In Brief
A worker at the Chase Park Plaza in St. Louis turned up to his shift with a broken arm and shattered glasses. He told coworkers a red-haired woman had watched him from the bathroom mirror, and he'd gone over backward into the tub.
The Full Story
A worker at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis once came in late to his shift, his arm broken and his glasses in pieces. He told the people he worked with what had happened. He'd been in a bathroom, looked up, and found a red-haired woman watching him from the mirror. She was not a guest. He panicked, went over backward into the bathtub, and snapped the bone.
The staff knew who he meant. They call her the Lady in Red, and she keeps to the third floor, by a room numbered 306.
The story goes that she was a bride. Sometime in the 1930s, on the night of her own wedding, she went out the window of that room and died below. No name comes with it. No newspaper, no death record, nothing in any archive confirms a bride ever fell here at all — the accounts that carry her all run back to ghost tours and ghost blogs, and her name is always "lost to time." What people report is the seeing of her: a red-haired woman pacing the corridor outside 306, said to walk straight through the walls. Most describe her in a red dress. A few put her in white.
She is not the only one the building kept. Chase Ullman, the developer who put the place up in 1922, is said to wander the halls in a tuxedo, and was reported most often during the hotel's reconstruction, as if he'd come back to see what they were doing to it. Riders on the elevators of the original Chase tower tell of a young woman in a beaded 1930s gown; the temperature drops, and she steps off on an upper floor without ever walking out. In the small hours, staff and guests report big-band music and the clink of glasses drifting up from ballrooms that are dark and locked.
The housekeepers describe the smaller things, the ones that don't make a tour. Rooms that seem to breathe — curtains stirring against sealed windows, lights flickering in a slow rhythm, the feeling of being watched while they turn down a bed for no one. Footsteps pace empty corridors. Elevators open with nobody in them.
The Chase opened in September 1922 — nine stories, roughly 500 rooms, raised in nine months, with a roof garden and Turkish steam baths. In its prime it pulled in Sinatra, Elvis, the Rolling Stones. All of them checked out. The red-haired woman is the guest who never did, and the only proof she was ever in that room is a man who came to work with a broken arm and said he'd seen her face.
