Haunted place · Missouri, United States

Coates House Hotel

Updated November 20266 sources How to visit

Protected heritage
3 archive documents

Grand 1891 hotel in Kansas City's Quality Hill, scene of the city's deadliest fire in 1978; its haunted reputation rests on a single 2010 article.

The story

The Coates House stands at 10th Street and Broadway in Kansas City's Quality Hill district, and the site has been tied to hotels since before the Civil War. In 1857 work began on a hotel there, on land owned by the developer Kersey Coates and designed by John Johnson. The war stopped construction, and Union cavalry used the unfinished foundations as barracks.

After the war, Colonel Shalor W. Eldridge put up a five-story building on the spot, which opened before 1870 under the name Broadway Hotel. Coates bought it in 1870 and gave it his own name. He died in April 1887, and his family then rebuilt and greatly enlarged the property, keeping parts of the older hotel. The result, designed by the firm of Van Brunt & Howe (Henry Van Brunt is credited as architect), opened on January 10, 1891, as the New Coates House. It became one of the city's grand addresses and earned the nickname "hotel of the presidents."

Like many downtown hotels, it declined in the 20th century. By the 1970s most of its rooms were rented one at a time to poor and transient tenants. In the early hours of January 28, 1978, at about 4 a.m., fire broke out in the south wing. Twenty of the roughly 140 residents died, many of them after jumping from upper floors to escape the flames, and more than 100 people lost their homes. It remains the deadliest fire in Kansas City's history. The building had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

Rather than being demolished, the burned hotel was bought in 1979 by the Historic Kansas City Foundation. Redevelopment as housing began in 1984, and the exterior restoration was finished in 1987.

The legend

Wikipedia lists the Coates House among Missouri's reportedly haunted places, but the claim is shaky, and readers deserve to know how shaky. The single source behind it is a light Halloween piece published by the Kansas City weekly *The Pitch* in late October 2010, which suggested five local spots that TV ghost hunters ought to visit. That article is no longer online, the haunted statement on Wikipedia is flagged as disputed, and in 2025 an editor on the article's talk page questioned whether it was adequately sourced.

Beyond that, our sources contain nothing: no named ghost, no description of what anyone claims to have seen or heard, no dated sighting, no paranormal investigation and no television episode. If a legend exists, its obvious seed is the 1978 fire, in which twenty people died, but no source links any reported phenomenon to the victims.

Our honest assessment is that the Coates House is a building with a genuinely tragic history and a haunted label that rests on almost nothing. It is listed here for that history, and the ghost stories should be considered unverified until better evidence emerges.

What remains today

The restored building now serves as an apartment house. Its restored 1891 exterior still marks the corner of 10th and Broadway, a reminder of the hotel's heyday. The National Register nomination itself has not been digitized, so architectural details beyond what is given here are not available to us.

Visiting

The Coates House is a private residential building. There are no public tours, and the interior is for residents only, so please do not enter or attempt to look around inside. The exterior can be seen from the public sidewalk on Broadway. Some Kansas City ghost walks may mention the building, but none could be confirmed. If you stop to look, remember that the 1978 fire is within living memory and that it claimed twenty lives.