The Haunted Weatherford Hotel, Flagstaff: Room 54, the Honeymoon Couple and the Zane Grey Ballroom

The Weatherford Hotel is on Leroux Street in downtown Flagstaff, a couple of blocks from the Hotel Monte Vista. It opened on New Year’s Day 1900, when Arizona was still a territory, and it has hosted Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, the painter Thomas Moran and Zane Grey, who wrote The Call of the Canyon in what is now its third-floor ballroom. Today it is a small historic hotel above three bars: Charly’s Pub, the Gopher Hole and the Zane Grey Ballroom.

Its ghost story is one of the best known in the Southwest, and it starts with a room you cannot book. Room 54 was turned into a storage closet after too many strange reports, and people still say they hear voices from it. Add a ballroom ghost and a basement full of legends, and it is a natural stop on any tour of the haunted hotels in Arizona.

The ghosts of Weatherford Hotel

The honeymoon couple of Room 54

The legend says a newly married couple checked into Room 54 in the 1930s and died there. The versions differ. In one, the husband went hunting in a blizzard, his wife believed he was dead and took her own life, and when he came back and found her he shot himself. In another, a fierce argument ended in a murder-suicide. Co-owner Sam Green has told the Arizona Daily Sun that nobody knows who the couple were and that the story has grown over the years.

What turned the story into hotel history was an employee who stayed overnight in the late 1980s. They felt pressure on the bed, woke to find a couple sitting on it, and watched them walk out through the door. After repeated reports of cold spots, flickering lights and eerie music, management turned the room into a storage closet. Guests still say they hear angry voices from it, and some have seen the couple walk in.

The woman in the Zane Grey Ballroom

The third-floor ballroom is the hotel’s other hot spot. People describe a woman’s silhouette floating or darting across the room and vanishing into a wall. One guest out on an early morning walk saw her from the street. Accounts differ on whether she is a young girl or a small, older woman.

Staff report low whispers from the empty bar and the light over the pool table swaying by itself. One bartender said the people in a 1908 photograph on the ballroom wall began to move like actors in a film.

The basement and the fourth floor

Local tour companies tell of a murdered bootlegger heard pacing the basement steps, and of two child spirits, a gentle girl called Matilda and a mischievous boy called Alginon. These stories are not documented and appear mostly in ghost tour material, so treat them as Flagstaff folklore.

Staff have also reported a presence on the upper floor that calls their names and the feeling of someone standing behind them.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The former Room 54: The closet itself, on the third floor. You cannot sleep in it, but you can stay nearby and listen.
• Third-floor rooms: Footsteps and doors locking and unlocking on their own are reported along this floor. The best rooms to request.
• The Zane Grey Ballroom: Open as a bar, with stained glass and an antique Brunswick bar said to have come from Tombstone. Look for the 1908 photo.
• The basement: Linked to the bootlegger and the child spirits. Ask whether it is included on any tours running when you visit.

History of Weatherford Hotel

John W. Weatherford came to Flagstaff from Weatherford, Texas, in the 1890s. After fires in 1897 the town required business buildings to be built of brick, stone or iron, and in 1898 he put up a two-story building with a general store downstairs and family rooms above. In March 1899 he started a three-story brick hotel addition, and it opened on New Year’s Day 1900, with a sunroom on the top floor, a balcony wrapping three sides of the building and a tall cupola over the corner.

Over the decades the building housed far more than a hotel: the Lyric Theatre, a billiard hall and barber shop, a pool hall in the basement, a dormitory in World War II, the radio station KCLS, a VFW post and a boys’ club. Weatherford also built the telephone exchange next door around 1910 to 1912, and the opera house that became the Orpheum Theater. A fire in 1929 damaged the balcony and cupola, and both were removed.

The hotel passed through a long line of owners and lessees, and by the 1970s it was in rough shape. Henry Taylor and his brother Lloyd bought it in 1975 to save it from demolition. It served for a time as a residential facility and, in the 1980s, a youth hostel, before Henry and his wife Sam turned it back into a hotel in the 1990s.

The restoration has gone on ever since. The Exchange Pub opened in the old telephone building in 1995, the ballroom reopened in 1997, and the first stage of the rebuilt wraparound balconies was finished in 1999, the same year the hotel started its New Year’s Eve Great Pinecone Drop. The Weatherford was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for a third-floor room when you book, and be ready for historic rooms: some share bathrooms.
• If you want sleep, avoid New Year’s Eve and busy weekends. If you want atmosphere, book them.
• Spend an evening in the Zane Grey Ballroom and find the 1908 photo behind the bar.
• Flagstaff ghost walks from Freaky Foot Tours cover the Weatherford and the Monte Vista.
• The Hotel Monte Vista is a couple of blocks away and publishes its haunted room numbers.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Hotel Monte Vista, Flagstaff: the Phantom Bellboy and Room 305, a couple of blocks away
• El Tovar Hotel, Grand Canyon: Fred Harvey’s ghost on the South Rim
• Haunted hotels in Jerome: the old hospital on Cleopatra Hill
• Hassayampa Inn, Prescott: Faith in the balcony suite
• Haunted hotels in Arizona

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• Ghosts of the Weatherford Hotel (Legends of America)
• The Haunted Weatherford Hotel (Ghost City Tours)
• Haunted ghost stories abound in iconic Flagstaff buildings (Arizona Daily Sun)
• Flagstaff keeps its history alive and freaky (Discover Flagstaff)
• Weatherford Hotel, National Register nomination (NPS)
• Weatherford Hotel (Discover Flagstaff lodging)

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