The Seelbach Hilton Hotel

This grand Beaux-Arts hotel opened in 1905 and quickly became one of the finest in the nation. F. Scott Fitzgerald was so impressed he used it as the setting for Tom and Daisy Buchanan's wedding in The Great Gatsby. The hotel also hosted gangsters like Al Capone during Prohibition.

The Seelbach Hilton Hotel had its grand opening in 1905, founded by Bavarian-born immigrant brothers Otto and Louis Seelbach in downtown Louisville. The hotel quickly became one of the most prestigious in the South, hosting a roster of famous guests that included Presidents Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, writer F. Scott Fitzgerald — who used the Seelbach as a model for the hotel in The Great Gatsby — and notorious gangster Al Capone, who reportedly used the hotel's Rathskeller for high-stakes poker games. The Seelbach is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains one of Louisville's most celebrated landmarks. But its most famous resident was never a paying guest.

On the evening of July 14, 1936, a 24-year-old woman checked into the Seelbach under the name Patricia Wilson. She had come to Louisville from Oklahoma with a traveling salesman named Wilson, but her real name, uncovered decades later by hotel historian Larry Johnson, was Pearl Elliot. Two days later, on July 16, Patricia Wilson was found dead at the bottom of one of the hotel's elevator shafts. She was wearing a long blue chiffon dress, and her long dark hair framed a face frozen in an expression that witnesses would never forget. The newspaper listed her death as either suicide or accident.

But the truth may have been darker. Johnson, who started as a bellman at the Seelbach in 1982 and spent decades investigating the case, uncovered a 1955 True Detective magazine article that offered a disturbing new theory. A hotel guest on the eighth floor reported hearing a violent argument between a young woman and a man identified as General Henry H. Denhardt — a Kentucky National Guard general, war hero, and former lieutenant governor who was reportedly down on his luck by 1936. The guest closed his door, then moments later heard a loud crash and a woman's scream. When he opened his door again, he saw Denhardt running toward the same elevator where Patricia Wilson was later found dead. A lawsuit was filed charging that "General Denhardt assaulted, beat, and bruised Patricia and caused her to fall down an elevator shaft in the hotel," but the case never produced sufficient evidence for criminal charges.

Whatever the truth of her death, Patricia Wilson — the Lady in Blue — never left the Seelbach. In 1987, hotel cook James Scott reported seeing a woman in a long blue dress walk directly through the closed elevator doors. Multiple housekeepers have reported encountering a woman matching Wilson's description on the eighth floor, where her story began and ended. Guests report the scent of lilac perfume — the fragrance Wilson was said to wear — wafting through hallways with no apparent source. Others describe a gentle touch on their shoulder while riding the elevator alone, as if someone unseen is trying to get their attention.

Larry Johnson, who authored The Seelbach: A Centennial Salute to Louisville's Grand Hotel and eventually located Wilson's true identity and burial place, now leads ghost tours of the hotel on Thursday through Saturday evenings. The Lady in Blue remains the Seelbach's most enduring legend — a woman who came to Louisville hoping for reconciliation and instead found an end that may never be fully explained, in a hotel she has never been able to leave.