Five Floods and Four Ghosts: Keosauqua’s Mason House Inn

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

The Mason House Inn stands in Keosauqua, a small bend-in-the-river town in southeast Iowa, and it has been taking in travellers since 1846. It was built for people arriving by water, on the run between St. Louis and Fort Des Moines, and although the steamboats stopped coming a long time ago the building never really stopped doing its job. It is a working bed and breakfast today, and it is also one of the most talked-about haunted lodgings in the state.

What follows separates what is documented about the building from what guests and owners say they have experienced there. The second category is considerably harder to verify, and the inn makes no secret of it.

Ashland House, Phoenix Hotel, Mason House: Three Names, One Building

The inn opened in 1846 under the name Ashland House. At that point Iowa itself was brand new as a state, and the Des Moines River was the practical highway through this corner of it. Steamboat passengers travelling between St. Louis and Fort Des Moines needed somewhere to sleep, and the Ashland House was built to be that somewhere.

It later traded under the name Phoenix Hotel before Lewis and Nancy Mason bought the property in 1857 and gave it the name it has carried ever since. The Masons and their descendants shaped the place for the better part of a century.

The building’s most sobering chapter came with the Civil War, when it served as a hospital. That is worth holding onto when you read the ghost stories attached to the inn: this was a place where wounded men were brought, and where some of them would not have left. Afterwards, Mason’s granddaughter ran the house as a boarding house for three decades, which means generations of long-term residents rather than one-night guests.

The Des Moines River has come for the inn repeatedly. The building has survived five major floods, which says something about both its siting and its construction. Few structures of that age in a river town can make the same claim.

In 1950 the Redhead family converted the property into a bed and breakfast, and in 2001 the Hansons took over, continuing to operate it in that role.

Quick Facts on the Mason House Inn

• Built: 1846, originally as the Ashland House
• Also known as: the Phoenix Hotel, before the Mason family purchase
• Named for: Lewis and Nancy Mason, who bought it in 1857
• Past uses: steamboat inn, Civil War hospital, boarding house, bed and breakfast
• Floods survived: five major ones
• Current status: operating bed and breakfast, run by the Hansons since 2001

The Four Names Guests Keep Repeating

Most haunted hotels offer a vague atmosphere and a cold spot. The Mason House Inn is unusual in that the reported activity is attached to named individuals with places in the building’s own family history. That does not make the accounts true, but it does make them specific, and specific stories are easier to weigh.

Mary Mason Clarke. An elderly woman in a nightgown, reportedly seen on the third floor. She is the apparition most often described by guests.

George. A young boy, and by all accounts a busy one. The reports attributed to George are the small mischief kind: objects moved from where they were left, and gentle tugs at a guest’s clothing.

Mr. Knapp. A stabbing victim connected to the house’s past. What people report is not an apparition but a sound: footsteps, heard occasionally, with no one on the stairs or in the hall.

Fannie Mason Kurtz. Sensed rather than seen, and always in one place, near the dining room fireplace, which is where she died.

These are guest and owner accounts, collected over decades of the building operating as lodging. None of it is verified, and a house that has been a hospital, a boarding house and a hotel by turns has an enormous number of former occupants to hang a story on. Read it as folklore with unusually good record keeping.

Staying at the Mason House Inn

This is the rare haunted site you can actually book. The Mason House Inn operates as a bed and breakfast, so a visit means a room, a night, and breakfast in the morning rather than a walk-through with a guide. The third floor is where Mary Mason Clarke is most often reported, and the dining room fireplace is Fannie’s spot, if you want to know where the stories are concentrated before you choose where to sit.

Keosauqua is a quiet river town, and the inn’s appeal is as much about the age of the place as the ghost stories. An 1846 building that has taken five floods and still puts guests to bed is worth the drive on its own. Whatever else happens on the third floor is between you and the house.

See Mason House Inn for Yourself

Sources

• The Last Wright
• Park Inn Hotel is a movie star
• San Francisco Public Library | Home | San Francisco Public Library
• Wikipedia: The Last Wright: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Park Inn Hotel

Address: 21982 Hawk Drive

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