You check in, you climb the old wooden stairs, you unpack, and you go down to the pub. When you come back up, the shirts you left in a heap have been folded and put away. The bed you sat on has been smoothed. In the small hours the bath taps come on by themselves, and somewhere in the room a woman is talking, low and unhurried, to somebody who is not there.

That is Room 10 at the Nottingham Road Hotel, according to a long line of guests who have slept in it, and according to the hotel, which is rather fond of the arrangement.

The hotel sits in the Midlands, on the road between Pietermaritzburg and the Drakensberg, and has been taking in travellers since the nineteenth century. Its ghost is called Charlotte. The story the hotel tells is that she fell in love with a young soldier who drank there on his way to the Anglo-Boer War, and that when word came back that he had been killed at Ladysmith, she threw herself from the upstairs balcony. The owner has put her death at 1902. A second version, which the hotel tells less often, has her as a working girl of the house who was thrown from that balcony by a customer who did not want to pay. Nobody has produced a death certificate for either Charlotte, and the hotel’s own accounts of her have shifted a little over the years.

What has not shifted is the list of things she is said to do. She unpacks bags. She folds clothes. She takes pictures off the walls and leaves them on the floor. She moves flowers from one vase to another. Guests report footsteps, knocks, shuffling, and that murmured one-sided conversation at three in the morning. A few say they have seen her, a young woman in old-fashioned dress at the foot of the bed, and then not. The staff, asked about it, tend to say she is harmless and that she likes things tidy.

Word travelled. The American series Ghost Hunters International brought its cameras and its meters to Room 10 and spent a night there. They went home with some readings and no Charlotte.

Journalists have tried too. The Witness ran her story in 2011 alongside the Midlands’ other haunts. A travel writer for SafariKZN booked Room 10 specifically to meet her, lay awake for a while listening, and woke in the morning with everything exactly where it had been left. The hotel, to its credit, does not promise her. Room 10 is simply the room people ask for.

There is a plainer reading. Old hotels creak. Plumbing knocks. A chambermaid folding a guest’s clothes is a service, not a haunting. And a pub with a sad girl in its history will attract stories the way its garden attracts the mist off the hills.

Still, the requests for Room 10 keep coming. Whoever Charlotte was, she has been a guest for a very long time, and nobody has ever handed her the bill.