Amway Grand Plaza Hotel

Guests near the original elevator bank hear a woman crying. Mary Monko died in a 1914 shaft accident and has haunted the Pantlind wing since.

The elevator that killed Mary Monko in 1914 remains the best-known ghost story at the Amway Grand Plaza, then called the Pantlind Hotel. Accounts differ on exactly what happened, but the detail that circulates is ugly: she was decapitated. Guests near the original elevator shaft in the historic section of the building describe a woman's crying, a sound that starts faint and rises.

Monko is one of dozens of figures staff and guests have logged since the hotel opened in 1913. The building has operated continuously, under two names, for over a century, and the accounts pile up across every decade of that run.

The Pantlind was designed by Warren and Wetmore, the New York firm that also drew Grand Central Terminal. The ballroom is famous for its gold-leafed ceiling, which the Pantlind claimed at the time was the largest gold-leafed ceiling in the country. By the 1970s the building had fallen into disrepair. The Amway Corporation bought and renovated it in 1981, carefully preserving the original lobby, ballroom, and elevator bank rather than gutting them. If a hotel has ghosts, this is the approach that lets them keep their hold.

Staff and guests report a range of activity. Victorian-dressed couples have been seen dancing in the Pantlind Ballroom, particularly when the room is empty and dim. Smokers describe cigarettes and ashtrays moving or disappearing, which sounds whimsical until you realize it happens often enough that the concierge has a stock response. A woman in a long white dress has been seen near the tennis courts. A small child appears in the historic wing, usually on upper-floor corridors, usually alone.

The Monko story carries the most emotional weight because it's anchored to a specific date and a specific mechanism. Elevator accidents in 1914 were more common than people remember. Doors didn't always lock, shafts weren't always guarded, maintenance happened live. Whatever exactly happened to Mary Monko, the story the hotel tells is that it was gruesome and fast.

Since 2023 the Amway Grand Plaza has started treating the ghost accounts as part of the official program. The hotel now runs official ghost tours led by staff, which is rarer than you'd think. Most haunted hotels either deny everything or commercialize with fog machines. The Amway takes the middle path: here are the accounts, here's the history, draw your own conclusions. Guests on the tour have reported their room faucets turning on by themselves in the middle of the night, blasting hot water at full pressure.

The interesting question isn't whether the Pantlind is haunted. The interesting question is why, in a hotel this big, the activity clusters so tightly in the historic section and barely appears in the newer tower. One possible answer: the newer tower was built in 1983 and has no memory. The Pantlind wing has a century of it.

Guests who've walked past the original elevator bank after midnight mostly hear nothing. Most nights the Pantlind wing is just a grand old hotel full of people who don't know about Mary Monko. A handful of guests, in rooms they didn't choose for the ghost, have woken up at 2 a.m. to a woman crying in a hallway that turned out to be empty, listened for two minutes, and stopped booking the Pantlind side on return visits.