Hotel Bothwell

Harry Truman learned he'd been picked to run for Senate in this 1927 Sedalia hotel, and Clint Eastwood promoted Rawhide in its lobby. The third floor concentrates the haunting: a girl in a white dress, a spectral maid still checking rooms, voices through air vents, and elevators that ride up on their own.

Harry Truman was sitting in the Hotel Bothwell in 1934 when he got the call that changed American politics. He'd been selected to run for U.S. Senate. Twenty-five years later, Clint Eastwood and Eric Fleming rolled through the lobby promoting Rawhide. The Hotel Bothwell in Sedalia, Missouri has been collecting moments like these since June 10, 1927, when attorney John Homer Bothwell opened its doors after spending $400,000 on a seven-story Classical Revival building with 109 rooms, a coffee shop, a barbershop, and five retail stores on the ground floor.

Bothwell designed it as the social center of Sedalia, and for decades it was exactly that. Weddings, civic meetings, banquets, political gatherings. Bothwell himself only got to see two years of it. He died on August 4, 1929, at his other Sedalia landmark, Bothwell Lodge, the 31-room mansion he spent three decades building on a bluff north of town. The hotel outlived him by almost a century and counting.

The third floor is where things get strange. Guests on that level report a concentrated cluster of activity that doesn't happen on other floors. Voices come through air vents with no apparent source. Cell phones get unplugged from chargers and moved to different spots in the room overnight. Elevators travel to the third floor on their own and open their doors to empty hallways. People hear children running in the corridor, open their doors, and find nobody there.

A young girl in a white dress is the most frequently seen figure. She appears on the third floor and occasionally in the basement. One hotel worker said she'd been told the girl had died in the building, either killed or fallen from a banister, though no one has pinpointed the specific incident in the hotel's records. The girl doesn't seem distressed. She shows up, she looks at you, and then she's gone.

A woman in a maid's outfit, described as being in her twenties, also turns up on the third floor. The running joke among staff is that she supervises the living housekeepers, checking their work from the other side. She wears period clothing, not a modern uniform, and moves through the corridors with purpose, like she has rooms to turn over and is running behind.

Maintenance workers in the basement have encountered a male figure near the old lap pool area. Local lore connects him to the speakeasy days, when the hotel's lower levels served a different clientele than the lobby upstairs. Nobody has identified him by name, but he turns up in the same spot often enough that the basement staff expect him.

The physical sensations are what guests mention most often. People feel the weight of someone sitting down on their bed when nobody's in the room. Doors open and close. Personal items left on nightstands disappear overnight and show up somewhere else entirely. It's not violent or threatening, just persistent, like the building hasn't fully accepted that its original staff clocked out decades ago.

The Hotel Bothwell still operates today, part of the Choice Hotels Ascend Collection. The original 1927 interior design is largely intact, which is rare for a hotel this old that's still taking guests. You can book a room on the third floor if you want. The front desk won't try to talk you out of it, but they won't pretend they haven't heard the stories either.