Ghost hunting at haunted hotels turned me into paranormal believer

NEW YORK (TND) — A bias-free ghost hunt is somewhat of a futile mission.

In actively seeking out evidence of the dearly departed, any bump in the night or chill in the air can more readily be interpreted as a definitive connection with the afterlife. The mind starts to fool itself into perceiving an inexplicable presence lurking around every corner. Shadows that, in any other context, would have gone unnoticed instead foster restless nights, heavy eyelids unable to fully close in fear of being watched in the most vulnerable of states by figures standing at the foot of the bed.

And since most ghosts seem to prefer making their presence known through faint murmurings in audio recordings and puzzling mishaps, it's hard to blame anyone for casting doubt on the lack of straightforward sightings.

Personally, I wouldn't have counted myself among the nonbelievers as I planned my visits to four haunted hotels, but I didn't view the existence of ghosts as a given either. But even if I had been a serious skeptic, several occurrences during my pursuit of the paranormal undoubtedly would have prompted a change of heart.

It's not every day, after all, that a mysterious face appears in the reflection of a display case.

One of the main disclaimers of a paranormal investigation? There is no forcing a ghost to perform on command.

Whether the ghosts at the Admiral Fell Inn in Baltimore had stage fright or were otherwise occupied during our visit is anyone’s guess, but outside of a few muffled voices picked up by the tour guide’s spirit communication software and the sporadic flickers of a light-up toy, we made very little discernible contact with the other side.

In no way, however, had their shyness detracted from the behind-the-scenes tour of the allegedly haunted hotel’s most active spots, a four-hour expedition run by Pittsburgh-based Ghosts N’at Paranormal Adventures. For as morbid as a ghost hunt has the potential to be, there had been plenty of laughter and lighter moments shared throughout the night. And so, as our group of around 15 ghost hunters approached the elevator bank to reconvene in the ballroom on the fifth floor, spirits were high, no matter the lack of spirits.

With too many people to fit in a single elevator, four of us were left behind in the lobby as the doors drew to a close. My fiancee reached out to press the button, but before her finger made contact, a soft glow indicated that someone had beaten her to the punch.

We stood in silence. And then: “Did you all see what happened?” All four of us had. No one could offer any explanation.

Part of the bias in a ghost hunt, to be sure, comes from knowing the previous encounters that others have supposedly had with the paranormal in a particular location. I had done some surface-level research of the Admiral Fell Inn prior to the evening with Ghosts N’at, and the investigators leading the evening’s festivities peppered in their own tellings of the hotel’s macabre history to maintain the eerie atmosphere while we waited for spirits to greet us.

Nothing I had come across, though, mentioned wayward elevators at the Admiral Fell Inn. It wasn’t until weeks later, in the depths of my Google searches, that I learned there are actually at least threeotheraccounts of guests having the elevator buttons mysteriously pressed for them.

One of the most common stories that gets passed around about the Admiral Fell Inn took place during Hurricane Isabel in 2003. As the storm passed through Baltimore, the hotel was evacuated, save for a few staff members. The workers claim that they heard the sounds of what could only be a raucous party on the second floor — loud music, heavy footsteps, laughter, drunken singing. But upon investigating, the entire hotel was as empty as they knew it to be.

Most of the Admiral Fell Inn’s ghostly residents lack specific names but are said to be lingerers from the building’s storied past. The oldest part of the structure dates back to the 1770s, shortly after the neighborhood of Fells Point had been established as a shipbuilding hub. Its history as a place to stay begins in 1900, when the Port Mission Women’s Auxiliary moved their Christian boarding house for seamen to the corner of Broadway and Thames Street. The boarding house, called the Anchorage, could accommodate 152 sailors in clean but crowded dorms.

When the deadly flu pandemic of 1918 hit Baltimore, available buildings across the city were turned into makeshift infirmaries to support at-capacity hospitals. At the Anchorage, the Port Mission Women’s Auxiliary pivoted from simply housing sailors to treating those infected with the virus. Cramped quarters combined with the highly lethal strain meant that they were often fighting a losing battle, and it’s estimated that hundreds of sailors, as well as at least six volunteer nurses, died during the outbreak.

Some of the present-day ghosts are believed to be the spirits of the nurses who sacrificed their lives caring for infectious sailors. There’s a photo of a supposed apparition with a white nurse’s cap that gets passed around at the hotel’s subterranean bar. And one guest, a self-described skeptic of all things paranormal, reported seeing a woman with a medical chart standing at the foot of his bed in the middle of the night. He tried to dismiss it as an incredibly realistic dream until he recognized the woman in a photograph in the lobby. She had been a volunteer for the Port Mission.

Of course, that woman would have lived quite some time ago, as the Port Mission transferred control of the facility to the YMCA all the way back in 1929. In 1955, a lack of funding led the Baltimore Seaman’s Branch of the YMCA to shut its doors. A vinegar bottling plant, the final occupant prior to the Admiral Fell Inn, left the building empty by 1980, enabling the hotel to move into the space five years later.

Among all the ghosts who have called the hotel home for the past century, there’s said to be one who arrived much more recently in a particularly tragic fashion. Christopher Jones, a convention attendee from New Jersey staying at the Admiral Fell Inn in 1999, was bludgeoned to death in his hotel room during a brutal homophobia-fueled attack. It’s suspected that his spirit now dwells in room 413, one of the hotel’s main hot spots for paranormal activity.

All three of the other hotels I chose to visit actually did have prominent accounts of elevators behaving in unusual ways. But at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, I hoped that a ghost would join me for a drink in the lobby bar.

The Algonquin Hotel has been named one of the 30 most haunted hotels in the world by Elle Decor and one of the five most haunted spots in New York City by CBS News. It also holds the distinction of offering visitors the opportunity to connect with high-profile celebrity ghosts. Some of the spirits causing mischief in the elevators and moving around furniture in unoccupied rooms may be the nameless, run-of-the mill sort, but the apparition of famed writer Dorothy Parker might grace guests with an appearance, too.

Located in Midtown Manhattan near Times Square, the Algonquin Hotel is pleased to embrace its history as a meeting spot for the literary elite of the early 20th century. A large painting in the hotel’s lobby depicts the Algonquin Round Table, a group of tastemakers who began lunching at the hotel in 1919. Members like Dorothy Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, and “New Yorker” co-founder Harold Ross made a near-daily habit of convening at the Algonquin to play charades, snack on celery and popovers, and attempt to outwit those around them with caustic remarks and snarky comebacks.

Now, aspiring writers can live out their literary fantasies by dining at the 181-room hotel’s Round Table Restaurant or sipping on a gin-based cocktail named after Parker at the Blue Bar.

The hotel seems more hesitant to accept its status as a paranormal hangout. One article quotes the hotel management as saying that there have been “no documented occurrences of a haunting,” and of the four hotels I contacted, the Algonquin was the only one to pass over my repeated requests for an interview.

A Gawker journalist who used pendulum to identify the members of the Round Table present at the hotel had gotten a response from the hotel's resident cat (yes, that's a thing), although the cat's reply was fairly cryptic. I followed her lead and reached out to Hamlet, the current feline on desk duty, but my email bounced. Spooky.

The hotel's tight-lipped attitude aside, there are many who swear that Parker's ghost still roams the halls of her former meeting spot and residence. In the Gawker journalist's investigation, Parker was marked a "maybe." Many of the supposed run-ins involve Parker, who was never fond of kids, shushing children or scaring them to the point of tears. And during a renovation of the 13th floor, a portrait of Dorothy Parker fell off the wall and shattered in the middle of the night, perhaps a sign that she wasn’t keen on the upgrades.

It does make sense that she'd choose that particular location to haunt, as her time as a pivotal member of the Round Table brought not only success but bad bouts of writer's block, struggles with alcohol abuse, and multiple suicide attempts. The initial allure of the Round Table meetings eventually faded for Parker, leading her to denounce the group altogether later in life. It's possible, then, that she has some unfinished business at the Algonquin.

Parker didn't make her presence known as I sipped on her namesake cocktail at the Blue Bar, nor did any other literary greats. I will say, though, that I had terrible writer's block regarding this article — until I began researching the Algonquin Hotel. I like to think that the members of the Round Table, and maybe even Parker herself, were looking out for me.

There are no celebrity ghosts to recognize at the Bowery Hotel, only celebrities. But the swanky locale that has hosted a bevy of A-listers from Rihanna to David Beckham is also a favorite resting spot of the dearly departed.

One look at the plush velvet furniture, faded antique tapestries, and wood-paneled walls of the Bowery Lobby, and it’s easy to imagine a ghost cozying up for a cocktail under the dusky glow of the candelabras. The opulent lounge, straight out of another era, suggests that the spirits floating just above the Persian rugs and Moroccan tiles are the remnants of a storied past to match that of the Admiral Fell Inn and the Algonquin.

In fact, the Bowery Hotel only opened in 2007, and its old New York-inspired lobby was a conscious design decision by accomplished Manhattan hoteliers Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode to charm guests with the impression of stumbling into a quintessential city experience from decades prior.

But even if the hotel itself lacks any true history beyond potentially serving as a pivotal location for the early days of Taylor Swift’s discreet relationship with Joe Alwyn, the neighborhood in which it’s situated comes with its fair share of tales.

The Bowery, a tiny strip in Lower Manhattan centered around a street with the same name, is a neighborhood much transformed from its previous reputation. The thoroughfare, possibly formed by animals as a trail heading to freshwater ponds in what’s now Chinatown, gained its present-day name from the Dutch word for farm — “bouwerij.” By the early 1800s, the rural character of the area was rapidly disappearing. As New York City developed, the area first came to be known as an entertainment district lined with theaters and mansions and then as a center for brothels, saloons, and flophouses.

In 1878, the opening of an elevated railway above the Bowery thrust the neighborhood into a shadowy darkness that would further attract illicit activity.

It’s possible that the spirits of unsavory characters who patronized the Bowery before the neighborhood’s transformation have made their way into the Bowery Hotel. They’re joined, it’s believed, by the permanent residents of the city’s oldest nonsectarian burial ground, the New York Marble Cemetery. Hidden behind an iron gate, the cemetery is almost entirely obscured by the surrounding buildings — one of them being the Bowery Hotel.

Absolutely nothing unusual happened when I stopped by the Bowery Hotel for a couple of cocktails and a margherita pizza. Some would say that my lack of contact with the spirit realm was a result of my daytime visit. Indeed, cursory research of the hotel's hauntings will quickly reveal that it’s always around 1 a.m. when the elevators apparently take on a mind of their own.

Others would say that I didn’t find any proof of ghosts because ghosts don’t exist.

“Anything that’s really happened, I think, is probably hearsay,” said Kirk Wilson, general manager of the Bowery Hotel.

For Wilson, much of his skepticism stems from the fact that he never encountered so much as a flicker of the lights or a mysterious sound while helping to maintain the hotel during its prolonged COVID shutdown. “I spent a lot of time in this building, and in all that time, I unfortunately, or fortunately, did not have any supernatural experiences,” he said.

Not every Bowery Hotel employee agrees with Wilson’s perspective. Some, Wilson said, have claimed to see a little girl wandering down hallways, only for her to mysteriously disappear upon turning a corner. Security guards working overnight shifts will occasionally mention startling reflections in windows. Then, there’s the matter of the erratic elevators.

And although Wilson remains largely unconvinced, he did see a video of a bottle flying off the bar at the Bowery Lobby and can admit that it looked “a little uncanny.”

Lee Johnson-Lowe, director of sales at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, isn’t entirely convinced in the existence of ghosts either. But working at a hotel so frequently listed as one of the most haunted places to stay in America, he has heard quite a number of stories.

The Lord Baltimore Hotel, dating back to 1928, attributes most of the ghostly inhabitants to its early days of operation.

“During the Great Depression time period, we would have been one of the tallest buildings in the city,” Johnson-Lowe explained, “so unfortunately, there were people who came and ended their lives here. We had 22 documented jumpers from this hotel.”

The hotel’s most famous ghost, Molly, is said to have been the daughter of two of those jumpers. As the tragic tale typically goes, Molly’s parents found themselves facing financial ruin after the stock market crashed and decided that it would be cruel to leave their young daughter behind when they leapt from the hotel’s 19th floor. Other accounts spare Molly entirely or claim that she accidentally fell while chasing a red ball, but no matter the truth, many believe that her spirit now roams the 19th floor, searching for her parents with a red ball in hand.

Paranormal investigators have had a great deal of luck connecting with Molly. Most, too, have been certain that Molly isn’t alone in the 440-room hotel.

“I had a medium come in about four years ago, and she immediately said that this hotel is really crowded,” said Johnson-Lowe.

That medium identified two men who were fighting for the love of one woman and have carried on with their dispute long past their deaths on the mezzanine level. There are also frequent reports of a couple dancing in the ballroom, always with the detail that they prefer to be left alone. In the hotel’s speakeasy, investigators made contact with a woman who introduced herself as a madam and said she used to run her business there. And a peculiar presence has been felt by many guests — including Johnson-Lowe’s husband.

“I had a big party here for my 50th birthday, so we stayed here,” Johnson-Lowe said. “He woke up and was very confident that he saw an apparition.”

When I met with Johnson-Lowe in the lobby of the Lord Baltimore Hotel, I was feeling refreshed from an undisturbed night's rest in the elegant guest room's oversized king bed — a delightfully welcome feeling during a hotel stay, if not quite the makings of a particularly interesting ghost story.

There had been one moment early on in my visit that exposed my predilection for attributing unusual occurrences to otherworldly causes. Upon first entering my room on the 18th floor, I set down my bags and pulled out my camera to document my visit. Once finished, I reached for my room key to head out to dinner and I couldn't find it anywhere. I began searching every inch of the virtually untouched hotel room, even the drawers I had yet to open. I dug through every pocket, emptied out my backpack, and removed all of the cards from my wallet. No key.

At that point, I was fully convinced that a ghost had given me a sinister welcome to the Lord Baltimore Hotel. Unsure of where else to look, I grabbed my phone, revealing the electronic key card lying beneath it.

If it was indeed a ghost who had stashed my key in the hard-to-find spot, the spirit was well enough satisfied with this initial bit of mischief to leave me alone for the rest of the stay. More likely, I had simply spooked myself.

Just like I don’t blame anyone for their skepticism of paranormal investigations, I understand why someone would view a ouija board as nothing more than a silly game or the vehicle for a hoax.

I had never used a ouija board before and purchased a cheap one on Amazon with very low expectations, intending it only to enhance the spooky atmosphere of my haunted hotel ghost hunt. When I searched the best practices for summoning spirits, I stumbled across several articles that quickly debunked any otherworldly explanation for the boards. Ghosts aren’t moving the pointer, known as the planchette — it’s the ideomotor effect. Essentially, the body is known to make involuntary movements in response to a person’s unconscious will.

But even with this in mind, using a ouija board can feel incredibly, stunningly, almost undeniably real.

Right before staying at the Admiral Fell Inn, I read that only one person should talk during a ouija board session. So to organize our thoughts, my fiancee and I drafted a long list of questions over a late-night dinner following the paranormal investigation with Ghosts N’at. Our questions were very much framed with the assumption that we’d be talking to a historical ghost, perhaps a sailor or one of the Port Mission nurses.

Even knowing that my involuntary actions would cause the planchette to move, it was more unnerving than I had anticipated when it actually started to slide around the board.

When we asked if anyone was present in room 418 of the Admiral Fell Inn, the planchette landed firmly on “yes.” If it was driven by my unconscious desires, that was expected. Then, we asked for the spirit’s name. It slid, very slowly but definitely, to the letter “w.”

My fiancee and I gave each other a look. Earlier that evening, we had laughed about a noise picked up by one of the detection tools that sounded a lot like "Wenceslaus," the name of one of our cats. But it was also the name of my grandfather, who had lived in Baltimore his entire life and passed away in 2019.

Something that no one tells you about ouija boards is that the planchette moves at a snail’s pace. So before the spirit could continue spelling out an entire name, especially one as long as “Wenceslaus,” we asked for the initial of the last name. It went to “v.” My grandfather’s last name? Valis.

To make a long story short (the planchette truly likes to take its time), we asked why he was at the hotel. It went to “e,” my first initial. Did he have a message for me? The answer: a hover between "s" and "t" — the first initials of his two daughters. I asked if he had a message for me to pass onto my mom, Susan. "Yes," said the planchette. Then, "p," "r," and "o." I still didn't know what it was spelling, but my fiancee had an idea. "Are you proud of her?" she asked, hoping to speed up the process.

"Yes," said the planchette.

We both burst out crying. I'm not exactly sure what it was about the message that caused such an intense and immediate emotional reaction. But feeling tired from a long night and somewhat emotionally drained from the ouija board, we dragged the planchette to "goodbye," because that's apparently the polite way to end communication with a spirit.

Now, assuming the ideomotor effect was at play, I see why the planchette went to “w,” “v,” and “e.” But in that case, I’d think that my grandfather would have sent a message to me instead of to my mom. And honestly, I'm also not so great at thinking on my feet, so I'm doubtful that my unconscious self would be so adept at that spontaneous type of creativity. I hadn't even called upon Dorothy Parker's wit at that point.

Early the next morning, I set out to take some photos of the hotel. For at least 10 minutes, I squatted outside of the fourth floor elevator bank snapping pictures of the hallway leading up to room 413. The sun hadn't quite risen yet, and the hotel was completely silent.

Satisfied with my shots, I stepped into the elevator. But before I hit any buttons, I started taking photos of the infinity mirror effect within the elevator. Above me, I started to hear a good amount of noise. I figured it was coming from another guest, until I realized that there would only be empty space directly above the elevator. And even if the noise was off to one side or the other, the entire fifth floor was dedicated to the hotel's event space.

There are plenty of reasonable explanations. Still, I couldn't help but recall the story of the invisible party during Hurricane Isabel. Had the spectral revelers moved their merriment up a few floors?

That same morning, I took a few pictures of a display case in the hotel lobby. Later, when I uploaded the photos to my computer, I saw the face.

At least, I think it's a face. My fiancee doesn't see it, and maybe that says something about our differing levels of skepticism. She did, however, dismiss part of it as obviously being a reflection of her hair, and I had to remind her that she was in our hotel room, not the lobby, when I took it. When I showed my mom, she immediately identified it as my late aunt (the "t" from the ouija board) in a floppy white hat.

I noticed the hat, too. But it wasn't until I looked further into the hauntings of the Admiral Fell Inn that I discovered an alternate explanation, though no less ghostly. There are several reports of faces appearing in images of reflective surfaces and mirrors at the hotel, often described as nurses in white hats. One of them — the aforementioned photo at the hotel’s bar — even shows the woman “standing behind a display of ship models,” of which the lobby display case holds many.

My fiancee still refuses to see the face, even after I've spotlighted it, outlined its features, and superimposed a photo of my aunt on top of the picture. I've shown her a second shot of the same display case from the same exact angle, taken only ten seconds after the first, in which the face has suddenly disappeared. I've shared with her all of my findings that might nudge the mind toward recognition of the face. I've presented her with other photos of alleged ghosts as evidence that these types of images are almost never crystal clear.

The most I can get out of her is an admission that it's a strange coincidence that I forgot my memory card not once but twice when visiting the Admiral Fell Inn, as if someone would prefer I didn't take photos there.

So if I can't convince my own fiancee, I certainly don't expect any cynics to find reason enough to believe through reading this article alone.

But isn't it more fun to buy into the existence of ghosts?

Brett McGinnis, co-founder of Ghosts N'at, thinks so. "It's a lot of fun," he said of leading ghost tours. "I love giving people their first experience with something paranormal. Sometimes, nothing will happen, or just a few small things will happen. Sometimes, major things will happen. But at the end of the night, everybody's going to have a good time."

I think so, too. I want to spend crisp October evenings cozying up in a hotel room illuminated only by the light of the full moon, ouija board on the bed and pumpkin beer in hand. I want the stories of past haunts in that very same location to bounce around my head, so that when the planchette starts to drift in directions dictated either by spirits or by my unconscious desires, I feel my heart start to pound in nervous anticipation. The next day, equipped with a pumpkin spice latte, I want to pore over my photos and listen to my recordings in hopes of catching those signs of specters that I had overlooked in the moment.

Really, no matter the time of year, all of the hotels I visited would make fine choices for anyone — living or dead, diehard believers or the staunchest of skeptics — and for any occasion, from a night out to a weekend getaway to a permanent residency in the afterlife.

Not a single hotel I visited seemed content coasting on its spooky reputation alone. The two places where I stayed overnight, the Admiral Fell Inn and the Lord Baltimore Hotel, had impeccable customer service, spacious guest rooms, and comfortable beds that lulled me into a peaceful, cocoon-enclosed slumber that felt entirely untouchable by other realms. They're both situated in prime locations by which to explore Baltimore, and scary stories aside, they both offer a glimpse into the city's past through the preservation of original features and their displays of relics and black-and-white photographs from long ago.

The Algonquin Hotel and the Bowery Hotel, though nearly a century apart in origin, each felt like a step back in time as well. And having always been fond of the way that a good hotel lobby bar can extend an invitation to sink into one of its seat for hours on end, surrounded by the buzz of clientele from around the world and following the comings and goings at the front desk, I was immensely satisfied snacking on pizza while perched on a plush sofa next to the Bowery Lobby's fireplace and tapping the quaint "push for service" button to order another round at the Algonquin's Blue Bar.

But for those who do allow themselves to get swept up in a hotel’s haunted past, experiences that would appeal to anyone get an extra tinge of excitement from the prospect of a visitor from the afterlife posting up on the next barstool or drifting through the walls for a late-night chat.

And if no one shows up, well, isn't it only fair that ghosts take a vacation of their own every once in a while?