The Haunted Ellis Hotel, Atlanta: Ghosts of the 1946 Winecoff Hotel Fire

Today the Ellis Hotel is a polished 127-room boutique hotel in Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio, a few blocks down Peachtree Street from the Fox Theatre. For most of the 20th century, though, Atlanta knew this narrow 15-story tower as the Winecoff Hotel, and on December 7, 1946, it became the site of the deadliest hotel fire in United States history. One hundred and nineteen people died, among them 30 high school students in town for a youth assembly at the State Capitol.

The Atlanta History Center lists the building among the city’s best-known haunted places, and Atlanta TV and newspapers repeat its stories every October: alarms that sound in the small hours, screams and the smell of smoke, and faces at the upper windows. The hotel itself does not promote any of this. This guide sets out what really happened, what people say they have experienced since, and what a stay is like now. It sits on our guide to haunted hotels in Georgia.

The ghosts of Ellis Hotel, Atlanta, a Tribute Portfolio Hotel (former Winecoff Hotel)

The alarm before dawn

The best-known story about the Ellis is that its fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night for no reason. The Atlanta History Center and Atlanta News First both put the time at 2:48 a.m., described in the story as the moment the 1946 fire began. The Access Atlanta version says the alarms tend to sound around the same time of year as the fire, in early December.

The official record does not quite match the legend’s clock. According to the fire investigation summarized on Wikipedia, a bellboy first noticed the fire at about 3:15 a.m., and the only call to the fire department came at 3:42 a.m. However the time is told, a modern hotel with working alarms in a building with this history was always going to collect a story like this one.

Screams and the smell of smoke

Guests and workers have reported waking to the smell of smoke when nothing is burning, and hearing screams in the middle of the night. These are the reports the Atlanta History Center and local TV mention most often, and they mirror what survivors described in 1946: smoke filling the corridors through open transoms, and guests calling for help from windows high above the street.

No one has tied these reports to a particular room or floor, and the hotel does not discuss them. They are best read as the stories a building collects when its past is this well known.

Faces at the windows

The most unsettling story is told from the sidewalk. According to the Atlanta History Center, passersby have claimed to see faces in the hotel’s windows, looking terrified, as if still calling for help. It echoes the most famous image of the fire: Arnold Hardy’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a woman falling from the 11th floor.

That woman, Daisy McCumber, survived. She lost a leg, went back to work and lived until 1992, a reminder that the people behind these stories were real, and that not every story from that night ended in tragedy.

The Winecoffs themselves

Some versions of the legend add the hotel’s builder. William Fleming Winecoff, who had promoted the hotel as fireproof, and his wife Grace both died in the fire. Accounts of where they died differ even in the records, and no published sighting is attached to either of them, so treat any story naming them as a modern addition rather than a guest report.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• High floors facing Peachtree Street: The fire cut off everyone above the third floor, and firefighters’ ladders reached only the eighth. A room high on the Peachtree side puts you in the part of the building where the night was worst, and where people on the street say they see faces.
• The third floor: Investigators placed the fire’s point of origin in the third-floor west hallway, near the stairway to the fourth floor. Guest rooms run from the third floor up, so you can ask for this level.
• The lobby and Peachtree sidewalk: The Georgia Historical Society marker about the fire stands beside the building. It is the best place to start, and it is free to visit whether you stay or not.

History of Ellis Hotel, Atlanta, a Tribute Portfolio Hotel (former Winecoff Hotel)

The Winecoff Hotel opened in 1913, one of the tallest buildings in Atlanta at the time. It was designed by William Lee Stoddart, who also worked on the Georgian Terrace, in the Neoclassical style: a steel and reinforced concrete frame clad in brick, with white terra cotta trim. Its steel construction let it be advertised as fireproof, and for three decades it was a fashionable address on Peachtree Street.

What it did not have was a safe way out. According to the Georgia historical marker, the 15-story hotel had no fire escapes, no fire doors and no sprinklers, and a single open stairway served every floor. In the early hours of December 7, 1946, with about 280 guests inside, a fire that started in the third-floor west hallway climbed that stairway and spread into the corridors through open transoms above the doors. Ladders reached only the eighth floor, and nets could not hold people falling from higher up. One hundred and nineteen people died, including 30 students attending the YMCA Youth Assembly. The cause was never officially determined.

The disaster changed building codes across North America. Hotels came to be required to have multiple protected exits and self-closing fire-resistant doors, and operable transoms over guest room doors were prohibited as a direct result of the Winecoff fire. The building reopened in 1951 as the Peachtree Hotel, now with sprinklers and fire alarms.

In 1967 it was donated to the Georgia Baptist Convention and used as housing for elderly residents. It then passed through a series of would-be developers and stood vacant for more than two decades; during the 1996 Olympics the gutted lobby served as a souvenir shop. A $23 million restoration began in 2006, and the building reopened on October 1, 2007, as the Ellis Hotel, named for the street along its north side.

The Ellis was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009 and joined Historic Hotels of America in 2023. It is now part of Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio, with 127 rooms and suites.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Start at the Georgia historical marker beside the hotel on Peachtree Street. It gives the story of the fire in a few lines and honors the victims and firefighters.
• Ask for a high floor when you book. It is a request, not a guarantee, but it puts you in the part of the building the stories are about.
• Be respectful. This is a place where real people died, including teenagers, and staff are not there to entertain ghost hunters.
• Parking is valet only and not cheap, so consider arriving by MARTA rail instead of driving.
• Pair your stay with a show at the Fox Theatre up the street, and browse more haunted places in Atlanta.
• If you want a hotel that tells its ghost stories openly, Savannah is a four-hour drive away and full of them.

More haunted hotels nearby

• 1842 Inn, Macon: an antebellum inn with its own ghost stories, about 85 miles south
• The Partridge Inn, Augusta: a haunted historic hotel on the way to the coast
• The Marshall House, Savannah: Georgia’s most famous haunted hotel
• Haunted places in Atlanta: more ghost stories around the city
• Haunted hotels in Georgia

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.

• Atlanta History Center: Haunted History, Stories from a City of Spirits
• Wikipedia: Winecoff Hotel fire
• Wikipedia: Ellis Hotel
• Georgia Historical Society: The Winecoff Fire historical marker
• Historic Hotels of America: Ellis Hotel history
• Atlanta News First: 10 of Atlanta's most haunted places
• Access Atlanta (AJC): 5 of the most haunted places in Georgia
• Marriott: Ellis Hotel, Atlanta, a Tribute Portfolio Hotel

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