In Brief
The Ellis Hotel in Atlanta stands where the Winecoff burned in 1946, killing 119 people in the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history. Guests say a smoke alarm still sounds in the small hours, and that the smell of smoke fills rooms that aren't burning.
The Full Story
At the Ellis Hotel on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta, the story guests tell is about smoke. They wake in the dark to the smell of it filling the room, and find no source. And there are nights, the lore goes, when a smoke alarm sounds on its own — at a time the story fixes the fire to start.
That fire is real, and it is the worst of its kind ever recorded. On December 7, 1946, this building was the Winecoff Hotel, 15 stories on the same lot, and it had advertised itself as "absolutely fireproof." The steel frame was. The interiors were not. Fire broke out in a third-floor hallway in the small hours — the leading account is a dropped cigarette near a mattress left in the corridor, though a later book argued for arson, and no one was ever charged.
The building had one open central stairway and no sprinklers, no fire escapes, no fire doors. The stairway pulled the flames and the smoke straight up like a chimney and trapped everyone above the third floor. Of more than 280 people inside, 119 died. Thirty were high school students in town for a youth assembly at the Capitol. A Georgia Tech student in the street photographed a woman falling from the 11th floor; the picture won a Pulitzer. She lived.
The Winecoffs themselves, who built the place, both died that night, in their seventies.
The building reopened, sat vacant for decades, and came back as the Ellis Hotel in 2007. The lore that clings to it maps onto that one night and nothing else — screams and running in empty corridors, the switchboard ringing from rooms no one rents, faces in the upper windows. People outside have said some of the faces appear to be screaming.
No guest is named in any of it. The smoke alarm is said to sound at 2:48 a.m. — the time the lore assigns the fire, not the time the record gives, which is closer to 3:15. The story keeps the earlier hour anyway, as if the building remembers it differently than the firefighters did.
