When ghosts and guests check in

What if your favorite vacation haunt was indeed haunted? That’s the premise behind three hourlong installments of “Haunted Hotels,” starting at 8 tonight on the Travel Channel, whose programming has a Halloween theme all week.

For those who believe in things that go bump in the night, these three travelogues present 15 ghost stories through interviews with hotel staff, reenactments and eerie effects. Even for skeptics who think the supernatural is as groundless as the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow is headless, there is some interesting information.

Each segment focuses on a specific building by providing historical or architectural details one might expect to hear about any quaint inn, whether it’s in Oxfordshire, England, or Palm Springs. Once the show discusses, say, the materials that went into the construction of a room, it then delves into the secrets presumed to lie within those walls.

At the Snowball Mansion, an 1870s-era bed-and-breakfast near Sacramento, innkeepers say the ghost of Lucy Snowball, a mother tormented by a child’s death, alerts visitors to potential danger. At the Shaker Inn in Enfield, N.H., slain Shaker leader Caleb Dyer is said to still roam the halls. And at the Moroccan-style Korakia Pensione in Palm Springs, the spirit of a former owner, a model wed to painter Gordon Coutts, supposedly pops in on fashion shoots.

What’s refreshing here is that even though the tales are spookily told, there remains a certain detachment in the storytelling. The husband-and-wife team of producer-writer Sarah Wetherbee and director Emre Sahin is careful to attribute the hauntings to innkeepers and visitors, never once asserting themselves that the locales are haunted.

As the programs note, the noises you could hear when staying at these hotels are “probably just the wind ... but you might want to leave the light on -- just in case.”