Horseshoe Las Vegas

The story

Long before it was a megaresort, this piece of the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, held a modest cluster of roadside lodgings. The Three Coins Motel opened here in the mid-1960s, and in July 1967 a casino with a Wild West theme, the Bonanza, was built between it and the Galaxy Motel, which supplied its rooms. Money troubles closed the Bonanza's casino after three months, though its 160-room hotel kept going. Kirk Kerkorian bought the property at the end of 1968, sold it months later to investors who reopened it in May 1969 and promptly fell into a legal fight among themselves, and then took it back through foreclosure in 1970. In its short life the Bonanza was known for country music; Buck Owens made his Strip debut there in 1969.

The MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, designed by Martin Stern Jr., opened on the site on December 4, 1973. Its 26-story tower held 2,100 rooms, which put it among the largest hotels in the world. The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast was taped in its Ziegfeld Room from 1974 to 1984.

On November 21, 1980, the hotel suffered one of the deadliest high-rise fires in American history. The blaze began with an electrical ground fault inside a chilled pastry display at The Deli restaurant. Smoke then spread up the tower through defective dampers, elevator shafts and fire doors that had been propped open. Eighty-five people died, 78 guests and 7 employees, most of them from smoke and carbon monoxide rather than flames. About 64 of the dead were found on the upper floors, mostly between the 20th and 25th, and ten died in an elevator. Somewhere between 600 and more than 700 people were injured. The disaster pushed Nevada to pass a 1981 law requiring sprinklers and smoke detectors.

The hotel was rebuilt for $50 million and welcomed guests again on July 29, 1981, now fitted with modern fire protection. A second 26-story tower added more than 700 rooms later that year, and the long-running revue *Jubilee!* began its 35-year run in 1981. Bally Manufacturing bought the resort in the mid-1980s and renamed it Bally's Las Vegas, while the MGM Grand name went to a new resort elsewhere on the Strip. Paris Las Vegas opened next door in 1999, and the Grand Bazaar Shops were added in 2015. After a renovation, the property was rebranded Horseshoe Las Vegas on December 15, 2022, after the original Binion's Horseshoe downtown. Its Jubilee Tower was later transferred to Paris Las Vegas and renamed the Versailles Tower, a project finished in late 2024.

The building has also had a long screen career, from *Rocky IV* and *Honeymoon in Vegas* to *Leaving Las Vegas*, and the Jubilee Theater was home to the American *Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?* from 2016 to 2019.

The legend

The ghost stories here all trace back to the 1980 fire, and they are thin. Wikipedia files the casino under reportedly haunted places in Nevada without saying why, and the details come only from Halloween lists, a gambling-advice column and a ghost-tour company.

Local television lists of haunted Las Vegas spots, including one syndicated by CNN in October 2019, say that victims of the fire walk the halls and the employee restrooms, and that staff have reported a group of ghosts that move around together. In a 2022 reader question, the Las Vegas Advisor relayed the account of a veteran blackjack dealer who said she saw a dealer, supposedly killed in the fire, standing in uniform at a nearby table that turned out to be empty when she looked again. The name she gave has not been confirmed among the victims.

A ghost-tour company goes much further, describing shadow figures lying on beds, said to be guests who died in their sleep from smoke, translucent groups crossing the casino floor, a pair of floating feet seen by a guest, a "most haunted" room numbered 1016 and a service elevator where people died that employees supposedly avoid. Other listicles, seen only in search excerpts, talk of chilly patches, the odor of smoke and screaming heard in the hallways. None of these claims is supported by a named witness or a dated report, and they should be read as tour-company storytelling.

We found no early report: the coverage we found begins in the 2010s. We also found no TV ghost-hunting show or named investigator that has studied the building. What is certain is the tragedy itself. Eighty-five people lost their lives here, and any ghost story told about the place should keep that in mind.

What remains today

The hotel rebuilt after the fire has been re-equipped and renamed several times since 1980. The resort counted 2,812 rooms before the Jubilee Tower moved to Paris Las Vegas, and its casino covers 68,375 square feet. The fire's most lasting legacy may be invisible: the 1981 Nevada law requiring sprinklers and smoke detectors.

Visiting

Horseshoe Las Vegas is an operating casino-hotel on the Strip. Guest floors are for registered guests, and staff-only areas such as service elevators and employee restrooms are off limits. Please don't go looking for "haunted" rooms or question employees about the fire; for the staff it is part of their workplace's real history.

Some Las Vegas ghost-tour companies tell the story as part of their routes. Visitors who want the facts can read about the 1980 fire and the fire-safety reforms it triggered.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Horseshoe Las Vegas — Wikimedia Commons
2. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Las Vegas, NV 1907 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1907 · Public domain (USGS)
3. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Las Vegas, NV 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
4. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Las Vegas, NV 1952 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1952 · Public domain (USGS)
5. 13 most haunted places in Las Vegas — KVIA (credited to CNN, 9 Oct 2019) — KVIA (credited to CNN, 9 Oct 2019
6. 13 places you might see ghosts in Las Vegas — KTNV Channel 13 Las Vegas — KTNV Channel 13 Las Vegas
7. A fiery disaster leaves many guests still lingering — Ghost City Tours — Ghost City Tours (weak source
8. Haunted Las Vegas (Question of the Day) — Las Vegas Advisor (18 Sept 2022) — Las Vegas Advisor (18 Sept 2022
9. MGM Grand fire — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
10. Official website
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.