There are a lot of weird things that happen on a book tour, and squeezing into pantyhose is only one of them. The oddest — and scariest thing — that happened to me by far (excluding that room service enchilada in Dayton) was this:

I arrived at a small but charming Inn in Lexington, Kentucky at 10:00 p.m., trudging into the lobby. The place seemed deserted and unhappily quiet. No clerk was in sight. In fact, nobody was around at all. I waited at the empty desk like the good girl that I am until a nice young woman appeared from nowhere and took a place behind the counter. We introduced ourselves and determined that I wanted to check in. And I’d had only that US Airways trail mix for dinner, so I asked if there was any room service available:

“No,” she said. “No room service after dark.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“We can’t get any help to stay when it’s dark. Not for turn-downs, nor room service neither.”

“And that would be because . . .”

“The hotel is haunted. Didn’t you know?”

I swear my mouth dropped open. I could feel it. I looked like Big Mouth Billy Bass. “Say what?” I said, as in Say what?

“I’m not kidding,” she told me, and she wasn’t. “In fact, I saw the ghost myself, and I gave notice on the spot. This is my last week. Now, will that be American Express or VISA?”

This is all true. The desk clerk showed me a book to prove it, which listed the Inn as one of the nation’s foremost haunted houses. The Inn’s ghostly guests include a little girl dressed in Victorian clothing who plays jacks on the second floor near the elevator. When spoken to, she laughs and runs away, vanishing. She is seen frequently and is known as “Anna.” Guests mention her often and she plays hide and seek with the hotel’s employees. John, another ghost, isn’t so playful. He sneaks (can a ghost prowl otherwise?) into guest rooms and turns on televisions and radios full blast in the middle of the night.

Guests on the third floor of the hotel periodically complain about loud parties in the rooms above them. A call to the front desk isn’t effective, though. Hotel staff explain that there are only three stories to the building. And perhaps most unsettling is the tale of a man who appears in the laundry.

Why all this ghostly excitement at the Inn? For many years the building that now houses the Inn served as a hospital and during that time the laundry room was a morgue.

By the way, despite this golden opportunity to have an authentically suspenseful night, I was outta there, after promising the clerk a free book for saving my life. I went across town to the Sheraton, where I hoped no ghosts would follow. I watched The Matrix on Spectravision, which didn’t help. I ordered Domino’s in, which did. The suspense writer part is just fiction, friends. I’m the biggest chicken you know.

— Lisa Scottoline