In Brief
The Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza keeps a ghost the staff call the Lady in Green. A food server once shared an elevator with her, talked for half a minute about the ballroom upstairs, and watched her vanish mid-sentence. He took two weeks off.
The Full Story
A food server at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza stepped into an elevator on a late room-service run and realized he wasn't alone. A well-dressed woman in a green ball gown was riding up with him. They got to talking, the easy way you do in a quiet elevator, about how lovely the third-floor Hall of Mirrors had looked that night. There was nothing about her that said she didn't belong. About thirty seconds in, mid-sentence, she was gone. He took two weeks off work.
The staff call her the Lady in Green, and they've described her the same way for decades: an African-American woman in a formal green gown, solid-looking, not some misty shape in a hallway. The hotel is a 1931 Art Deco landmark, the centerpiece of the Carew Tower complex downtown — all Brazilian rosewood, marble, and brass — and management has never tried to bury her. They treat her as part of the building's history, and the hotel openly shares her story with guests. According to senior account executive Carla Ballard, the legend ties her to a painter who fell to his death while the hotel was going up; his body, the story holds, was never recovered. His widow, in her best green dress, went looking for him and never stopped. By the legend she later took her own life inside the hotel, though CityBeat is careful to say no record confirms the death.
She turns up most on the eastern mezzanine, in the Hall of Mirrors — the ballroom modeled on the one at Versailles — and in the elevators. An airline pilot felt a cold draft in one, turned, and caught sight of her for a moment before she was gone; he keeps booking the hotel and won't discuss what he saw. A night auditor working alone heard a woman's voice calling for help out of an empty hallway, ran downstairs, and quit on the spot. One account has a businessman leaving within an hour of checking in, in just his t-shirt and socks, refusing to go back up for the rest of his things. During the 1983 renovation, the workmen tearing into the place reported seeing her too.
Cincinnati Magazine, laying the legend out, follows it to its end. The painter fell during construction and his body was never recovered. His widow, in her best green dress, keeps searching the floors of the hotel he died building, riding the same elevators where the food server met her. As the magazine puts it, 'she will only go home when he does.'
