Murphys Hotel

The story

Murphys is a small Gold Rush town in Calaveras County, California, named after its founders Daniel Martin Murphy and John Marion Murphy, sons of the Santa Clara Valley rancher Martin Murphy Sr. Its hotel is among the oldest still operating in the state.

James L. Sperry and John Perry opened it on August 20, 1856, as the Sperry and Perry Hotel. The timing was no accident. The giant sequoias of the Calaveras Big Trees had recently been discovered, and Murphys became a stop on the stage line that carried visitors from the railhead at Milton up to the grove; the 1971 National Register nomination says the hotel was built to serve that traffic. Its owners advertised it as fireproof. The front section was stone, separated by iron doors from a wooden dining room at the back. That confidence did not survive the fire of 1859, which swept through most of downtown and badly damaged the hotel.

Rebuilding started at once, this time with walls entirely of stone, and the hotel reopened in the spring of 1860. According to the nomination, it never burned again: stone walls carried it through the fire of 1874, and when a huge explosion and fire hit the town in 1893, the only damage was warped iron doors and shutters.

The rebuilt hotel was counted among the finest outside San Francisco, and its register reads like a roll call of the era. Copies show the signatures of Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant, John Jacob Astor, J. P. Morgan, Thomas Lipton, Horatio Alger, Henry Ward Beecher and the pioneer John Bidwell, among others; the original register is held by the Calaveras County Museum in San Andreas. The nomination and Wikipedia add Charles Bolles, better known as the stagecoach robber Black Bart, said to have signed in 1880.

Sperry sold the hotel in 1881; after two short ownerships it passed in September 1882 to G. P. Mitchler, and it became the Mitchler Hotel. Following a period of closure, a new owning family renamed it the Murphys Hotel in 1945 and ran it until 1963, when 35 members of a club of former College of the Pacific students bought it together. It has changed hands several times since. Television brought it new attention when Gordon Ramsay's Hotel Hell featured it in an episode aired on Fox on September 9, 2014, and it also appeared on public television's Road Trip with Huell Howser.

The legend

Murphys Hotel is often listed among California's haunted hotels, but the evidence behind that reputation is slim, and it is worth being clear about where each claim comes from.

The only statement from the hotel itself concerns Room 9, named the Thomas Lipton Room after the tea magnate in the register. The hotel's own description calls it the "most paranormally active room" in the building, without saying what guests have experienced there.

Everything else comes from anonymous visitor comments on a haunted-places directory, mostly posted between 2014 and 2024. They mention a playful little boy in the lobby and on the first floor; a maid from the early years called "Eleanor" who tosses small objects; a gentle male presence named "John"; and a prospector supposedly killed in a fall from the balcony, for which no record has been found. One commenter wonders whether Mark Twain, who signed the register, still drops by. The experiences described include objects moving, a closet door opening and banging shut, a hand felt on someone's back while climbing the stairs, a whisper close to a guest's ear at night, children laughing and a glass of water sliding off a dining-room table.

No dated first report, newspaper investigation or paranormal television episode has been found. Hotel Hell's visit was about running a business, not ghosts. Wikipedia's note that the hotel is reportedly haunted rests on a 2025 Secret San Francisco article. Treat the hauntings here as guest folklore rather than an established tradition.

What remains today

The 1860 hotel still stands: a two-story building of stone, with a metal roof, iron front doors and iron shutters on every window of both floors, measuring roughly 50 by 95 feet, according to the 1971 nomination, which also noted that the rooms held much of the old furniture. The historic rooms upstairs are named after guests from the register, including Lipton (9), Astor (10), Grant (12), Hearst (14), Susan B. Anthony (15), Morgan (16) and Mark Twain (19). Besides being California Historical Landmark No. 267, the hotel appears on the National Register; the nomination form dates to 1971, although the hotel's website gives 1978.

Visiting

Murphys Hotel is a working hotel with a restaurant and bar, so the simplest way to experience it is to eat there or book a night. Room 9 can be reserved by anyone curious about its reputation. No ghost tours are known. Please respect other guests and staff-only areas. Murphys lies on the old stage route to the Calaveras Big Trees, the sequoia grove whose discovery brought the stagecoaches and the hotel in the first place, and the original guest register is held by the Calaveras County Museum in San Andreas.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #71000134 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #71000134) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Murphys Hotel — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Big Trees, CA 1891 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1891 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Murphys, CA 1948 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1948 · Public domain (USGS)
6. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Sacramento, CA 1957 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1957 · Public domain (USGS)
7. Historic Rooms — Murphys Historic Hotel (official) — Murphys Historic Hotel (official
8. History — Murphys Historic Hotel (official) — Murphys Historic Hotel (official
9. Murphys Historic Hotel — HauntedPlaces.org — HauntedPlaces.org (weak source; user comments
10. 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.