Marlene Akhtar lived in an old house in Hot Springs, South Dakota. The twenty-room home was built as a guesthouse in 1891 in a town known for its gambling and carousing. One evening during the mid-1970s, Akhtar was sitting in her living room, relaxing. She looked up and saw across the room an elegant woman in a beige lace dress in a style from the previous century. The woman was walking down the staircase from the second floor. The woman's dark hair was pinned back in a bun, and she looked straight ahead, descending gracefully, her hand on the stair rail. As Akhtar watched, the woman disappeared. The lady in beige was only the first of several ghosts Akhtar saw during the eleven years she lived in the house, report Michael Norman and Beth Scott in Haunted America.

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