“Where is he! O no! He couldn’t go back to the woman he’s supposed to marry! We made a promise to cancel our weddings. He told me he’d love me forever, but he’s not here. Is he not coming. I can’t live without him!”

No one knows, but these might have been the last words spoken before a woman hanged herself at the Inn at Jim Thorpe, previously known as the White Swan Inn, rebuilt and renamed the New American Hotel after it was destroyed by the great fire in July 1849.

The inn was recently included in a Pennsylvania tourism newsletter, onlyinyourstate.com as the most haunted hotel in the state. There is a YouTube video of a paranormal investigation. “Madeline,” as the woman has been named, lost her patience for her lover’s arrival that night.

It’s a highlight of ongoing ghost tours conducted by the Jim Thorpe Rotary Club. According to Casey Parker, a ghost tour guide for the tour Room 211 is where Madeline hanged herself after being so distraught that her secret lover had not come to her as promised.

“They were both betrothed to others,” Parker said, “and back then something like this affair would be a terrible scandal.”

Parker explained that Madeline had planned to be assigned to a room on the same floor as her lover, but the new desk clerk at the hotel gave her a room on the second floor and he was assigned a room on the third floor. She checked into Room 211 before he checked into Room 310.

“There’s enough proof throughout the years that she’s still here at the Inn looking for the man she loves,” Parker said.

Madeline is a prankster and not an evil spirit. One of her antics has happened after the room has been cleaned and locked and prepared for the arrival of new guests at the Inn.

“The guest and his wife found water running from under the door and into the hall,” Parker said. “Upon entering the bathroom, they found bath towels shoved into the toilet causing it to overflow and flood the floor.”

Was the flood of water symbolic of Madeline’s tears when she thought he was not coming to the Inn? There was another episode when toiletries were shoved into the bowl causing another flood. Other guests have reported that wake up calls were made to the room at 11 p.m. for many nights that did not come from the front desk in the lobby.

Still others have confirmed experiences they’ve had at the Inn with a ghost as reported by former Times News lifestyle editor Marigrace Heyer. She reported that a woman from Jim Thorpe saw Madeline one night when the power went out in the hotel and she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and long white gown with yellow flowers on it. She had long brown curly hair but no face.

Also at the Inn, members of the housekeeping staff have heard a woman laugh like a child in the room and after the door is locked, and the TV goes on and off.

“She’s not trying to scare you,” Parker said. “She might move your slippers and then the room doesn’t get warmer when you try turning up the heat.”

Upstairs in Room 310 where her gentleman caller had checked in unbeknown to Madeline, there have been plenty of paranormal activities, some having nothing to do with him.

It’s haunted by a nurse who still tends to her patient. The nurse gets annoyed when a guest lies on the bed at the side where her spectral patient is lying. Guests have claimed they have felt her icy grip on them as if she’s angry that they’re sleeping in her patient’s bed.

There have been several more paranormal activities recorded at the Inn. Outside Room 211, a man found his boots in the hall after he had taken them off and left them inside the room. The smell of cigars has been noticed when no one is smoking and the sound of children laughing has been heard when no children were around. A bathroom door has been mysteriously locked from the outside while someone was inside.

“There’s also stories of guests seeing a see-through young boy wearing suspenders to hold up his pants making one think he might have perished when the White Swan had burned to the ground,” Parker said.

And yet the best ghost story of them all is about Madeline. Perhaps an unrelated song called “Sweet Madeline” written by Curtis Ryan Roush, John Patrick O’Brien, and Joseph Michael Mirasole aptly describes what the Inn’s lady in waiting might have thought just before she took her last mortal breath.

“Our dreams are lies replaced. We reach out past the trace until it’s gone.”

So she waits for her lover to come to Room 211 at the Inn at Jim Thorpe to save her from an eternity of loneliness, anguish and to finally set her soul free to be with him forever.

There are three weekends of ghost tours remaining in the season. For the schedule and to buy tickets, go to https://bit.ly/3D5ENx8.