The Historic Brookstown Inn

The building that houses the Historic Brookstown Inn was erected in 1837 as the Salem Manufacturing Company — a textile mill founded by members of the Moravian congregation that had established Salem (later consolidated with Winston as Winston-Salem) in the eighteenth century. The Moravians were known for communal industry, and their cotton mill became one of the first in the American South to be illuminated by electric lighting, an early technological distinction that reflected the congregation's progressive relationship with industry.

The mill expanded through the nineteenth century. In 1880, F. and H. Fries constructed the Arista Cotton Mill Complex as the second major building on the site, and it was under this name that the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. The complex's brick construction, exposed timber framing, and large mill windows have been preserved through its conversion into the present hotel.

The Brookstown Inn opened as a boutique hotel after a multi-million dollar rehabilitation project, retaining the original wide-plank wooden floors, exposed brick walls, and heavy timber beams. Today it operates as an inn with 28 suites under the Wyndham Trademark Collection brand; the hotel's own materials describe the property as having seventy or seventy-one guest rooms. The hotel is located steps from Old Salem, the restored eighteenth-century Moravian village and museum that forms the historical core of Winston-Salem.

The fourth floor of the inn occupies what was originally a workers' dormitory, where young women employed in the mill lived and worked under the paternalistic boarding-house system common to nineteenth-century textile operations. It is this floor — and specifically Room 401 — that is most associated with the hotel's haunted reputation.