In Brief
At the Amway Grand Plaza in Grand Rapids, Michigan, guests near an old sealed-off elevator report a woman crying. The story traces to Mary Monko, a hotel servant killed there in 1914 — a ghost you can pin to a name, a newspaper, and a spot still standing.
The Full Story
At the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, there's an elevator on the historic Pantlind side that nobody is allowed to use. It sits behind a cage, completely sealed off. Guests who get near it say they hear a woman crying, faint at first, then rising.
Most hotel ghosts are a feeling and a rumor. This one has a name.
Her name was Mary Monko, and she worked as a servant here in 1914, one year after the place opened as the Pantlind. She was stepping off the elevator at the tenth-floor landing when the car started down. A coworker, Josephine Kreuko, had reached for the governor in the operator's hands, and Monko's head was caught between an iron gate and the floor of the landing as the car dropped away beneath her. Michigan newspapers that autumn carried it in plain wire-service language. "Mary Monko was decapitated by an elevator in the new Pantlind Hotel at Grand Rapids Monday night," one began.
That elevator is the one behind the cage now. "It's completely sealed off and no one is allowed to use it," an employee says.
No one source agrees on which paper ran it first, or the exact date that week — the same account turns up in clippings from across Michigan that autumn, word for word, the way a single wire item spreads. They all agree on the year, and the manner, and the name.
The crying isn't the only thing people report. Accounts cluster around Rooms 336 and 337 — faucets that blast steaming hot water, lights that flicker, doors that slam. A guest in 337 said they woke to two shadow figures standing over the bed. Elsewhere, staff and guests describe a couple in period dress dancing in the Pantlind Ballroom, a woman in white near the tennis courts, and a small child wandering the old wing.
The hotel doesn't hide from any of it. Since October 2024 it has hosted a ghost tour called "Ghosts of the Grand," run by a local group, Tours Around Michigan, with the hotel's own historian giving the building's history and a paranormal author meeting guests at the door. The first night sold out instantly. The organizer, Candice Smith, told a reporter that "on ninety-five percent of the tours I run, somebody has a paranormal experience. Sometimes, it's the whole entire group."
The Pantlind was once ranked among the ten finest hotels in America, designed by the firm behind Grand Central Terminal, with a gold-leaf lobby ceiling among the largest in the world. Guests today walk those floors, ride the working elevators, sleep in the rooms two doors apart from 337. And the original car hangs in its cage at the end of the hall, sealed shut for over a century, with a woman crying beside a door no one is allowed to open.
