The Cavalier Hotel

The Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach is where Adolph Coors Sr. went out a sixth-floor window in 1929. The county coroner shrugged.

On the morning of June 5, 1929, 82-year-old Adolph Coors Sr. went out a sixth-floor window of the Cavalier Hotel and hit the concrete patio below. His wife Louisa, the only other person in the room, said he either fell or jumped. The county coroner, R.W. Woodhouse, decided no investigation was necessary. No autopsy was performed. When Coors' will was opened, it stipulated that his $1,876.51 hotel bill be paid in full.

The man who went out the window was the founder of Coors Brewing. The man whose name is on every red can in every cooler in America. He'd come to Virginia Beach in April with his wife, his daughter Augusta, and his granddaughter Louise. He was 82, recovering from influenza, and a doctor had told him the sea air would do him good. He and Louisa had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Six weeks later, he was on the patio.

Prohibition had taken the brewery and turned it into a malted milk and pottery operation. Dan Baum, who wrote the family biography *Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty*, was blunt about the motive in Coastal Virginia Magazine: "It was probably a combination of not being able to make beer and being a miserable son of a bitch, which he was."

You'll see internet sources insist that the windows were locked from the inside, that the room number was 606, that the family was eating breakfast in the Pocahontas Room when he excused himself to go upstairs. Wikipedia notes the locked-windows detail was never confirmed. The room number 606 is what ghost-tour guides call it. The breakfast scene shows up in tour writeups and nowhere I'd trust. The fact is a man went out a window, a coroner shrugged, and a hotel bill got paid. Everything else is decoration.

One small but important note. The Coors who died here is Adolph Coors Sr., the founder. Not Adolph Coors III, the grandson kidnapped and murdered in Colorado in 1960. Different generation, different state, different crime. They get conflated in roughly every other haunted-hotel writeup on the internet.

The Cavalier opened in 1927 at 4200 Atlantic Avenue, a seven-story Y-shaped brick pile designed by Neff & Thompson. Virginia's Department of Historic Resources calls the style Jeffersonian-inspired Classical Revival. The hotel was built with over half a million bricks. Bathtubs ran Atlantic Ocean saltwater straight from the tap. By 1929 the Cavalier Beach Club had opened next door, and between 1930 and 1950 the hotel became the largest contractor of big bands in the world. Frank Sinatra played here. Ella Fitzgerald played here. Judy Garland and Will Rogers and Bette Davis all came through. F. Scott Fitzgerald visited (the tourism boards will tell you Gatsby was written here, which is impossible since Gatsby came out in 1925 and the Cavalier opened in 1927, but he was a guest at some point).

Then the Navy showed up. On October 3, 1942, the military commandeered the building and ran a radar training school out of it through June 1, 1945. They drained the indoor pool and used it as a classroom. They converted the stables into sailors' barracks. Sources disagree on how many U.S. presidents have stayed at the Cavalier. The hotel's own NRHP press release names seven: Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon. Other tourism pages stretch the list to ten.

It was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register on March 20, 2014, and to the National Register of Historic Places on May 19, 2014. The building closed soon after for restoration. After four years and $81 million, it reopened on March 7, 2018, as a Marriott Autograph Collection property, slimmed down from its original room count to 85. Bruce L. Thompson, the CEO of Gold Key | PHR, the local hospitality outfit that led the work, told Virginia Business his goal was to bring the place "back to grace and grandeur, doing it in a way that the entire community could be proud."

Coors didn't leave. The sixth floor is the active address. Guests and staff describe sudden temperature drops, a figure matching his description near the windows, and the smell of cigar smoke that appears in the Grand Ballroom and other rooms and vanishes the same way. A married pair of paranormal investigators staying in what the tour guides call Room 606 said they recorded, on a spirit box, a voice identifying itself as "Mike" who said there were multiple ghosts on the floor, including murder victims.

Other ghosts in the catalog: a Lady in White on the third floor, sometimes identified as Ida Harrington, the wife of an early hotel figure. A WWII-era serviceman on the third floor. An African-American bellman who warns guests away from the sixth floor and disappears. Ghost-tour sites also tell the story of a little girl who drowned in the saltwater pool trying to save her cat, with phantom paw prints in concrete and a spectral cat to match. That one I can't trace to any contemporary record. No name, no date, no newspaper, just the tour script.

The haunting reputation here is unusually well-credentialed. In March 2010, a three-day Eastern Paranormal Investigators Co-Op Conference was hosted right there in the building. Producer Teddy Skyler told the Virginian-Pilot they chose the venue "because of its historical value" and "because it has been written up in books as having a haunted history." That's a working paranormal conference picking the Cavalier, not the other way around.

The Cavalier earns the attention. It's a hotel that survived Prohibition, the Depression, a Navy occupation, a long decline, and an $81 million reset. Frank Sinatra slept there. Seven presidents slept there. Adolph Coors went out a window there and the coroner went home. The will said pay the bill in full, and they did: one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six dollars and fifty-one cents.