Hotel Monte Vista

Flagstaff’s Hotel Monte Vista was a community project. Residents of the Arizona mountain town wanted a first-class hotel for a growing stream of motorists, and a fundraising campaign reportedly raised some $200,000 within a month. Ground was broken on 8 June 1926, and the building opened on 1 January 1927, only weeks after Route 66 itself was commissioned. It was first billed as the Community Hotel; a young schoolgirl who won a naming contest suggested “Monte Vista”, Spanish for mountain view. Locals soon had a saying of their own, “Meet me at the Monte V”.

The hotel quickly became the town’s social centre. In 1929 radio pioneer Mary Costigan, one of the first women to hold a commercial broadcasting licence, moved her station KFXY into the building, and the property has long advertised a guest list that runs from cowboy-film stars to presidents. Its basement lounge had a more furtive past as a Prohibition-era speakeasy, which local officers reportedly closed in 1931. Today the Monte Vista is on the National Register of Historic Places and still operates as a hotel, with 73 rooms across three floors and a lively lounge.

The ghost stories are told by the hotel itself and by Arizona journalists, and they cluster in particular rooms. Room 305 is said to belong to an elderly woman who lived there for years and watched the street from the window; guests and housekeepers describe a rocking chair moving by itself and a figure seated in it. Room 306 is the darkest tale: two women are said to have been murdered there in the early 1940s and thrown from the window, and guests report a feeling of being watched or smothered. Room 220 is linked to a long-term boarder of the 1980s known as the “Meat Man”, whose television reportedly comes on at full volume.

Other stories belong to public spaces. A bank robber wounded during a 1970 holdup is said to have bled to death in the lounge, and visitors there describe a disembodied voice saying “Good morning!” and barstools that shift. A phantom bellboy knocks on doors near Room 210 calling “room service”; one version of the tale says the actor John Wayne answered such a knock. Staff also mention a crying infant in the basement and a dancing couple in the lounge.

As with many hotel ghost stories, the documentary trail is thin. The hotel’s construction and early history are well recorded, but none of the murders, deaths or robberies behind the haunted rooms are backed up in the sources consulted, and the names of the supposed victims are missing. In October 2016 the Phoenix news site KTAR reported that Travel + Leisure had named the Monte Vista Arizona’s most haunted spot, while noting that it could not confirm the stories itself.

Guests and staff describe a rocking chair that moves, a woman’s figure by a window, knocks and a voice calling “room service”, a greeting of “Good morning!” in the lounge, shifting barstools, televisions switching on, a cold touch, a feeling of being watched or smothered, and a crying infant in the basement.

Rooms 305, 306, 220 and 210, the corridor outside, the ground-floor lounge, and the basement. Accounts are mostly of night-time and early-morning events.

The Monte Vista appears on ghost-tour itineraries in Flagstaff, in Travel + Leisure style lists of America’s spookiest hotels, and in travel writing about Route 66. Its lounge, “the Monte V”, remains a local music and drinking spot.