Hotel Vendome

Prescott was Arizona’s territorial capital, and the block where the Hotel Vendome stands has a long paper trail. In 1872 the lot was deeded to Dr. Thaddeus Seeley, a surgeon at nearby Fort Whipple; in 1876 it passed to county supervisor William Hutchinson, who built a large Victorian house there. Later owners included Henry D. Ross, a future chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. By 1917 the old house was gone and the lot was empty, and rancher J. B. “Jack” Jones borrowed money from the bank of his neighbour Morris Goldwater to put up a two-storey red-brick hotel with 30 rooms and 16 bathrooms. It was finished by November of that year.

The Vendome served miners, ranchers and travellers; cowboy film star Tom Mix is said to have stayed while making westerns near the town. Ownership changed several times, with Henry Brinkmeyer taking it in 1924, the Dutcher family in 1927 and the Salvation Army briefly in the 1950s. A major restoration in the early 1980s converted some of the rooms to suites and added bathrooms, and the hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on 25 November 1983 as the only unaltered early twentieth-century tourist hotel of its kind in Prescott.

The ghost story centres on Abby, who is said to have come to Arizona for the dry air because she had tuberculosis. In the most common telling her husband went out one day in early 1921, perhaps to fetch her medicine, and never came back; Abby locked herself and her cat, Noble, in her room, and both died. Some versions have the couple owning the hotel and staying on as guests after they lost it. The story is a local tale, and the Sharlot Hall Museum’s articles give no surname, dates for the events or named witnesses; they say Abby’s presence began to be reported after World War II.

Visitors and workers connect her with Room 16 and the corridor around it. Reports include soft footsteps and murmured voices, a bell ringing for service when the room is empty, a woman glimpsed in the hall, and the sensation of a cat brushing against a guest’s legs or hopping onto the bed. The Sharlot Hall authors are notably even-handed: they point out that many people sleep in the room without noticing anything, and that some who book it because of the legend also have an uneventful night.

Prescott, with its Whiskey Row saloons, Hassayampa Inn and Palace Saloon, is one of Arizona’s favourite ghost-story towns, and the Vendome is its most gentle entry: a sad, domestic tale rather than a murder.

Soft footsteps and voices near Room 16, a service bell that rings in an empty room, a woman seen in the hallways, and the feeling of a cat rubbing against legs or jumping on the bed.

Room 16 and the adjoining upstairs corridor of the two-storey hotel.

The hotel appears in Sharlot Hall Museum’s Days Past columns on haunted Prescott and in regional guides to Arizona’s haunted landmarks. It is a stop on Whiskey Row ghost-story walking routes.