West Baden Springs Hotel

Eleven unsigned angels painted between 1902 and 1918 hide in a chamber atop West Baden's 200-foot dome. Thirty-nine Jesuits are buried here.

At the crown of the 200-foot dome at West Baden Springs Hotel, tucked into a drum-shaped chamber that nobody noticed for decades, eleven angels stare out from peeling oil paint. Eight are painted on steel. Three are on the wooden ceiling. The earliest graffiti scratched over them dates to 1918, which means the angels were painted between 1902 and 1918 by somebody who climbed an external ladder and dropped through a roof hatch to do it. They left no signature. Nobody knows for sure who they were.

The hotel was marketed as the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened on September 15, 1902, and for a decade it was. Architect Harrison Albright designed it. Bridge engineer Oliver Westcott designed the dome. Lee Wiley Sinclair had acquired the property in 1888 and pushed through the 1902 rebuild in 270 days at a cost of $414,000. The 200-foot free-spanning dome was the largest in the world until Breslau's Centennial Hall surpassed it in 1913, and it held the U.S. record for free-spanning domes until 1955. The resort was built to sell mineral spring water, marketed under the name Sprudel Water with a little elf mascot. It had an opera house, its own orchestra, a theater, a double-deck pony-and-bicycle track, and a casino that drew the rich and the criminal in equal measure.

Al Capone visited every year through the 1920s with his bodyguards. The French Lick Springs Hotel down the road turned him away; West Baden rented him rooms. Prohibition-era illegal gambling operated openly inside the dome. Diamond Jim Brady came. So did boxers John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett. Major league baseball teams, including the Reds, the Cubs, and the Pirates, held spring training on the grounds.

The Great Depression broke the hotel. In 1934 owner Ed Ballard, who was not Catholic, donated the entire property to the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits cemented the mineral springs shut and turned the resort into West Baden College, a seminary that ran from 1934 to 1964. Thirty-nine priests died during those decades and are buried in the cemetery on the grounds.

The Angel Room went undiscovered until the 1990s renovation. For decades the prevailing theory was that a seminarian painted the angels and died before signing them, which is the romantic version. The Dejaco brothers theory, from French Lick Resort's own historical research, is more likely: Fred, Frank, Louis, and Charles Dejaco ran a Cincinnati mural firm that specialized in church commissions, had family ties through marriage to the Cassini family who laid the atrium's 1917 terrazzo floor, and per the historical record slept up there with their gold paint during months-long jobs. Either way, somebody crawled into the apex of the dome and painted eleven angels and told no one.

What visitors report as haunted at West Baden clusters in two areas: the upper floors near where seminarians once lived, and the grounds around the Jesuit cemetery. Footsteps pace empty corridors on the upper levels. Dark shapes move through halls. People describe a heaviness near the cemetery that doesn't lift. None of it rises to a named ghost with a biography; this is a hotel with 39 dead priests buried on-site and a century of gangster traffic, and whatever's here is layered rather than individual. Author Michael Koryta visited the hotel as a ruin at age eight, and eighteen years later he wrote the supernatural novel So Cold the River, which centers on a malevolent force in the area's mineral water. The 2022 film adaptation shot on location at the hotel. After a 75-year closure, the property reopened in June 2007 following a roughly $100 million restoration, and the dome holds its record as one of the strangest pieces of architecture in American hotel history. The angels are still up there. Nobody has scrubbed the graffiti.