Totten Trail Historic Inn, Fort Totten

Fort Totten was founded in 1867 on the southern shore of Devils Lake, after an 1867 treaty created the Devils Lake Indian Reservation (now Spirit Lake Reservation). It was named for Joseph Gilbert Totten, the Army’s chief engineer. The army built permanent brick buildings around a parade ground from 1868, and the 7th Cavalry briefly stationed two companies there in 1873. With no clear mission left, the army abandoned the fort on 20 December 1890.

A year later the buildings were turned into the Fort Totten Indian Industrial School, one of the federal boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children. Students were taught vocational skills under an English-only regime, and enrolment reached about 400 at its peak. In the mid-1930s part of the site served as a tuberculosis preventorium for at-risk Native children. The school finally closed on 6 March 1959, the site passed to the State Historical Society of North Dakota in 1960, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

The inn occupies a restored former officers’ quarters, once the fort’s lieutenants’ and captains’ residence, and opened to guests around 2002 with ten period-furnished rooms. Its ghost stories are the sort told about almost any old guest house: guests mention shadows, doors that open or close, footsteps overhead and a sense of being watched. Some popular travel articles tie those reports to the children who attended the school and claim that many died there, but that is local lore: the sources used here do not document any such deaths, and it is a sensitive subject for the descendants of the students and for the Spirit Lake Nation.

The inn’s own staff are cautious. When a State Historical Society blogger spent a night there in 2022, she heard footsteps above her room but did not describe them as paranormal, and the innkeeper pointed to the “creaks and groans and shadows” of an old building. Readers who are interested in the human history are better served by the visitor centre and the site’s exhibits, which tell the fort and school years from several perspectives. The school years are painful history for many Native families, and the site deserves to be approached with that in mind.

Guests report shadows, doors that open or close on their own, footsteps in the upper floors and a feeling of being watched; popular articles also speak of apparitions, which the inn does not endorse.

The restored quarters that now form the inn, particularly the guest rooms and upper floor, at night.

The inn is promoted by North Dakota tourism as a place to stay in a living piece of frontier history. It also appears on lists of lesser-known haunted hotels, which the innkeeper has played down.