Lily’s Lavender Gown and the Haunted Franklin Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 13, 2026 · How we verify

Strawberry Point is a small town in northeast Iowa with an outsized fiberglass strawberry on its main street and a two story brick hotel that has been taking guests since 1903. The haunted Franklin Hotel is the second of those landmarks, and the one people drive out of their way for: a working lodging house with a long porch, a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, and a pair of resident ghost stories that staff and guests have passed along for years.

What follows separates what the record says about the building from what people report happening inside it. The first part is documented. The second part is anecdote, and it is worth reading as anecdote.

Quick Facts on the Franklin Hotel

• Where: Strawberry Point, Clayton County, Iowa
• Opened: 1903
• Architects: Netcott and Donnan, of Independence, Iowa
• Builder: E.M. Loop
• Construction: two story brick, Neoclassical with Romanesque Revival elements
• National Register of Historic Places: listed in 1999
• Owners: Doug and Christine Smith, since 1989
• Status: open, rooms available to book

Built in 1903 by Netcott and Donnan

The hotel went up in 1903, at the tail end of the era when a county town measured its ambitions by whether it could put a respectable brick hotel near the rail business and the main street trade. The design came from Netcott and Donnan, an architectural firm in nearby Independence, Iowa, and the building work was carried out by E.M. Loop. The result is a two story brick block that borrows from two vocabularies at once: the restrained symmetry of Neoclassical design, with Romanesque Revival details in the masonry. It is not a flamboyant building. It was meant to look solid, and it has.

That durability is a large part of why the Franklin was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The porch is the detail preservationists tend to point at first. It is original, still in place after more than a century, and it is the feature that most clearly dates the hotel to the moment it was built rather than to any of the renovations since.

The Smiths and a Century of Patching

Doug and Christine Smith have run the hotel since 1989, which makes them the longest part of its recent history. Their approach has been to bring the building up to modern expectations without stripping out what makes it worth visiting. A new staircase went in, along with a range of structural updates, while the original exterior character was left alone. A hotel that has been continuously occupied for well over a hundred years is a hotel that has been continuously repaired, and the Franklin is a layered thing: 1903 bones, decades of alterations, a working front desk.

Lily in the Lavender Gown

The best known of the hotel’s stories belongs to a woman called Lily. There is no verified record presented for who she was or when she stayed, and that absence matters: Lily exists in the hotel’s oral tradition, not in its paperwork. In the telling, she wears a lavender gown and she sings. Staff and guests have described hearing a woman’s voice carrying down empty corridors with no one there to account for it.

The other reports attached to her are the ordinary currency of old buildings: furniture found moved, figures glimpsed and gone in the time it takes to look twice. The sightings cluster along a particular route, between the lobby and the room she is said to have occupied, which is the kind of detail that gives a ghost story its shape and also the kind of detail that an oft repeated story naturally acquires.

Leo and the Bells That Ring at Night

A second presence is reported at the Franklin, and even the people who tell the story do not agree on who it is. One version identifies him as a merchant who once did business here. The other names him as Leo, a laundry worker who spent years on the hotel’s staff. Either way, the signature is the same: the old hotel bell system, the mechanical call system that once summoned staff to guest rooms, reportedly ringing in the quiet hours with nobody at the other end of the wire.

Old call systems are precisely the sort of equipment that misbehaves with age, corrosion, and a century of vibration through plaster walls. That is the dull explanation, and anyone staying the night should keep it in mind. It is also true that a bell ringing in an empty hotel at two in the morning is not a sound that argues for itself quietly, and it is the detail that has drawn paranormal investigators and enthusiasts to Strawberry Point.

Staying the Night at the Franklin Hotel

This is not a tour attraction with a ticket window. The Franklin is a functioning hotel, so the way to see it is to book a room on Elkader Street in Strawberry Point and stay. Guests get a historic building with modern comforts, an original porch to sit on, and, depending on temperament, either an uneventful night or a story to add to the pile. Reserve through the hotel directly, and be courteous about the ghost hunting: other people are trying to sleep.

Whether anything unexplained actually happens here is not something this guide can settle. What can be said is that the Franklin Hotel has been standing in the same spot since 1903, that the building itself is genuinely worth the detour, and that the stories of Lily and Leo have outlasted several generations of guests who first heard them at the front desk.

See Franklin Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• Wikipedia: Franklin Hotel

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