Geiser Grand Hotel

Baker City was a mining and railway town, platted in 1865, made county seat in 1868, and transformed when the Oregon Short Line Railroad arrived in 1884. By 1900 it was the largest city between Salt Lake City and Portland, and its grandest address was the hotel that opened in 1889. The National Register nomination describes a three-storey, stucco-clad brick building that had, at its opening, with plate-glass windows, electric lights, baths, an elevator and a 200-seat dining room. Sources differ about the first name, which appears as the Washauer or Warshauer, and about when it became the Geiser Grand, which was named after the Geiser family, whose mining investments in the county made them rich; one account dates the renaming to about 1895, another to 1900–1902.

The hotel declined with the town’s mining economy and closed in 1968. It stood empty for years before a restoration that reopened it in 1993, and it is part of the Baker Historic District, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. As the hotel returned to business, the ghost stories began to circulate.

The best-known figure is the Blue Lady, a woman in a turn-of-the-century blue gown who is said to walk up and down the grand staircase. The listing on hauntedplaces.org also mentions a young girl, a woman in a purple dress, a saloon dancer, a headless former chef and a cowboy with his girlfriend. In Room 302 a former owner, given as Maybelle Geiser, is said to admire guests’ jewellery, move it around and eat their complimentary snacks. The hotel holds ghost tours around Halloween, and the author Leslie Rule includes it in her book Coast to Coast Ghosts. The sightings are anonymous and undated.

There is a wry sceptical voice too. A commenter who says he worked as a night auditor at the hotel for two years wrote that he never saw or heard anything unusual and heard no guest complain, and he suggests that ghost stories helped a restored hotel in a struggling economy to find guests. That is one person’s opinion and not a documented fact, but it is a reminder that the hotel’s real, recorded history – the railway, the mining wealth, the closing and the rescue – is more solid than its ghosts.

A woman in a blue gown on the main staircase, a girl, a woman in purple, a dancer, a headless chef and a cowboy couple, plus a presence in Room 302 that moves jewellery and food. The reports are anonymous.

The grand staircase and Room 302, with other sightings listed for the lobby, dining room and corridors.

Included in Leslie Rule’s Coast to Coast Ghosts, in Oregon ghost listings and in the hotel’s own Halloween tours.