Geiser Grand Hotel

This 1889 gold-rush hotel has so many ghosts they need cast lists. The Lady in Blue, jewelry-rearranging Maybelle in Room 302.

If you check into Room 302 at the Geiser Grand Hotel and lay your wedding ring on the nightstand, there's a fair chance it won't be there when you wake up. Your earrings will be on the dresser instead, lined up neatly. Your necklace will be looped around the lamp. The staff have heard about it for years and now warn arriving guests at check-in. They think Maybelle Geiser is doing it. Maybelle was the wife of the man this hotel is named for, and apparently she likes to look at jewelry.

Maybelle's partner in the lore is the Lady in Blue, a woman in a deep-blue silk bustle dress who descends the grand staircase and walks straight into a wall. Staff and longtime regulars believe she's Granny Annabelle, a wealthy patron who kept a permanently reserved chair at the hotel bar during her lifetime. The chair is still there. Sit in it without knowing the history and you may feel a sharp pinch from no visible source. Bartenders have learned to gently steer newcomers somewhere else. The Lady in Blue also drifts through the upper floors, the blue silk unmistakable against the period wallpaper, and she's reliable enough that guests come specifically hoping to see her.

The hotel that hosts both of them opened in 1889 in Baker City, back when Baker was the Queen City of the Mines and Eastern Oregon was a gold rush boomtown with money pouring in faster than people could spend it. The hotel showed off accordingly. It was built of locally mined volcanic tuff, four stories tall with a 200-foot corner cupola, a clock tower, marble floors in the second-floor dining room, and the third elevator ever installed west of the Mississippi. Mining investor Albert Geiser bought the place around 1900 and reopened it under his own name in 1902. Underneath the building, a network of tunnels from the 1880s connected to brothels and saloons across downtown Baker City, which had a reputation as the brothel capital of the West. Later the same tunnels moved Chinese immigrants, and during Prohibition, contraband.

Maybelle in Room 302 has the more interactive habit. Snacks get rearranged. Hairbrushes move across the dresser. Jewelry, especially, gets handled. Beyond Maybelle and Annabelle, the Geiser Grand has accumulated an unusually large supporting cast: a saloon girl in red, a cowboy and his girlfriend, a young girl encountered in the historic cellar, flappers seen along the upper banisters, a woman in a 1930s purple dress, and a headless former chef. It reads like a costume party that nobody bothered to send home.

In 2003, The Atlantic Paranormal Society, the team behind Ghost Hunters, brought their double-blind protocols and recording equipment to Baker City. Investigator Marie Cuff has said on record that they keep coming back because they keep getting evidence. During one three-hour investigation, a team member kept hearing the name Wayne, repeated by an unseen voice across different rooms. They had no idea what it meant. Later research turned up a country music performer named Presley Wayne who had died from a gunshot wound at the hotel in 1998, a death the investigators had no prior knowledge of. The International Paranormal Reporting Group now runs regular tours and ghost hunts at the property, opening up areas guests don't normally see.

The Geiser Grand has the right relationship with its ghosts: it neither hides them nor cheapens them. The hotel publishes the room number. The bartender warns you about the chair. If you bring nice earrings, just expect that Maybelle may want to look at them.