. The National House Inn, as it had been renamed by that point, also hosted travelers on another kind of railroad. Though it was too far from the Civil War's front lines to contribute much, the town of Marshall acted decisively to protect those who arrived there escaping from slavery, even installing a secret room into the basement for them to hide in. 

After the Civil War concluded, the National House Inn fell behind the very technologies which had once delivered its customers. Sleeper cars and other comforts replaced the need for hotels on the railway, and faster trains meant even those competitive opportunities were less common; why stay at a hotel when the trip would take less than a day? 

As the Victorian era came to a close, the National House underwent a radical transformation. It spent the waning decades of the 19th century serving as a factory for windmills, a popular commodity in the region, as well as making other axled objects like wagons. 

With a new century came new opportunities, and in 1902 the building changed hands and purpose for yet another time. From the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt to the dawn of household computers, the National House was "Dean's Flats," a set of luxury apartments. Unfortunately, those apartments grew less and less luxurious as innovations like the air conditioner left the already-septuagenarian building behind. Bootleggers took advantage of the state of the facility, stashing liquors and other illicit substances in the secret room. 

Dedicated preservationists and historians rallied to protect the building, successfully soliciting investments from the community to restore it. On the day of Thanksgiving in 1976, the National House was officially back and ready to resume serving as a cornerstone of the city of Marshall. Today, its prices sit over $200 per night - a far cry from the $2 per week it cost at its advent - but that new price includes amenities like running water, working outlets, internet access, and like any good hotel a coterie of ghosts.