Goldfield Hotel

The story

In the first years of the twentieth century Goldfield, in Esmeralda County, was a gold-rush boomtown, and its hotel was meant to show it. The Goldfield Hotel was built in 1907 and 1908 on a corner of Crook Avenue (today U.S. 95), on ground where two earlier hotels of the same name had burned. The Reno architects Morrill J. Curtis and George E. Holesworth designed it in the Classical Revival style: four stories in a U-shape, so that every guest room had an outside window, with a main front of 180 feet and two wings of 100 feet each. The ground floor was faced in gray granite from Rocklin, California, and the upper stories in red brick under a white cornice.

It cost somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000 and was hailed as the grandest hotel in the state when it opened in 1908. According to the oft-repeated story, champagne ran down the front steps at the opening. Its roughly 150 rooms had pile carpets, many with private bathrooms, and the lobby was finished in mahogany with black leather furniture, gilded columns and crystal chandeliers; there was even an elevator. The mining magnate and Nevada power broker George Wingfield was an investor, while his partner Casey McDannell ran the hotel. Newton Crumley bought it in 1923.

The hotel stayed open through World War II, when officers of the Tonopah Army Air Field and their families were the final residents. It closed in 1945 and has never reopened. In the 1980s a California developer spent around $4 million trying to turn it into an Edwardian-style resort, but the project ended in bankruptcy. The building was sold at auction during Goldfield Days in 2003 for about $360,000 to a Carson City rancher and engineer, who said in a 2004 Wall Street Journal interview that he hoped to open the bottom two floors by 2006, adding: "It's a challenge. I may regret it." The work was still unfinished in 2010. Renovation was reported to have resumed in 2017, and in 2022 the hotel was put up for sale together with nearby properties for $4.9 million.

The hotel has also had a screen career. It played Super Soul's radio station, KOW, in Vanishing Point (1971) and appears in Cherry 2000 (1987) and Ghosts of Goldfield (2007). Nevada placed it on its state historic register on March 4, 1981, and it is a contributing building in the Goldfield Historic District, listed on the National Register on June 14, 1982.

The legend

The Goldfield Hotel's best-known ghost is a woman called Elizabeth. In the usual telling she was a prostitute who became pregnant by George Wingfield, who chained her to a radiator in Room 109; she died in childbirth or was killed, and her baby was thrown down a mine shaft. Visitors claim to have seen her with long hair and a white dress, walking back and forth and crying out for her baby, and the sound of a crying baby is part of the story. Room 109 is described as bitterly cold, and camera equipment is said to fail there while working elsewhere in the building.

Wingfield himself is said to haunt the lobby and his old first-floor room, his presence signaled by the smell of cigar smoke and fresh cigar ash. Other reported spirits include two people who took their own lives on the third floor, a woman who hanged herself and a man who jumped, neither identified in any record; a hostile presence nicknamed "the Stabber," supposedly armed with a kitchen knife in what was once the Gold Room; and three small, mischievous spirits, two of them children, near the lobby staircase. These last two come from a single source.

Television made the building famous. While filming the original Ghost Adventures documentary in 2004, Zak Bagans and Nick Groff recorded a moment in the basement when a brick appeared to fly across the room by itself, and Bagans's frightened reaction became the clip that launched the site's reputation. The Ghost Adventures team returned in 2011 and in 2013 ("Goldfield Hotel: Redemption"), and a two-hour special, Ghost Adventures: The Goldfield Hotel, was released on Discovery+ in October 2021. In between, the TAPS team of Ghost Hunters investigated for "Spirits of the Old West" (season 4, episode 8, April 23, 2008). They reported footsteps and shuffling, shifting shadows, a pair of red light balls on a thermal camera, a meter responding in Room 109 and an audio clip they heard as "Get out." The owner at the time, who described himself as a non-believer, guided them and said afterward that the recordings had convinced him.

Historically, the legend does not hold together. No account of a haunting earlier than the 1980s has been found; one travel writer attributes much of the lore to stories spread in that decade by a former owner, and says historians at the Central Nevada Museum see inconsistencies that suggest tales made up for tourists. The timeline is also wrong: the story sets Elizabeth's death in the 1930s, years after Wingfield had sold out and Crumley had bought the hotel in 1923. The mine shafts behind the hotel were sunk around 1925 by Crumley, and came up dry, so the tale of the baby in the shaft cannot belong to Wingfield's era. ROUTE Magazine suggests the legend may echo a real 1904 scandal, when a woman named May Baric sued Wingfield for abuse and was paid $400 to leave town, but offers no evidence of a direct link. Wingfield died in Reno in 1959. The suicides and other spirits likewise have no documented basis. Elizabeth, in short, is best treated as a modern legend.

What remains today

The hotel still stands empty on its corner in Goldfield, its granite ground floor and red-brick upper stories still facing U.S. 95. The opulent interiors described in 1908 have been through nearly eight decades of vacancy and several abandoned renovation attempts. For about thirty years a local resident acted as caretaker and "keeper of the keys," letting visitors in and walking them through the floors, until she handed the role on in January 2016.

Visiting

The Goldfield Hotel is private property and has been closed to guests since 1945. Do not try to enter on your own: the building is old, has been empty for decades, and entry without permission is trespassing. Tours, including ghost-themed visits, have been offered by appointment via the Goldfield Historical Society, at around $20 for an hour, but listings disagree on whether they are currently running, so confirm before you travel. Even without going inside, the facade can be seen from the street, within Goldfield's historic district.

Sources

1. Goldfield, Nevada 1904-1909, Personal Views Also — Internet Archive · Eppler, Arthur O., 1873 -, 1900-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
2. Wikimedia Commons category : Goldfield Hotel — Wikimedia Commons
3. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Goldfield, NV 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Lida, NV 1908 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1908 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Goldfield, NV 1952 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1952 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "Episode Recap: Spirits of the Old West" (Ghost Hunters S4) — Syfy. — Syfy.
7. "First Look: 'Ghost Adventures: The Goldfield Hotel' Trailer" — Higgypop (2021). — Higgypop (2021).
8. "Goldfield Hotel – Luxury in the Nevada Desert" — Legends of America (Kathy Alexander). — Legends of America (Kathy Alexander).
9. "The Ghosts of the Goldfield Hotel" — ROUTE Magazine (Cecil Stehelin). — ROUTE Magazine (Cecil Stehelin).
10. "The Goldfield Hotel" — Destination4x4 (travel blog). — Destination4x4 (travel blog).
11. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.