Hot Lake Hotel

The story

Hot Lake lies in the Grande Ronde Valley of Union County, in northeastern Oregon, a short distance from La Grande. Its thermal lake is the largest hot spring in the state, and Native Americans used the springs long before settlers arrived. The first wooden building on the site went up in 1864 for Samuel Fitzgerald Newhart, and it housed a mix of frontier services under one roof: a post office, a blacksmith, a dance hall and a bathhouse among them.

The arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad transformed the place. Construction of a larger hotel and sanatorium started in 1900, a large brick wing was completed in 1906, and the facility opened as a sanatorium in 1907, promoting the supposed healing powers of its mineral water to visitors from far away. The building used the springs to heat itself, and it is credited as the earliest known commercial building anywhere to run on geothermal heat.

Its best-known figure was Dr. William T. Phy, who worked at Hot Lake from 1901 to 1910 and again from 1917, when he bought the property. Under his direction it became a sanatorium and experimental medical center, with its own operating room, and it earned the nickname "the Mayo Clinic of the West." La Grande historian Richard R. Roth has found no evidence for any actual tie between Phy and the Mayo Clinic, so the label is best taken as promotion. Phy died at Hot Lake in 1931.

On May 7, 1934, fire swept through the wooden west end and consumed over half the complex. The brick section carried on as a resort and sanatorium, hosted a nurses' training program and a flight school during the Second World War, and from 1952 served as a nursing home for elderly and disabled residents. It was sold in 1977, briefly housed a restaurant and dance hall, changed hands several times and was abandoned in 1991. Over the next decade it was heavily vandalized.

Restoration began in 2003 under a local family who opened the building for tours from 2005, ran a bed and breakfast by 2010 and operated a foundry on the grounds. The property changed hands again in 2020, was renamed Hot Lake Springs, and reopened its suites in 2021. The National Register of Historic Places added it in 1979 under the name Hot Lake Resort.

The legend

Hot Lake's ghost stories grew up in the years when the building stood empty and broken after 1991, and television spread them. In 2001 ABC Family's The Scariest Places on Earth filmed in the derelict hotel, highlighting its alleged paranormal activity. The stories also appear in the book Oregon's Ghosts & Monsters, cited by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

No ghost here has a confirmed historical identity. The lore speaks instead of kinds of spirits: former vacationers, former sanatorium patients, and a gardener. The gardener, never named, is said to have died by suicide somewhere on the property. A 2025 travel feature adds a nurse said to have been scalded to death in the lake, a claim found in only one weak source. Other writers describe former "asylum" patients appearing at the windows, though the building's use as an asylum is itself only a rumor, as is a story that it served as a temporary morgue during a typhoid epidemic.

Visitors and writers report screams at night, especially from the old surgical and hospital wing on the third floor, as well as footsteps and voices. A piano is said to play by itself, on the third floor in one account and the second in another, and one listicle claims it belonged to Robert E. Lee's wife, for which no evidence has been found. Weaker sources add odd smells in former hospital rooms, chairs that move, and even "blood on the walls." A Roadtrippers journalist who stayed overnight in 2019 said her bed shook at 3:22 a.m., though she admitted she could not tell whether a spirit or a passing train was to blame. Guests often write about spirits in the guest diary, and the previous owners eventually stopped answering paranormal inquiries because there were so many. The building also served as a setting for a 2012 music video by singer Laura Gibson, described by NPR as a western ghost story.

There is a strong skeptical thread. The current owner has explained that loud banging on the third floor turned out to be a bird striking a window, and that a figure he saw at the end of a hallway was his own reflection. A 2014 Oregon Public Broadcasting piece reported that the owner at the time had not experienced anything paranormal herself. Several of the most dramatic claims, from the asylum to the Lee piano, have no documentary support.

What remains today

The surviving 1906 sanatorium is a three-story, U-shaped brick and concrete building about 216 feet wide, with a hipped metal roof, corner pavilions with quoins, and a long glazed solarium running across the front behind a two-story portico of four colossal Tuscan columns. A three-story wooden residence stands at the west end. The 1979 nomination described the third-floor operating room, tiled entirely in white with a glass-walled viewing room, an old Otis iron-cage elevator, and the geothermal radiator system that heats the building by convection. Today the property operates as the Lodge at Hot Lake Springs, offering guest rooms, stone soaking pools, a restaurant with a pub, a small cinema and a museum of medical antiquities on the third floor.

Visiting

Hot Lake is an operating hotel and hot springs, so you can visit legally by booking a room, a soak or a meal. The third-floor museum of medical antiquities brings visitors close to the old hospital wing at the center of the ghost stories.

Ghost tours were planned by owners in 2014, but no current ghost tour has been confirmed; ask the lodge directly what is offered. Treat guest areas and private rooms with respect, and remember that the building's dramatic history as a sanatorium and nursing home involved real patients and residents.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #79002148 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #79002148) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Hot Lake Hotel — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Telocaset, OR 1906 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1906 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Craig Mountain, OR 1966 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1966 · Public domain (USGS)
6. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Grangeville, ID 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
7. "Come for the Soak, Stay for the Spirits: The Lodge at Hot Lake is Oregon's Steamiest Ghost Story" (Vanita Salisbury, 12 Sept 2025) — Only In Your State via AOL — Only In Your State via AOL (weak source
8. "From healing to haunted: A look inside Oregon's mysterious and desolate Hot Lake Springs Hotel" (8 Nov 2019) — Roadtrippers Magazine — Roadtrippers Magazine
9. Hot Lake Springs Lodge article — Islands.com — Islands.com (weak source
10. "Oregon's Most Haunted Places" (29 Oct 2014) — Jefferson Public Radio / Oregon Public Broadcasting — Jefferson Public Radio / Oregon Public Broadcasting
11. "The Hot Lake Story" (Dick Mason, 2 Aug 2008) — The Observer (La Grande) — The Observer (La Grande
12. 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.