The Haunted Many Glacier Hotel, Glacier National Park: The Winter Caretaker's Ghost Story

Many Glacier Hotel stands on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake in the northeast corner of Glacier National Park, a long Swiss chalet style building of up to five stories with mountains rising straight behind it. The Great Northern Railway built it in 1914 and 1915, and it is now part of a National Historic Landmark district. It is the most spectacular setting of any of the haunted hotels in Montana.

Its ghost stories are quieter than most. They come from the winter caretakers and night staff who have looked after the park’s big lodges, and they were passed on by word of mouth for decades. The best of them involves an empty hotel, a wine case and no footprints in the snow.

The ghosts of Many Glacier Hotel

The wine bottle in the empty hotel

Steve Lautenbach spent several winters as caretaker of Many Glacier, alone in a closed hotel buried in snow. He told the author Karen Stevens that on one of his rounds he found an empty wine bottle lying in a hallway. The glass doors of the wine case were open and one slot was empty. There had been no guests for months, and there were no footprints in the fresh snow outside.

Asked by reporters whether ghosts were real, he gave an answer Stevens later recalled to the Flathead Beacon: “If I say yes, then I’m crazy, but if I say no, then I am a liar.” Lautenbach died in Florida in 2008, aged 37.

The woman in red

Karen Stevens’ book Glacier Ghost Stories, published by Riverbend Publishing, says Many Glacier has many ghosts, and the Whitefish Pilot’s 2013 write-up of the book singles out a woman in a red dress among the apparitions. Our original guide told a version in which a young boy saw a woman he did not know standing in his room in a red dress before she vanished. Nobody has put a name to her, so treat her as staff and guest lore.

Room 308

Room 308 is the hotel’s best-known room story. According to the same 2013 account of Stevens’ book, guests and staff have reported the sounds of a noisy party coming from Room 308 when the room was empty. The hotel itself does not promote any haunted room, and you cannot book a specific room number.

A skeptic's view

Karen Stevens, a retired librarian who wrote Glacier Ghost Stories and investigated the park’s lodges and cabins, estimates that about 90 percent of reported hauntings come from faulty observation. In a wooden building of this size, the wind off the lake and the creaks of old timber do a lot of work. It is the other ten percent that keeps the stories going.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The winter hallways: Where the caretaker found the wine bottle in a hotel with no guests.
• The four-story lobby: Balconies with Swiss patterned railings around a tall open lobby, at its quietest late at night.
• Room 308: Guests and staff have reported the noise of a party from this room while it stood empty, according to Karen Stevens’ Glacier Ghost Stories.

History of Many Glacier Hotel

In the 1910s Louis W. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway and son of James J. Hill, set out to turn the new Glacier National Park into a destination resort, marketed as the American Alps. Glacier Park Lodge and Many Glacier Hotel were the two big hotels, with a chain of backcountry chalets a day’s ride or hike apart.

Many Glacier was built in about a year, through a winter of sub-zero temperatures, using timber logged nearby and milled at a sawmill on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake. It opened on July 4, 1915, as the largest hotel in Montana. Architect Thomas D. McMahon designed it as a series of linked chalets along the lakeshore, with a stone foundation, a wooden frame, brown siding and Swiss patterns cut into the window frames and balconies. The railway promoted it as the Gem of the West.

The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 29, 1976, and is part of the Great Northern Railway Buildings National Historic Landmark district. It is a member of Historic Hotels of America. From the 1960s to the 1980s it was famous for the musical shows put on by its staff. Xanterra has run it since 2014, the Ptarmigan Dining Room was restored in 2011 to bring back its historic features, and the hotel was partly renovated in 2016.

It closed for the 2020 season because of COVID-19 and reopened on June 4, 2021. Today it has about 205 rooms, 7 family rooms and 2 suites, all with private bathrooms, and most look out over the lake or the mountains.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Book as early as you can: summer rooms go quickly. Reservations are through the park lodges website or by phone.
• Choose a Lakeside room for the view across Swiftcurrent Lake, then sit in the lobby late at night when the hotel is quiet.
• Expect rustic rooms: no TVs and no air conditioning.
• The last stretch of road to the hotel is partly gravel. Grinnell Glacier, Iceberg Lake and Ptarmigan Falls trails start nearby.
• Read Karen Stevens’ Glacier Ghost Stories before you go for more of the park’s lodge lore.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Grand Union Hotel, Fort Benton: Montana’s oldest hotel, on the Missouri River
• Sacajawea Hotel, Three Forks: a 1910 railroad hotel with its builder still on duty
• Boulder Hot Springs: Simone’s Suite and geothermal pools
• Haunted hotels in Montana

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.

• Flathead Beacon: Glacier's haunted history (2016)
• Whitefish Pilot: Glacier Park ghost stories collected in new book (2013)
• National Park Service: Many Glacier Hotel
• Wikipedia: Many Glacier Hotel
• Glacier National Park Lodges: Many Glacier Hotel

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