The Haunted US Grant Hotel, San Diego: Fannie Grant and the Fifth Floor

The US Grant stands on Broadway in downtown San Diego, facing Horton Plaza Park at the top of the Gaslamp Quarter. Ulysses S. Grant Jr. built it and named it for his father, the Civil War general and 18th president, and it opened in October 1910. Today it is a Marriott Luxury Collection hotel owned by the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, and it is one of the best-known haunted hotels in San Diego.

Its ghost stories are quieter than those of the Hotel del Coronado across the bay, but they have been told for a long time. Most center on Fannie Chaffee Grant, the builder’s first wife, said to walk the halls in a white dress. Guests also describe a heavy-set man in a black suit on the fifth floor, and staff talk about things that vanish in the ballroom. In 2022 Yelp reviewers put the hotel on a national list of the most haunted hotels in the country.

The ghosts of the US Grant

Fannie Chaffee Grant, the lady in white

The hotel’s best-known ghost is usually named as Fannie Chaffee Grant, daughter of Colorado senator Jerome Chaffee and wife of Ulysses S. Grant Jr. It was Fannie who owned the old Horton House hotel on this site, and it was her decision to pull it down and build something grander.

The legend says she died soon after the new hotel opened and was so unhappy when her husband remarried that she came back to walk its corridors. Guests describe a woman in an old-fashioned white dress moving along the hallways toward the guest rooms, and then simply not being there.

The records do not quite fit the story. Fannie died in 1909, a year before the hotel opened, and Grant Jr. did not remarry until 1913. Some older ghost guides name his mother, Julia Dent Grant, instead, but she died in 1902 and had no link to the building. The lady in white may simply be the most famous woman in the hotel’s history attached to a very old kind of sighting.

The man in the black suit

The most specific story comes from the fifth floor. Guests have described a large, stocky man with gray hair and a black suit standing at the foot of their bed, there for a moment and then gone. One widely repeated account has two guests in different rooms seeing him on the same night, shortly before a small earthquake shook San Diego, and comparing notes over breakfast the next morning.

Nobody has put a name to him. Some guests assume he is a long-ago businessman who never checked out; others link him to the cigar smoke that a few visitors say they have smelled in nonsmoking rooms.

The ballroom

Staff stories about the ballroom are less about apparitions and more about things going missing. Items set down for an event are said to disappear the moment someone turns away, then turn up somewhere else entirely. Ghost writers like to say some staff would rather not set up the room alone, though that comes from repeated lore rather than anything the hotel has said.

Lights, footsteps and wandering elevators

Guest reviews add the smaller details: lights switching on and off, footsteps and crashes from rooms that are empty, housekeeping supplies that seem to move across a room in seconds, and an elevator that stops and opens on the fifth floor with nobody waiting. A guest in 2019 described a wedding ring vanishing and then dropping back into view with a clink. The hotel itself does not promote any of this.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Fifth-floor rooms: Where the man in the black suit is said to appear at the foot of the bed. The floor most guests ask for.
• The guest-room hallways: The route Fannie Grant’s lady in white is said to walk on her way toward the rooms.
• The ballrooms: The hotel’s original ballroom is now the Crystal Ballroom; this is where staff say things vanish and reappear.
• Grant Grill: The hotel’s restaurant and bar, opened in 1952; not haunted by reputation, but the best place to soak up the building’s history before bed.

History of The US Grant

The story starts with an older hotel. Alonzo Horton, the developer who created New Town San Diego, opened the Horton House on this spot in 1870, a three-story, 100-room hotel that was the city’s first major hotel. In 1895 it was bought for Fannie Chaffee Grant. Grant Jr. had moved his family to San Diego in 1893 and become one of the city’s leading investors and civic boosters.

In 1905 the Horton House came down. Construction of the new hotel stalled after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake disrupted lumber and building supplies, and Grant Jr. could not pay for it all himself: San Diego voters helped raise $700,000 of the cost. Architect Harrison Albright designed an 11-story Beaux Arts building with a roof garden, a palm court, a ballroom and two saltwater swimming pools fed from the bay. It opened on October 15, 1910, after about five years of work, with a day-long celebration. Grant Jr. is said to have put a time capsule in the arch above the Broadway entrance.

The hotel quickly became the city’s social center. Radio stations broadcast from its upper floors in the late 1920s and 1930s, and Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a radio address from the building. Guests over the years included Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh and more than a dozen presidents. The Grant Grill opened in the 1950s as a downtown power-lunch spot that did not admit women before 3 PM until 1969, when three local women attorneys staged a sit-in and ended the rule. A plaque marks the first reservation made by a woman. The first San Diego Comic-Con was held here in 1970.

The hotel slid along with downtown in the decades after World War II. Christopher Sickels bought it in 1979 and got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places that year, saving it from demolition, and it closed for a major renovation before reopening in December 1985. After more changes of owner, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation bought it in 2003, on land that was once Kumeyaay territory, as a tribute to President Grant’s policies toward Native Americans. It closed for a 21-month restoration and reopened in October 2006 as part of the Luxury Collection.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for a fifth-floor room when you book, ideally directly with the hotel, and repeat the request at check-in. It is a request, not a guarantee.
• Look for the portraits of famous guests and the Grant family history on display around the public floors before you go up.
• Have a drink in the Grant Grill and look for the plaque marking the 1969 sit-in.
• The Gaslamp Quarter is a short walk south. Pair your stay with the Horton Grand Hotel, whose 1880s buildings were saved from the same downtown redevelopment that once threatened the Grant.
• Downtown hotels charge for parking. If you arrive by trolley or train, the hotel is a short walk from several stops.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Horton Grand Hotel: Roger Whittaker’s Room 309, a few blocks south in the Gaslamp
• Hotel del Coronado: Kate Morgan’s beach resort across the bay
• Haunted places in San Diego: from the Whaley House to Old Town
• Haunted hotels in California
• Haunted hotels in San Diego

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: U.S. Grant Hotel
• Wikipedia: Ulysses S. Grant Jr.
• Historic Hotels Then and Now: The US Grant
• FOX 5 San Diego: Two San Diego hotels among most haunted in US (2022)
• Only In Your State: The historic US Grant Hotel is notoriously haunted
• La Jolla Mom: Haunted hotels in San Diego

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