In Brief
At the St. James Hotel in Red Wing, Minnesota, guests request Room 310 by number. It was Clara Lillyblad's hotel for four decades, and the story goes she still turns up there — in the antique mirrors, in the chair at the foot of the bed.
The Full Story
At the St. James Hotel in Red Wing, Minnesota, there's one room guests ask for by number. They want Room 310. The woman they're hoping to see is Clara Lillyblad, who ran this hotel for the better part of forty years and, the story goes, never quite left it.
Clara started at the St. James as a waitress. She married Charles Lillyblad, who had bought into the place, and their son Art was born in the building in 1916. By then she was the one who ran it. Art called his mother "the queen bee," and the staff understood the terms exactly: you had to produce, or you didn't stay. She held the hotel that way for roughly four decades, until she died in 1972, and the Lillyblad family kept it until 1977.
She is said to turn up in Room 310. Guests report her in the antique mirrors, or sitting in the chair at the foot of the bed. One man, the way it's told, left the hotel at 2 a.m. after seeing her floating above him. None of these accounts comes from a named witness with a date, and the staff don't promise her. But people keep requesting the room anyway.
The St. James was built to last. Eleven Red Wing businessmen pooled $60,000 in 1875, when the town was the largest wheat market on earth, and put up a four-story Italianate hotel on the bank of the Mississippi, designed by the St. Paul architect E.P. Bassford. It had steam heat, hot and cold running water, gas on every floor. It opened with a grand ball on Thanksgiving Day. Portraits of those eleven founders still hang on the staircase by the original check-in desk, and the guest rooms are named for the riverboats that used to stop here when the hotel was a working steamboat landing on the river.
There is a darker thread underneath, the one the ghost tours like best. On July 13, 1890, a squall capsized the excursion steamer Sea Wing on nearby Lake Pepin and drowned 98 people, most of them from Red Wing — still the worst maritime disaster in Minnesota history. The dead were brought home by steamer to the city levee, 52 of them arriving on a single Monday morning. Local lore holds that the St. James served as a temporary morgue for the bodies. No historical record confirms it. The disaster is documented down to the hour the boats came in; the part about the hotel is the one piece nobody can source.
The St. James turned 150 in 2025. In all that time it has had only three owners; Red Wing Shoe Company has held it since 1977. Same building, same staircase, same Room 310. People still call ahead and ask for it by number.
