Haunted hotel guide · Boston, Massachusetts

The Haunted Omni Parker House, Boston: Harvey Parker, Room 303 and the Third-Floor Elevator

America’s longest continuously operating hotel has been taking guests on School Street since 1855, and its staff have collected ghost stories for almost as long, from the founder on the tenth floor to an elevator that stops on three by itself.

By The Haunted Rooms Team · Updated November 2026 · How we rate hotels

3.8/5Haunted Rooms Score

1855Year opened

10th floorMost reported activity

Check availabilityMeet the ghosts

The Parker House opened on October 8, 1855, on School Street in the middle of old Boston, across from King’s Chapel and its burying ground. The building you stay in today replaced the original hotel in 1927, but one wing of the old house stayed open throughout the rebuild, which is why the Omni Parker House calls itself the longest continuously operating hotel in America. It gave the world Boston cream pie and the Parker House roll, hosted Charles Dickens and the Saturday Club, and employed both Malcolm X and Emeril Lagasse.

It is also Boston’s best-known haunted hotel. Staff and guests describe a mustached man on the tenth floor they believe is founder Harvey Parker, an elevator that arrives on the third floor with nobody in it, and a room, 303, that drew so many complaints of laughter and the smell of whisky that it was turned into a storage closet. These are stories, not proof, and some of the best-known claims have been knocked down over the years, but few big-city hotels have a ghost tradition this long. For the rest of the city’s history and legends, see our guide to haunted places in Boston.

The ghosts of Omni Parker House

Harvey Parker on the tenth floor

Harvey D. Parker started out running a small cafe in Boston in 1832 and opened his hotel in 1855. He was famous for watching every detail, and the story goes that he still does. Parker died on May 31, 1884, at the age of 79.

The most quoted account comes from longtime bellman John Brehm, who started work at the hotel in 1941. He told the Boston Globe in 1992 that around 1950 an elderly woman staying on the tenth floor saw a misty shape outside Room 1078 that turned into a heavy-set older man with a black mustache before fading away. Security searched the floor and found nobody. The hotel’s own blog adds a mother and daughter in Room 1012 who woke to a man in 1800s dress at the foot of the bed asking if they were enjoying their stay, and who later recognized him in Harvey Parker’s portrait in the dining room. It also tells of noise complaints from Room 1040 that security could never trace, and of whispering voices, the creak of a rocking chair and floating lights on the tenth floor.

Room 303 and the smell of whisky

The hotel’s most famous room is one you cannot book. The version told on most Boston tours says a liquor salesman took his own life in Room 303 in 1949 by mixing whisky with barbiturates. The hotel’s own blog tells it differently, as a long-term resident who drank heavily and smoked strong cigars. Either way, later guests complained of laughter from the empty room and the smell of whisky and cigar smoke that lingered after cleaning, and the room was eventually taken out of use and turned into a storage closet. We could not find a newspaper record of a 1949 death in the room, so treat the details as hotel lore.

You will often read that Stephen King based his story 1408 on Room 303. Author Susan Wilson put that to King’s assistant, Marsha DeFlippo, while writing her book on the hotel, and was told it was just a rumor. Wikipedia’s article on the hotel reports the same denial.

Charlotte Cushman and Elevator Number One

Charlotte Cushman was one of the most famous American actresses of the 19th century. She died of pneumonia in her third-floor room at the Parker House on February 18, 1876, after a long illness, and a newspaper reported her death the following day.

Staff tie her to the hotel’s most repeatable story: Elevator Number One arriving at the third floor and opening its doors when nobody has called it. Becca Hensley wrote in the Austin American-Statesman in 2010 that it came to her floor without anyone pressing the button, and a front desk worker told her it had done that since Charlotte Cushman died there. The hotel’s blog links the same third floor to Charles Dickens, who stayed on it. Engineers would point out that old elevators misbehave, and that is a fair answer.

The Charles Dickens mirror

Charles Dickens stayed at the Parker House for five months in 1867 and 1868 and first performed A Christmas Carol for the Saturday Club here. A large mirror said to be the one he rehearsed in hangs on the mezzanine near the press room, with a plaque from the Boston Dickens Fellowship.

The modern legend says that if you say his name three times in front of it, something odd happens. Boston tour guide Jeffery Doucette has told of a worker cleaning the glass who saw condensation appear beside him, as if someone were breathing on it, and who would not clean it again. It costs nothing to go and look.

A voice in the storage room

Around 2010, guest services manager Seamus Murphy, who had spent more than two decades at the hotel and started as a bellman, said he heard a gruff voice shout “What do you want?” from an empty storage room on the mezzanine. He thought it sounded like a late bell captain. The account appears in Susan Wilson’s 2014 history of the hotel, Heaven by Hotel Standards.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Tenth floor: Where Harvey Parker is most often reported, including the area around Room 1078. Ask for a high floor when you book.
• Ninth floor: The bearded figure has been reported here too, so it is a good second choice if ten is full.
• Third floor: Charlotte Cushman’s floor and the stop for Elevator Number One. The former Room 303 is a storage space and not bookable.
• The mezzanine: Not a room, but free to visit: the Dickens mirror and the door from his guest room are on display.

History of Omni Parker House

Harvey Parker bought a small Boston cafe in 1832 and built it into one of Boston’s best restaurants before opening the Parker House on School Street on October 8, 1855. It quickly became the place to stay and eat in the city. The hotel says Boston cream pie, first called chocolate cream pie, was created in its kitchen in 1856 by chef Augustine Anezin, and a German baker created the Parker House roll in the 1860s. The recipe stayed a secret until Franklin D. Roosevelt asked for the rolls for a White House dinner in 1933.

The hotel’s guest list reads like a history of 19th-century America. The Saturday Club, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, met in its dining room. Dickens stayed for five months in 1867 and 1868, Mark Twain stayed in 1877, and John Wilkes Booth stayed on April 5 and 6, 1865, days before he shot Abraham Lincoln. John F. Kennedy announced his first run for Congress here in 1946, held his bachelor party in the Press Room in 1953 and, the hotel says, proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier at Table 40.

It also employed some famous names. Malcolm X, then Malcolm Little, worked as a busboy in the 1940s, and Emeril Lagasse was a sous-chef from 1979 to 1981. Ho Chi Minh claimed in a 1913 postcard to have worked as a baker here, though the hotel’s records do not back that up.

After Parker’s death in 1884 the hotel passed to his partners and then to Joseph Reed Whipple. The original buildings were demolished in the mid-1920s and replaced by the current hotel in 1927, with one old wing kept open throughout. Creditors seized the hotel during the Depression, Glenwood Sherrard bought it in 1933, Dunfey Hotels took over in 1968, and it became part of Omni in the 1980s. Omni’s owner, TRT Holdings, has held it since 1996.

The hotel closed temporarily in 2020 during the pandemic. A $65 million renovation of all 551 guest rooms, the Rooftop Ballroom, the meeting rooms and the lobby began in November 2024 and was unveiled in August 2025, in time for the hotel’s 170th anniversary that October. The ghost stories are part of the hotel’s own lore: Omni tells them on its blog, and the site faces the city’s oldest burying ground.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for a high floor in the main building in your booking notes, and call ahead if the tenth floor matters to you; specific rooms are never guaranteed.
• Ride Elevator Number One to the third floor and see if it comes back on its own.
• Visit the Dickens mirror and the door from his room on the mezzanine, even if you are not staying.
• Order the Boston cream pie and a Parker House roll in Parker’s Restaurant, where both were created.
• King’s Chapel Burying Ground is directly across School Street, and the Old Granary Burying Ground is a few minutes’ walk; both are on the Freedom Trail.
• Boston’s weekend and fall rates are high, so book early for October.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Concord's Colonial Inn: Room 24 and the Revolution, about 40 minutes west
• Longfellow's Wayside Inn, Sudbury: Jerusha Howe in Rooms 9 and 10, about 45 minutes west
• Hawthorne Hotel, Salem: Rooms 612 and 325, about 40 minutes north
• Lizzie Borden House, Fall River: sleep in the house of the 1892 murders, about an hour south
• Haunted hotels in Massachusetts

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.

• Wikipedia: Omni Parker House
• Omni Hotels blog: Haunted Hotels, Boston's Omni Parker House
• History of Massachusetts: Is the Omni Parker House haunted?
• Boston.com: Look inside the $65 million renovation of Boston's oldest hotel (2025)

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