Idanha Hotel

The Idanha opened on New Year’s Day 1901 and was, for a time, the grandest address in Boise. Designed by architect William S. Campbell, who is said to have toured hotels from Idaho to New York before settling on a French-chateau look, it rose six storeys of red brick above a sandstone basement, with round turrets on its corners and a steep mansard roof. The reported cost of about $125,000 made it the most expensive building in the city, and it was built beside the railroad spur that brought travellers up from Nampa. Its elevator is often described as the oldest in Idaho.

For decades it served as the capital’s social hub, serving travellers arriving by rail; local histories add that the proprietors kept rooms on the third floor and, during Prohibition, ran a dumbwaiter to move illicit liquor. The Idanha stopped operating as a hotel in the 1970s and was converted into apartments, and it was entered on the National Register of Historic Places on 9 July 1974. Today the ground floor holds restaurants and shops, and the upper floors are private homes.

The ghost stories come mostly from the building’s later life. Residents and staff talk of activity concentrated on the third and fourth floors: curtains that stir when no air is moving, doors that open and close, locks that turn by themselves, moaning in the elevator shaft, and a car that seems to stop at floors no one has called. Restaurant workers have described pans, pots and silverware shaken off shelves, and tenants have said that blankets were pulled from them as they slept. Local retellings add the “ghosts of murdered bellhops” as the cause.

Boise columnist and historian Rick Just, writing in 2020, summed up the two violent stories attached to the building: an early twentieth-century killing in which a husband supposedly buried his wife beneath the basement, and a late-1970s shooting of a bellboy by a guest, after which the guest died by suicide. Just presented them as hearsay, and no independent record confirming either has been found. A 1983 book, The Idanha: Guests and Ghosts of an Historic Idaho Inn, collected the building’s lore. Because the building is a private residence above street level, there is no public ghost-hunting access, and neighbours deserve their privacy.

Curtains moving without a draught, doors opening and closing, locks releasing, moans from the elevator shaft, an elevator that moves on its own, cookware and silverware falling from shelves in the ground-floor kitchen, and blankets pulled off sleepers. Most reports come from residents and restaurant staff and have not been independently investigated.

Mainly the third and fourth floors, the elevator and its shaft, and the ground-floor restaurant kitchen; reports are strongest in the residential corridors.

The Idanha features in regional books of local hauntings and is a landmark of the capital’s skyline.