Would you willingly spend the night in a room where you knew someone had died?

Obviously we all know, or suspect, that people have breathed their last in places we live in, maybe even on mattresses we've slept on, but the part of our mind - or mine, certainly - whose job it is to keep one sane tries not to dwell on this fact.

Not everyone is as squeamish. A chic Paris hotel in St Germain, formerly a fleapit, allows guests to stay in the room where Oscar Wilde departed this life, allegedly uttering the immortal last words, "Either that wallpaper goes or I do." Given its popularity, Wilde's last resting place is a selling point.

The idea of seeking out a deathbed is creepy. It's one thing to find oneself in an old house, where such events must have been common, quite another to go in search of them. And yet, if you were to tell me to choose between a hotel where Dostoevsky or Jane Austen had spent a week, and one with no literary connections, I'd follow in the writers' footsteps. And if the housekeeper of Dove Cottage or the Bronte parsonage slipped me the keys and said I could spent the night there, I wouldn't say no. I might avoid the chaise-longue where at least one of the Brontes coughed their last, but it wouldn't be these writers' deaths I was thinking about as I prowled around, but the life they lived while here.

I don't believe in ghosts, as such, but I do think the imagination can recreate a bygone atmosphere with the most meagre of clues. Others evidently agree, because as well as Wilde's last quarters, several Paris hotels are beginning to latch onto the idea of parading their literary associations to entice visitors.

One new establishment, Le R Kipling Hotel, is decked out as if it were the writer's home, with embossed leather sofas and souvenirs from the Raj. Other hotels draw attention to the literati who have stayed there, alone or scandalously coupled. And one, at least, has the brass neck to name its rooms after characters in A la recherche du temps perdu, and to claim that the spirit of Proust hovers over the place, despite the fact he was never once inside the door, and would have likely deemed it far too declasse an arrondissement ever to frequent.

The shameful truth for someone like me is that a plaque on a wall indicating that a famous writer once lived there is enough to whet my interest. Whether it's Tolkien's drinking haunts in Oxford, James Joyce's lodgings in Trieste, or Hugh MacDiarmid's mouse-ridden cottage at Brownsbank in South Lanarkshire, I am drawn to the idle, utterly futile pastime of trying to catch an echo of them as I look at the now empty, or modernised, or down-at-heel rooms.

It just shows the attraction of fame. I might scoff at those who'd sell their souls to see Michael Jackson's bedroom, but I'm no better. To stare at the view from the library in Abbotsford is to stand for a second in Walter Scott's boots and understand more immediately the ideas or influences that shaped his work. To pass the door of the house where Jane and Thomas Carlyle lived in Edinburgh is to picture, fleetingly, the far from cosy domestic life they both chafed against. And while the romantic in me prefers Dickensian character to bland banality, there is something oddly reassuring, even inspiring, about the houses and flats of great writers that are downright shabby or dull.

Jose Saramago's house in Lanzarote, for instance, is depressingly without charm. Many years ago, I was in a renowned Scottish poet's scullery, which could have been commandeered for the Tenement House, so antique were its fittings. Meanwhile, one of England's best novelists lives in a featureless bungalow, almost overgrown by the gardens, a place as gloomy and emotionally crepuscular as he. I wouldn't want to live there myself, but whenever I'm reading his books, it adds greatly to their pleasure to picture him there.