Chase Park Plaza Hotel

The Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis has at least four ghosts, including the red-haired woman of Room 306 who jumped from a window on her 1930s wedding day and once scared a hotel worker so badly he broke his arm falling into a bathtub. Developer Chase Ullman still inspects the property in his signature tuxedo and top hat.

A hotel worker at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel showed up to his shift late one morning with a broken arm and shattered glasses. He told his coworkers he had seen a red-haired woman in the bathroom mirror, panicked, and fell backward into the bathtub hard enough to snap bone. The woman was not a guest.

Chase Ullman built the original Chase Hotel in 1922 in St. Louis's Central West End. Architect Preston J. Bradshaw gave it a Renaissance Revival style with 400 rooms. In 1929, Sam Koplar added the 28-story Park Plaza tower next door in Art Deco. The two buildings merged under single ownership in the early 1960s. Elvis Presley stayed here. The Rolling Stones. Frank Sinatra. Sammy Davis Jr. The complex had its own movie theater. Today it operates as the Chase Park Plaza Royal Sonesta, with over 250 rooms at 212 North Kingshighway Boulevard.

The hotel's most persistent ghost is the woman who broke that worker's arm. The story goes that in the 1930s, a red-haired woman jumped from the window of Room 306 on her wedding day. Nobody has pinned down her name. She paces the corridor outside 306, walking the same stretch of hallway in her red dress. One apartment resident in the building woke up to a woman in a long white dress with red hair whispering in her ear. Guests staying near Room 306 describe waves of sadness that arrive with no trigger and lift the moment they leave the hallway.

Chase Ullman is the second ghost, and he is considerably more cheerful. He appears in a tuxedo and top hat, his signature look from when he was alive, wandering the public spaces of the hotel like a man checking on his investment. Staff who encounter him say he gives off satisfaction rather than menace. He seems happy with how the place turned out.

The elevator has its own ghost. A young woman in 1920s or 1930s clothing steps in when the doors open and sometimes smiles at other passengers. The temperature drops while she rides. She vanishes on the upper floors without ever walking through the doors.

The ballroom produces its own strangeness. Staff have seen couples dancing when the room is empty, dressed in vintage formalwear, moving to music no one else can hear. Big band, usually. Jazz. Phantom music drifts through the halls past midnight, faint enough that you could convince yourself it was coming from a radio somewhere until you realize there is no radio. Housekeepers describe rooms that seem to "breathe," curtains shifting despite sealed windows and lights flickering in a rhythm too even to be electrical failure.

Sam Koplar, who built the Park Plaza tower, rounds out the roster. He used to walk the halls during construction, and local radio personality Ron Elz has noted that he never stopped. Koplar is spotted less often than Ullman, but the pattern is the same: a builder surveying every floor of a building he willed into existence.