Gold Hill Hotel

The hotel stands in Gold Hill, the mining camp on the southern end of the Comstock Lode where prospectors found gold in early 1859. The town was incorporated in 1862 and had about 8,000 people by 1877. The hotel began as the Riesen House, and the hotel’s own history gives 1861 as the more accurate date, with construction under way that July, though many people say 1859. Floods in the winter of 1861–62 damaged its corners, and Horace Vesey acquired it in late 1862. In August 1864 miners gathered in front of the Vesey House to adopt a constitution, and the hotel remained a centre of the camp’s social life.

Gold Hill was a dangerous place to work. In April 1869 a fire that began in the Yellow Jacket mine spread underground to the Kentuck and Crown Point mines and killed 37 miners, a major mining disaster of the Comstock era. As the silver and gold declined, the town emptied; by the 1930s only a few hundred people were left on the Comstock, the railway closed in 1938 and the post office in 1943. By 1907 the hotel was a private residence, and it passed through various owners before being renovated in 1986–87 and reopened as an inn. It is generally promoted as the oldest hotel in Nevada, though the records disagree about the opening year.

The ghost stories belong to the modern inn. The best known is “Rosie”, a woman who is said to haunt Room 2, one of five original historic rooms with sloping floors and no televisions. The paranormal author Richard Senate asked for the room because of its reputation and wrote that, while bathing in the claw-foot tub, he noticed a powerful smell of roses like cheap perfume with no source; the scent vanished, returned, and vanished again, and he learned the next day that earlier guests had described the same thing. A second room, William’s, is also said to have a friendly ghost. The inn says it has been featured on Ghost Adventures and offers ghost tours.

Nothing in the record explains who Rosie or William might have been, and the hotel’s ghost lore is not tied to any documented death. The stories are best understood as part of the Comstock’s tourism culture, in which the genuine tragedies of the mining camp and the age of the building mix with guests’ expectations. The mine disasters and the nineteenth-century miners were real people, and the building’s story is worth knowing whether or not one believes in ghosts.

A strong smell of roses in Room 2, said to be a woman called Rosie; a friendly presence in William’s Room; and general reports of footsteps and a feeling of company in the old building.

The five original historic rooms, above all Room 2 (“Rosie’s Room”) and William’s Room; also the bar and older parts of the building.

The hotel has been featured on Ghost Adventures, is described in travel writing as Nevada’s oldest hotel, and hosts ghost-and-history tours with local paranormal groups. Legends of America and Islands magazine both retell the Room 2 story.