Cornstalk Hotel in New Orleans’ French Quarter.
How do Traveling Moms celebrate Halloween? By checking into haunted hotels, of course.
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, a stay at a haunted hotel promises a scary good time and more fun than a ball of candied popcorn!
“I don’t scare easily,” says Scenic Route TravelingMom Lara DiPaola, “but the Cornstalk Hotel in New Orleans‘ French Quarter freaked me out.
“It has a long history in the French Quarter, and its owner is a true NOLA character who made us feel very welcome. We’d sit out on the veranda and listen in to the hourly stops made by guided ghost tours, so I figured that played into what I thought I’d felt – and maybe even some of what we’d seen. The light in the bathroom would go on and off; just an electrical issue, of course – it’s an old house. The door to the sitting room would open, when I knew I’d closed it. Again, it’s an old place, the foundation could be askew causing the doors to not quite fit into their frames.
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An arrow points to the blur in Lara DiPaola’s French Quarter photo.
“The view from the veranda is gorgeous, and I love to take pictures of architecture. One of those pictures, the third in a series of six, had more than tourists and wrought iron in it. Now I know what you’re going to say: “It’s a smudge on the lens.” But there’s no smudge in the other five photos taken before and after the “mist.” Maybe it’s a blur created by a person. You can clearly see the people in the image. The man closest isn’t running. It was October in NOLA, no fog and it wasn’t humid. Is it a ghost? I doubt it. But it’s fun to speculate.
Amber Johnson, the Mile High Mama, went on a ghost hunt at the Hotel del Coronado, which is rumored to be haunted by Kate Morgan. Amber says: “We even went on a ghost hunt and used what I thought was a silly app that detected ‘movement.’ Some reaaaaaaaaly weird things happened … the app kept throwing out random words it was picking up, which made no sense. Until we told our guide and he explained the history of some of them. Creeeeepy. The app wasn’t on my phone and I never wrote about it so I can’t remember the details but it was GPS-based. I’m not really a believer in stuff like that but it had me creeped out. The app had a sensor for ghost activity and in certain areas where the activity was high, random words came across the screen. Or at least we thought they were random until we ran some of them by the hotel’s archivist and several of the more random ones (I think there was the word monkey?) had connections to the hotel.” A Google search for haunted del Coronado pulls up pages and pages of stories; check in – if you dare.
“The Claremont Hotel in Berkley, Calif., was originally built as a castle style home for a wealthy family in the 19th century,” says Karen Heffern, Traveling Mom and founder of Desert Chica Ramblings. “After a fire destroyed it in 1901, it was rebuilt as a hotel that opened in 1915. The hotel is said to be haunted either as the result of the fire or a death of child. I didn’t experience any ghostly incidents during my stay, but the old fashioned vibe of the hotel definitely lends itself to the possibility.”
Inside the Stanley Hotel.
The Getaway Mavens have the spooky scoop on the Lizzie Borden B&B in Fall River, Mass., where you can stay in the murder room. You’ll need to be feeling brave to tour this Victorian mansion. The autopsies were done on the dining room table and replicas of the skulls are displayed there. Though Lizzie was acquitted, the double murder of her parents, by axe, is still considered unsolved.
Did you know The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo., was the inspiration for Stephen King’s “The Shining”? Check in to Room 217, where King was said to have been tormented by the ghost of a hotel maid, who apparently died in that very same room. The Stanley celebrates its apparitions with a daily guided tour, though “Shining” fans may be disappointed to discover the hotel bar does not pour “redrum.” Kara Williams of The Vacation Gals snapped the photo of Room 217’s hallway at the Stanley.
Haunted Hermosa Inn in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Photo from GhosttoGhostAZ.org)
Traveling Mom Julie Cohn rounded up six of the spookiest haunted hotels in Arizona. The Copper Queen Hotel has been featured on the TV shows “Ghost Hunters” and “Ghost Adventures.” Meanwhile, in Prescott, “You might see a ghostly bride wandering the hallways of the Hassayampas Inn, don’t be alarmed; it’s just Faith, the heart-broken ghost bride,” she writes. “According to legend, the young bride checked into the Hassayampas Inn with her new husband in 1927. He went out for cigarettes, but never came back, and after waiting for him for three days, she took her life.”
If you check into a hotel that is supposed to be haunted and bump in to anything in the night, we want your story! Leave a comment below.
Totally freaked out! Loved this article! I live in California and have never stayed at the Claremont (only spent a day at the hotel) I am not eager to return with a hair-raising story!