Goldfield Hotel

Goldfield was briefly the biggest city in Nevada. Gold strikes from 1902 drew tens of thousands of people, and in 1908 the town opened a hotel to match its ambitions: four stories of stone and brick, 154 rooms, a mahogany-paneled lobby with gold-leaf ceilings and crystal chandeliers, electric lights, telephones and steam heat in every room, and one of the first elevators west of the Mississippi. Shortly after it opened, mining magnate George Wingfield and his partner Casey McDannell bought it; Wingfield was the majority investor, while McDannell actually ran it.

The boom did not last. By the 1920s the mines were fading, and a 1923 fire destroyed much of the town around the hotel, which passed to new owners and declined into a flophouse during the Depression. During World War II it housed officers and families from the Tonopah Army Air Field, and when they left in 1945 it closed. It has stood empty ever since, through a 1980s restoration that collapsed in bankruptcy, a 2003 county auction and several plans to reopen it. It is a contributing building in the Goldfield Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1982.

Its best-known ghost story centers on “Elizabeth,” said to have been a young woman whom Wingfield kept chained to a radiator in Room 109 when she became pregnant; in some versions she died in childbirth, in others he killed her, and her baby was supposedly dropped down a mine shaft beneath the hotel. Wingfield himself is said to linger near the lobby staircase, announced by the smell of cigar smoke. Other stories tell of children on the stairs and unhappy figures on the upper floors.

Historians are clear that the Elizabeth tale does not fit the record. No contemporary source mentions her; Wingfield rarely stayed at the hotel and had sold it and moved to Reno before the shafts under the building were dug in 1925. A Central Nevada Museum researcher has said the stories are full of inconsistencies and largely trace back to a book by a former owner. That has not stopped the Goldfield Hotel becoming one of the most famous haunted buildings in America – or attracting vandals and trespassers, which is why it is kept locked.

Intense cold and failing cameras in Room 109, the sound of a woman or a baby crying, cigar smoke and fresh ash near the lobby, apparitions on the staircase, and – most famously – a brick that seemed to fly across the basement during a 2004 investigation.

Room 109 on the first floor, the lobby and main staircase, the basement and the old mine shafts beneath the building, and the upper floors.

The Goldfield Hotel is where Ghost Adventures began, and the team has returned several times; it has also appeared on Ghost Hunters and in the films Vanishing Point (1971), Cherry 2000 (1987) and Ghosts of Goldfield (2007). It anchors Goldfield’s ghost-town tourism alongside the nearby International Car Forest of the Last Church.