Haunted hotels are a big business these days. There are tour companies and booking agencies dedicated solely to those travelers desiring to spend time with things that go bump in the night. There are even web pages with tips on staying in a haunted room (leave the kids at home, find out which rooms are haunted and stay in one).

Although the ghosts of Great Britain are world-famous, there are several very famous haunted hotels in the United States as well. The former cruise ship Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA is famous for its paranormal population, and has been turned into a hotel complete with tours of its scariest bits. New Orleans is, of course, famous for its ghostly population and there are several tours originating from the French Quarter to point out different haunted spots. Some hotels in the Quarter advertise to those looking for an "experience" along with their stay. The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO is what inspired Stephen King's The Shining, and room 418 is supposed to be the hot spot. People have reported hearing children playing in the empty halls. Teddy Roosevelt is supposed to haunt the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, and another San Antonio hotel, the Gunter, is home to the spirit of a woman who was chopped into pieces, ground up with a meat grinder, and flushed down the toilet. All the rooms ending in '03' at the Heathman Hotel in Portland, Oregon have had odd occurrences. One old hotel, built over an old gold mine in Nevada, has a colorful history of paranormal activity, with numerous tales of hotel guests hearing sobbing and cries for help from somewhere down below the hotel. The hotel became known for its unusual location as well as the strange things that seemed to occur there, leaving guests wondering if the mines might have been used to dispose of bodies. The hauntings alledgedly became so bad that the hotel was shut down in the 1930s although there have been recent attempts to re-open it and capitalize on the legends of ghosts and hauntings.

Is there something in common with all the different haunted hotels, or are there really that many displaced spirits roaming the Earth, trying to get their messages across to the living? Is it all a secret government plot using infrasound? Are you brave enough to find out?

8/26/04 Update: I got an interesting e-mail from a reader today regarding the hotel story. Oddly enough, there appear to be two purportedly haunted old hotels in the same town in western Nevada. They were both build atop old, abandoned gold mines and have quite a reputation among the locals for the scope and frequency of their ghostly visitations. It's not clear whether both hotels are actually haunted or whether similar names have caused stories from one place to be applied to the other. In any event, it would be interesting to see if both places are built over the same gold mine!

HOME