Claremont Club & Spa

Guests in Room 422 at the Claremont keep waking up to a little girl sitting on the edge of the bed, lightly touching their arm. The fourth floor is where most of the Claremont's reports cluster, and even the San Antonio Spurs reportedly asked to switch rooms during a 2014 stay before going on to win the NBA Finals.

Room 422 is the one that keeps coming up. Guests in that room at the Claremont have reported a little girl sitting on the edge of the bed, touching their arm gently while they sleep, the way a child might wake a parent up on a quiet morning. She's friendly. That's the part of the story that makes it unusual. Nobody describes her as menacing. She laughs in the fourth-floor hallway at night, and guests who've seen her say she just seems to be playing.

Nobody has ever been able to nail down exactly who she is. The most-repeated version of the story is that she was a child living at the hotel in the 1940s who went missing and was later found dead in the laundry chute two days after she disappeared. Another version traces her to the fire that burned down the original Claremont buildings. The details vary depending on who's telling it, and the hotel's own ghost tour, which they ran starting in 2023, tends to leave the exact backstory open.

What's not in dispute is that the fourth floor is where every paranormal report at the Claremont clusters. Flickering lights. Televisions turning on by themselves. A chill in one specific corner of 422 that doesn't match the rest of the room. Guests checking out early after a long night. It's consistent enough that the hotel has essentially accepted the ghost as part of its identity rather than trying to shut the stories down.

The Claremont itself is one of the most dramatic hotel buildings in the Bay Area, a massive white wooden resort on the Berkeley-Oakland hills line that looks like somebody built a Rocky Mountain ski lodge and dropped it on the wrong coast. The original structure opened in 1915 after a decade of delays and an earlier fire during construction that nearly killed the project. It was sold and resold, converted to a military rehab center during World War II, and eventually restored to a high-end resort. It's a Fairmont property now.

The best ghost story from the hotel's recent history involves the San Antonio Spurs. In 2014, during a stay at the Claremont, Tim Duncan and several other Spurs players reportedly had enough strange experiences in their rooms that a few of them asked to switch. UPI picked up the story. Duncan himself was apparently unfazed (the guy has basically seen everything), but other players were rattled enough that it became a minor news item. The Spurs went on to win the 2014 NBA Finals, so whatever the ghosts did, they didn't mess with the basketball.

The hotel offers organized ghost tours in October, which is a relatively new program. A Bay Area ghost investigator partnered with the Claremont in 2023 to run them, and the tours walk guests through the fourth-floor hallway, the old staircase, and the hotel's oldest wings. It's not cheesy. It's actually well-researched for a hotel program, and the guides are careful to say "some guests have reported" instead of overselling the activity.

What separates the Claremont from most haunted hotels is the personality of the ghost. A lot of hotel ghost stories are about something terrible that happened in a room and a presence that still feels angry. The Claremont's little girl feels sad and lonely. Guests describe her touching them as a greeting. Staff say she just wants someone to sit with her. If you're the type who reads haunted listings looking for scary, this isn't that. If you're the type who reads them looking for strange, the touch-on-the-arm in 422 might be exactly your speed.