Mission Inn Hotel & Spa

Frank Miller and his sister Alice, the siblings who built the Mission Inn into Riverside's sprawling landmark, are reportedly still running the place a century later. Alice's fourth-floor room in the southeast corner is considered the most active, with guests hearing her singing. Bridal Suite guests report being shoved down the spiral staircase, and the underground catacombs are where the ghostly monk sightings start.

The Alice Room sits on the fourth floor, southeast corner. Alice Richardson, sister of hotel founder Frank Miller, lived and died at the Mission Inn, and something at the top of that two-level suite appears to keep her schedule. Guests who stay there report cold touches, sudden drops in temperature, and now and then, singing drifting through the walls. Alice had a beautiful voice. Staff who work the room swear they can still hear her.

The Mission Inn sprawls over an entire city block in downtown Riverside, a surreal mash-up of Spanish Mission Revival, Moorish arches, flying buttresses, and European antiques that Frank Miller collected obsessively over six decades of construction. He started with a twelve-room adobe called the Glenwood Cottage in 1876 and never really stopped building. By the time he died in 1935, the place was a 239-room maze with underground catacombs, a five-story rotunda, and a ceiling so heavy with relics and chandeliers that it looks like an opium dream of Old Europe. Every president from Benjamin Harrison to Nixon stayed here. Ronald and Nancy Reagan honeymooned in the Presidential Suite.

Frank and Alice are the two ghosts who come up in nearly every account. Frank's room was the northeast corner of the fourth floor, mirror image of his sister's. Staff feel him there, they say, a heavy presence rather than a visible one. He appears more often as a mood than a figure. Alice is the opposite. Guests have reported seeing her outline, hearing her hum in the hallway, and feeling a hand on their shoulder when no one is standing behind them.

The Bridal Honeymoon Suite is where the stories get physical. The suite has a spiral staircase between its two levels, and guests over the years have reported being pushed or shoved or hurried down the steps by something they couldn't see. A few have described seeing a Victorian couple in the mirror before it happened, a bride and groom from a wedding long since forgotten. Reports of the Bridal Suite figures go back decades and turn up in multiple paranormal investigation reports from the 1990s and 2000s.

Below the public floors, the catacombs run under the hotel. Frank Miller built them as storage and wine cellars and atmospheric curiosities, lining them with European religious art and stone arches he'd bought on his travels. A monk, according to the hotel's own staff stories, walks them. Guests who've taken the hotel's historical tours have reported footsteps beside them in the tunnels when nobody else was there, low voices, and once or twice the shape of a hooded figure at the end of a corridor. Cell phones notoriously refuse to work in parts of the catacombs, which the hotel has started to joke about on the tours.

The Mission Inn Museum now runs an official haunted walking tour every October. It is not subtle about the ghost stories. Frank and Alice are the anchors, and the tour hits Alice's room, the Bridal Suite, the catacombs, and the Mission Dining Room, where more than one witness has reported seeing a figure drifting along the ceiling from the entrance wall out toward the patio. The staff will tell you, if you ask, that the strange stuff doesn't happen every night. It happens often enough.