The Foley House story is told in Chippewa Square on several ghost tours, and its appeal is the part nobody has solved. In 1987, the story goes, contractors renovating the inn opened up a wall about a century old and found a human skeleton inside. Lodging Magazine, which interviewed the innkeeper, reported the discovery as fact. The remains were never identified.

Local lore supplies a suspect. As the legend goes, a gentleman boarder at Mrs. Foley's guest house kept pressing his attentions on her, and she kept turning him down. One night he slipped into her room while she slept. Startled awake, Honoria grabbed the nearest heavy object, a candlestick, and struck him, killing him instantly. A mason friend, the story says, helped her hide the body in the wall. South Magazine quotes the research-minded investigator Ryan Dunn, who says he has seen a diary entry in which Mrs. Foley describes an intruder she struck. The entry says nothing about what happened next.

Guests and staff describe a man in a top hat walking the courtyard at night, often assumed to be the unlucky suitor. Dunn's team says it recorded a male voice growling 'Who told?' when they asked about the body. At the spot where it was found, he says, they recorded the scrape of a trowel and a voice asking for 'another ship's brick,' the ballast stone the wall turned out to be built from. Other stories are gentler. A guest woke feeling as though someone were making the bed around him, and a tour guide tells of a couple whose missing suitcase of hair curlers turned up open beside the fireplace. Staff tend to credit small breakages to Mrs. Foley herself, still watching over her house.