In Brief
At the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, guests report a woman searching the halls for a child, pulling hair and throwing objects. She haunts the third version of a building that burned down twice before they made it fireproof.
The Full Story
Something in the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri pulls guests' hair and throws objects across their rooms. Staff blame a distressed woman searching the halls for a child. Who she is, whose child she's looking for, none of it is written down anywhere.
She isn't the only one people report. There's a maid up on the third floor in a 1920s housekeeping uniform, who staff say drifts the rooms watching the living do their work, making sure it's done right. The third floor is the most active part of the building. No one has a name for her either, and the uniform is all anyone has to place her.
To understand a building this restless, you have to know it has died before. The Elms grew up around mineral water; the town drew visitors who came to drink the springs for their health, and the first hotel opened in 1888 with 200 rooms to house them. It burned to the ground on May 9, 1898. A larger one went up in its place and opened in 1909. That one burned too, on October 30, 1910.
So the owners stopped trusting wood. The third Elms opened in 1912, raised from native Missouri limestone, steel, and reinforced concrete, engineered so it could never burn again. It still stands, running today as a Hyatt property with around 153 rooms.
The strangest reports come from the basement. There's a lap pool down there now, built in the space that ran as a speakeasy through Prohibition, where the story goes Al Capone hosted all-night gambling parties behind blocked-off doors and machine-gun guards. Guests report cold spots, the sense of being watched, and splashing from water that's empty. The man blamed for it is said to have been killed by the mob on one of those nights. No police report, no newspaper, no court file records any such death. It's the story people tell, not one anyone can prove.
In 2013, the Ghost Hunters team spent a night here for an episode they called "Something In The Water." They explained away one apparition as reflected light and a swaying chandelier as a draft. But they also recorded a woman's voice and doors banging on their own, and signed off saying there was "a lot of activity going on in the hotel, but ... it is not hostile."
Not hostile is a strange verdict for a place where something pulls your hair while you sleep.
