Haunted Hotels & Inns

Haunted hotels are where most people actually meet a ghost story – and many hotels are glad of it. The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King spent a night in Room 217 in 1974 and conceived The Shining, now runs ghost tours; the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego has its “beautiful stranger”, Kate Morgan, who died there in 1892; and the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, tells the story of the quack doctor Norman Baker’s “cancer hospital” of the 1930s. Britain has coaching inns and castles turned hotels, such as Jamaica Inn in Cornwall, and almost every old town has an inn with a resident spirit.

Hotels are natural homes for ghost stories. They are old buildings full of strangers, where people sleep in unfamiliar rooms, hear unexplained noises from plumbing, lifts, ventilation and neighbouring guests, and wake disoriented in the dark – prime conditions for sleep paralysis and vivid dreams. Staff pass stories on to new staff, guests read the stories before they arrive, and a famous room can be booked months ahead.

When we write about a haunted hotel we separate the documented history of the building and its guests from the marketing, check the records behind named ghosts, and note what you can actually do there – book a room, take a tour, or just have a drink in the bar.