In early January, a guest stayed in room 812 at the Hotel Alex Johnson, in Rapid City, S.D. As the anonymous visitor wrote in the guest book the next morning, the night was a bit more than uneventful.

“The Hilton app does not warn you about ghosts when you select a room,” the guest wrote. “A couple of co-workers told me I was nuts for staying there, but I don’t believe in ghosts, so I figured that made me immune to them.”

After a line space: “I could not have been more wrong.”

Hotel Alex Johnson, a member of Hilton’s Curio Collection, has several guest books, called “ghost journals,” where one can record encounters with the resident spirits. Their pages tell eerie tales of midnight footsteps, phantom door knocks and, in the case above, the word “HELP” scrawled on a foggy bathroom mirror.

Alex Johnson is one of a number of hotels putting a creative spin on a centuries-old tradition. Typically now only found in small bed-and-breakfasts, high-end s afari lodges and independent luxury hotels, guest books, reinvented for the modern era, are increasingly landing in larger — and often corporately backed — accommodations.