Jerome Grand Hotel

Jerome clings to the side of Cleopatra Hill above the Verde Valley. From the 1880s the United Verde Copper Company, bought in the late 1880s by Montana mining magnate William A. Clark, turned the mountain into one of the richest copper mines in the world, and by the 1920s the town held many thousands of people – and, since a New York newspaper’s verdict in 1903, a reputation as the “wickedest town in the West”. Blasting and underground workings shifted the ground so badly that the company’s 1917 hospital cracked, and in 1926 it began a replacement: a five-storey, poured-concrete Mission Revival building set on bedrock at a steep slope, built to be fireproof and to withstand the shock of mine blasts.

The United Verde Hospital opened in January 1927 and was soon described as the most modern hospital in Arizona. Its patients were miners and their families, and it treated industrial injuries, pneumonia, influenza and the ordinary illnesses of a crowded mining town. Phelps Dodge took over the mines in 1935 and ran the hospital until 1950, when medical services moved to Cottonwood. Mining in Jerome ended in 1953, the town shrank to a few hundred people, and the hospital stood empty and boarded up for more than four decades.

In 1994 Phoenix businessman Larry Altherr bought the building from Phelps Dodge, and after two years of renovation the Jerome Grand Hotel opened in July 1996, keeping the original Otis self-service elevator – the first in Arizona – and the 1926 Kewanee boiler. The hotel restaurant is named the Asylum. Altherr’s own history of the building records that psychics visiting the hotel claimed a “head nurse” was upset at the removal of the old dispensary desks, which were later moved back.

The hotel’s best-known ghost story concerns Claude Harvey, a hospital maintenance man found dead beneath the elevator in 1935. His death was recorded as an accident, but tour guides and many retellings say it was murder made to look like one. Published accounts of his death differ in their details, and they have not been checked against the coroner’s file. The hotel has embraced the reputation, appearing on Ghost Adventures in 2011 and hosting nightly ghost tours.

Guests and night staff report coughing, wheezing and voices from empty rooms, footsteps and the creak of gurneys in the halls, a woman in white, a nurse carrying a clipboard, doors and lights operating on their own, and the old elevator moving between floors without a passenger. Some attribute shadows in the stairwells and boiler room to Claude Harvey.

The elevator shaft and boiler room (linked to Claude Harvey), the third floor and the former wards now used as guest rooms, the stairwells, and the lobby once used as the hospital’s main floor; reports cluster at night.

The hotel is the centrepiece of Jerome’s ghost-tour trade and has been featured on Ghost Adventures and in many Arizona “most haunted” lists. Jerome itself, a National Historic Landmark district, promotes itself as a ghost town that came back to life as an arts community.