Grove Park Inn and the Pink Lady

Edwin Wiley Grove, a St. Louis pharmacist who made a fortune in patent medicines, first came to Asheville to ease his insomnia and bronchitis and ended up remaking much of the city. His grandest project was a hotel on the slopes of Sunset Mountain, sketched by his son-in-law Fred Seely, who had no architectural training. Some 400 laborers and a team of Italian stonemasons built it from local granite in less than a year, and it opened on July 12, 1913, with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan declaring it “built for the ages.”

Its Arts and Crafts interiors and enormous Great Hall, with fireplaces big enough for 12-foot logs, drew presidents, inventors and writers – among them Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Helen Keller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent long stretches there in the mid-1930s while Zelda was in treatment nearby. During World War II the U.S. government used the inn to hold Axis diplomats awaiting repatriation, then as a rest center for officers, and in 1944 it housed the Philippine government-in-exile of Manuel Quezon.

The hotel’s ghost story is set in the 1920s. According to the inn’s own telling, a young woman – believed to have been the guest of a guest – fell from the fifth-floor gallery to the floor of the Palm Court atrium two stories below and died. Whether it was an accident is not known, and her name has not been recorded in published accounts. Since then employees and guests have described a woman in pink, or simply a pink glow, in the upper corridors and around the Palm Court, and children have reported experiences of their own.

The resort embraces the story, displaying a pink dress in her memory, and Asheville ghost tours include the inn on their routes. Most accounts describe her as gentle rather than frightening.

A young woman in pink, or a pink glow, in the fifth-floor corridors and the Palm Court and a sense of a presence – reported by employees, guests and children.

The original 1913 Main Inn, especially the fifth-floor rooms and gallery overlooking the Palm Court atrium, and the Palm Court itself.

The Pink Lady is a fixture of Asheville ghost tours and of lists of haunted Southern hotels. The inn hosts the annual National Gingerbread House Competition and remains one of the most famous resort hotels in the South.