Totally Ghoul Offerings in Haunted Hotels

LOS ANGELES (TheStreet) -- You won't always read it on the hotel's Web site, and there will be no mention of it under the amenities tab of Expedia's booking page.

Some of the world's most famous haunted hotels will rarely publicize the fact that they're hotspots for both the living and the dead, but if you manage to get a concierge or manager away from his official duties, you'll manage to extract some hair-raising stories and sightings of the long-since departed.

Grand ghouls in S.F: Call it Presidential Paranormal Activity, but Palace Hotel San Francisco has been a Ghostbuster landmark ever since Warren Harding died there while holding office in 1923. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison and Rutherford B. Hayes managed to both check in and check out.

The Palace Hotel San Francisco is the site of several ghost stories.

The Palace Hotel is a San Francisco monument of architecture and phantom rumors, operated by Starwood's(HOT Quote) Luxury Collection. It has a Tiffany-glass-domed garden court flanked by marble-wrapped columns that's popular for its position connecting the Financial District to SoMa (South of Market) and nearby Embarcadero.

Destroyed in the 1906 earthquake following the great fire, Italian tenor Enrico Caruso swore he would never return to San Francisco following his stay and Earth-shaking performance as Don Jose in "Carmen" at the San Francisco Opera. Today the hotel is rumored to contain one very haunted guest room, as well as hair-raising stories of the night King Kalakaua of Hawaii spent a night there after he died in 1891.

Sicilian saints and sinners: The frescoed chapels and pin-drop silent staircases of this former monastery-turned-grand-hotel in Sicily's Taormina have become a summer hotspot for European globetrotters and five-star ghost trackers. The glass-enclosed lobby and elaborate courtyard observatory of San Domenico is lined with terra-cotta stone floors, along with expansive hallways with 20-foot ceilings decorated in period Italian furnishings that take on an especially scary feel any time after midnight.