Omni Parker House

Harvey D. Parker arrived in Boston in 1825, aged 20, and built a career in the restaurant trade. In 1855 he opened the Parker House at the corner of School and Tremont streets, an Italianate hotel designed by William Washburn, across the street from King’s Chapel. It quickly became one of the city’s social centres: from 1856 the Saturday Club – Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes and others – met there monthly, discussions that led to the founding of The Atlantic Monthly. Charles Dickens lived at the hotel in 1867–68 during his American reading tour, and John Wilkes Booth stayed two nights in April 1865, days before he assassinated President Lincoln.

Parker’s kitchen gave the world the Parker House roll and the Boston cream pie, and its staff included a young Malcolm X, who worked as a busboy in the 1940s; Ho Chi Minh claimed to have worked in the kitchen, though hotel records do not confirm it. Harvey Parker died in 1884. The original building was replaced by the present fourteen-storey hotel in 1927, which John F. Kennedy used to announce his first run for Congress in 1946. Now run by Omni Hotels, it describes itself as the longest continuously operating hotel in the United States.

The ghost stories focus on the founder. Staff and guests have long said that a portly, bearded man in nineteenth-century dress appears in the upper hallways, especially on the tenth floor, checking on his hotel – Harvey Parker, the story goes, still making his rounds; the hotel’s own blog has retold a bellman’s account of a 1950s sighting. Guests also describe the creak of rocking chairs on the tenth floor, though the hotel has none, and elevators that stop at the third floor, where Dickens stayed, without being called. Ghost-tour retellings add the smell of whiskey and cigars around Room 303. Haunted-Boston books and ghost tours single out Room 303, claiming it inspired Stephen King’s 1999 story “1408” about a deadly hotel room; even the Historic Hotels of America profile repeats the link. King’s personal assistant has said the claim is false, and the story’s hotel is a fictional one in New York.

A figure resembling Harvey Parker in the halls, especially on the tenth floor; lights flickering and switching on; doors opening; elevators stopping on the third floor without being called; the sound of rocking chairs on the tenth floor in a hotel that has none; and, in ghost-tour retellings, laughter and the smell of whiskey or cigar smoke near Room 303.

The tenth floor and other upper hallways, the third floor and Room 303 in particular, and the elevators. Reports come mostly from night staff and overnight guests.

The Parker House features on Boston ghost tours and lists of America’s most haunted hotels, and is closely tied to the King story “1408” and its 2007 film adaptation in popular lore. It is equally famous for Boston cream pie, Parker House rolls and its literary history.