Jerome Grand Hotel

If you have any curiosity in the paranormal (even if just to disprove it) the Jerome Grand Hotel is a place you must visit. It sits atop a hill, emitting a menacing glow over the town of Jerome. There are many ghost stories from the gruesome events that happened both in this building and the town itself.

Jerome was once a bustling Western outpost that provided Arizona with one of it’s famous “5C’s”, in this case: copper. This historic landmark was built in 1926 as a hospital and was considered one of the best in the region at the time, as it was equipped to perform difficult procedures.

The hospital was needed to support the many bodily injuries the copper miners faced from the extremely hazardous work environment. Some injuries were so severe they required their limbs to be amputated. It is said that the hospital installed drains to ease the flow of blood and improve sanitation as this was a fairly common occurrence.

The company who owned the mine (United Verde Copper Company, later became the Phelps Dodge Mining Corporation) also owned the hospital and was in charge of the record keeping. Due to the conflict of interest, there is no definitive way to know how many people truly died here.

We drove up the hill to Jerome, which sits around a mile about sea level, and headed straight for the hotel. Prepare for a winding road up.

The hotel is intimidating even during the daytime

Before the hospital was purchased in the ’90s and transformed into a hotel, it sat dormant for decades, similar to the rest of this living ghost town. The new founder restored the building to its 1920s glory days.

The hotel is very reminiscent of The Shining and the hallways instill an uncanny sense of fear and dread. If you are brave try walking the halls alone at night.

We stayed in Room 22 (shown above) on the second floor. While not as haunted as the third floor, we still had our fair share of weird experiences.

The room itself is a time capsule to a bygone era, filled with items that blast you back to the ’20s. Everything from the floral curtains to the wooden furniture feels very at place for the time period.

In case you can’t see it in the video above, here is a screencap from the hallway:

Can you see it?

The photo shows a silhouette in the hallway, one that appears to be a woman in a white dress with long black hair staring back at us through the peephole. I initially shrugged this off as “just a smudge”, but if you look closely on the video you can see she is visible from multiple angles. This wasn’t the only strange occurrence that night.

Before going to bed, I made sure to close the bathroom door. The clock slowly ticks away at night, the pendulum rhythmically swinging back and forth in this eerily quiet place. Feeling anxious and uneasy throughout the night, I woke up around 3am to check my surroundings and saw that the bathroom door was wide open.

I woke up my wife, Angy, and asked if she had been the one to open the door. She told me “yes”, so I thought nothing of it and went back to sleep. When I asked her about it again the next day she admitted she lied and hadn’t opened the door, as she didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.

We had something else strange occur in the hallway at night. While casually walking around and looking at the decorations, two people called us over to check out what they were looking at. The spot they showed us right in the middle of the hallway (near the cabinet) felt as though it was pulling us down to the ground, almost as if there was extra gravity. The air also felt colder than the surrounding areas.

Meanwhile on floor 3, our friends stayed in Room 32, alleged to be one of the most haunted in the entire hotel. They had their own weird experiences, including the sudden inability to move and hearing strange noises throughout the night.

Would you stay at this hotel? Put your skeptic or paranormal cap on and give it a go. You can book a room from the Jerome Grand Hotel website which also contains some more interesting history. You can also find more info in person at the Jerome Historical Society. Let us know how it goes!