Battery Park Apartments (Former Hotel)

Helen Clevenger, 19, was killed in Room 224 in 1936. A Black bellhop was beaten into confessing and executed. His elevator still runs at 3 a.m.

Helen Clevenger was 19 years old, a freshman at NYU visiting the South for the first time with her uncle William, an N.C. State professor. On the night of July 15, 1936, a thunderstorm pounded Asheville hard enough that no one in the Battery Park Hotel heard the gunshot in Room 224. Her uncle opened her unlocked door around 8:30 the next morning and found her shot through the chest and beaten in the face.

Eleven days later Asheville police arrested Martin Moore, a 22-year-old Black bellhop at the hotel. They beat him for twenty minutes in an interrogation room. They told him they'd already found his bloody fingerprints on the light bulb in Helen's room. They had not. They told him they would kill him if he didn't confess. He eventually gave them a confession, one he later said the officers "helped me explain, and told me what to say." Six months after Helen's death he was executed in the state gas chamber. The Asheville History Center now runs a public project arguing that Moore was almost certainly innocent, that the real killer was never identified, and that the city knew it at the time.

Anne Chesky Smith's 2021 book "Murder at Asheville's Battery Park Hotel" lays out the case in detail: the coerced confession, the tampered evidence, the hotel's rush to move on. Several magazines in 1936 started calling it "The Murder Hotel," and business never fully recovered. The building converted to senior housing, the Battery Park Apartments, which it remains today.

The service elevator is the part people keep coming back to. Residents on the upper floors report hearing it run between midnight and 3 a.m., stopping at each floor, opening, closing, moving on. Maintenance checks it the next day and it works normally. It ran that route the night Helen died. Operating the service elevator was Martin Moore's actual job. Whatever is repeating that pattern is repeating the route of the man who was blamed for a killing he almost certainly didn't do.

Back when the building was still a hotel, employees described being followed by a young woman who matched Helen's description, walking a few steps behind them through service corridors and vanishing when they turned. Two separate suicides off the roof, both men, both in the 1940s, have generated sporadic reports of figures seen falling past windows and disappearing before reaching the ground. Recent renovations seem to have cranked the activity up. The property is closed to paranormal investigators, so most of what gets recorded now comes from residents who didn't sign up for any of this.

Asheville has a long list of haunted addresses and most of them are wrapped in velvet ropes and tour-guide theater. The Battery Park isn't. It's a senior apartment building with a real 1936 homicide in its walls and the man blamed for it executed in the name of a closed case. The ghosts, if that's what they are, are the two people in the story: a teenage girl killed in Room 224, and a 22-year-old bellhop executed for a crime the city probably knew he didn't commit.