Haunted Grand Midway Hotel Ghost Hunt & Sleepover, Windber, Pennsylvania

Haunted Grand Midway Hotel Ghost Hunt

A Miner’s Hotel. A Secret Brothel. A Funeral Parlour. 130 Years of the Dead Who Never Checked Out

In the small coal town of Windber, Pennsylvania, two hours east of Pittsburgh and just south of Johnstown, a red-sided building beside the train tracks has been collecting the dead for over a century.

The Grand Midway Hotel began its life in the late 1880s as a central station stop for coal miners and migrant workers flooding into the region in search of work. It was rough, transient, and lawless. By the 1920s, the building had become a secret brothel, a place of back-room dealings, violent altercations, and deaths that were never officially recorded.

When the brothel era ended, the building was converted into a funeral parlour. Then a wedding reception venue. Then a bar. Then it was abandoned entirely.

In 2000, a man named Blair Murphy found the building listed for sale on eBay and bought it on impulse. He moved in, renovated it, and reopened it as a hotel in 2001. In 2019, he painted a massive Ouija board across the entire flat roof of the building. It now holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest Ouija board. The ceiling of the dining room features an oversized Tarot card, also painted by Blair. This is not a building that shies away from the other side.

The sellers never mentioned the ghosts. It didn’t take long for them to make themselves known.

The Spirits They Never Mentioned

During renovations, Blair and his crew watched a man walk down the second-floor hallway, turn a corner, and vanish. The first resident to move into the hotel, Aimee Kast, was told the building was empty. She walked in, saw a tall man on the second floor covered in soot and dressed in overalls, dropped her belongings, and ran. She refused to re-enter the building alone.

That soot-covered figure has been seen multiple times since. A guest who brought flowers into the hotel and left them in the dining room flew home to California, only to wake the following morning to a tall man in mining gear standing at the foot of her bed. He said “Thank you,” and disappeared.

The Death of Martha Selinsky

Martha is the hotel’s most well-known spirit. On July 4th, 1911, the eighteen-year-old was watching fireworks from the second-floor porch when a steel pipe, hurled into the air by one of the launches, struck her in the throat. It severed her jugular vein and ruptured her spinal cord. She was dead within minutes, while the rest of Windber continued celebrating into the night, unaware. The local fire company covered up the incident for decades, fearing criminal neglect charges.

Martha never left. Guests and staff report the apparition of a young woman with curly hair wandering the hallways. She has been seen standing in the window, staring out at nothing. Martha’s own niece, named after her, once slept in the hotel as a young girl and saw a woman walking the corridors and standing over her bed. She somehow knew details about Martha’s death that only close family and friends would have known.

The Professor, the Little Girl, and the Lullaby

Then there is The Professor, an older, scholarly figure seen quietly reading on the second floor. He rearranges books on the shelves and studies guests as they pass. Investigators and mediums have documented him repeatedly.

A little girl’s spirit has been reported in both the basement and on the third floor. She is playful. She tugs at trouser legs, climbs on furniture, bounces on beds, and plays hide and seek in the basement. On the third floor, a child has been heard crying on audio recordings before being quieted by the sound of another phantom voice singing a lullaby.

Poltergeist Activity and the Canopy Room

The Grand Midway is not a place where the dead simply watch. In the bar area, chairs slide on their own, silverware is scattered, and glasses are thrown and smashed. On the upper floors, furniture has been hurled across rooms by an unseen force, an entity no one has been able to identify.

The Canopy Room is the most feared space in the building. Something in that room despises Ouija boards, which is darkly ironic given what’s painted on the roof directly above it. Guests and investigators who have tried to use spirit boards in the Canopy Room have been physically attacked.

Cold spots move through empty corridors. Objects and decorations rearrange themselves in guest rooms overnight. A bouncing ball has been heard echoing from a sealed third-floor storage room packed with old furniture. No ball has ever been found. Guests on the second floor have been kept awake by the noise. Guests on the third floor have felt the ball hit them.

32 Rooms. Countless Spirits.

Across 32 rooms, including the 8 themed sleeping rooms such as the Vampire Suite, the Frankenstein Suite, the Mermaid Room, and the Dragon Suite, the Grand Midway Hotel holds more spirits than anyone has been able to count. Miners, prostitutes, children, scholars, and at least one young woman who was never meant to die on a Fourth of July night over a hundred years ago.

We’re going in. Are you brave enough to join us?

What’s Included in the Ghost Hunt

Your after-hours investigation includes:

• Exclusive after-hours access to the Haunted Grand Midway Hotel.
• Structured investigation sessions led by experienced Haunted Rooms America investigators
• Use of professional paranormal equipment, including EMF detectors, trigger objects, thermal imaging devices and motion sensors, plus EVP sessions run by our team
• Free time to investigate independently
• Optional Estes Method sessions run by our team during free roam
• Snacks and refreshments provided
• Room and extended investigation time* – If you’re an Overnight VIP guest, you’ll also get to stay in one of 8 themed rooms and investigate for as long into the night as you like!
• Breakfast* – After a full night of investigating, overnight VIP guests will be served a light continental-style breakfast provided by our team.

Equipment and recording: Guests are welcome to bring their own ghost hunting equipment (EMF meters, spirit boxes, REM pods and similar). Filming and video recording are not permitted at any point during the event. You are welcome to take photos and use digital voice recorders for your own EVP sessions during free roam; during the structured investigations, we ask that you don’t record or take photos, to protect the privacy of other guests.

TICKETS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED