Jerome, Arizona was built by copper and nearly erased by its absence. At its peak the town held fifteen thousand people on Cleopatra Hill above the Verde Valley; by the early 1950s, when the mine closed, the population had dropped below a hundred. The Jerome Grand Hotel was originally the United Verde Hospital, completed in 1926 to serve the copper company’s workforce. Five stories of reinforced concrete on the hillside, it treated three decades of mining accidents and deaths before closing in 1950 and reopening as a hotel in 1996.
The haunting centers on the elevator. In 1935, a maintenance worker died in the elevator shaft in what records describe as an accident. Since the hotel’s reopening, guests and staff have reported the elevator moving between floors with no one inside, sounding in the corridors at night. Room 32, a former patient ward, generates consistent reports from guests who arrive without prior knowledge of its reputation: a presence, sounds, objects displaced. The boiler room carries what investigators describe as a concentration that differs from the rest of the building. Ghost Adventures has documented sessions at the property, and the footage from those investigations is part of the hotel’s public record.
The Jerome Grand Hotel operates today at 200 Hill Street with rooms in the original hospital building and a restaurant on site. Jerome itself is worth the drive—its survival as a working town built around the ruins of its own boom gives it a quality that curated destinations rarely achieve. The hotel’s view of the Verde Valley is exceptional. The elevator still moves when no one calls it. Room 32 still has guests.
Story Source: www.jeromegrandhotel.net
Address: 200 Hill Street, Jerome, AZ 86331
Accessibility Rating: Booking Required — Open to visitors but requires advance reservation, ticket purchase, or tour booking.
Google Map
What Others Have Experienced
Claude Harvey, a maintenance worker found dead under the hotel’s Otis elevator in 1935, is seen by graveyard-shift staff as a shadow moving near the boiler room and laundry room. Sounds of coughing and sneezing come from the laundry room, which staff always find empty when they investigate.
— from Phoenix Ghosts
Guests report hearing children giggling, laughing, and crying from empty rooms; a boy of about four or five has been seen running the hallways and standing at the foot of occupied beds while guests sleep.
— from Phoenix Ghosts
Two psychics visiting the building separately while it was still abandoned both encountered a spirit identifying herself as the “Head Nurse,” who was upset about removal of the original dispensary desks. When the desks were moved back into the lounge area, a second psychic confirmed she was content.
— from Phoenix Ghosts
Guests have reported seeing a trio of apparitions — a male doctor carrying a clipboard, a female nurse, and a female patient in a hospital gown — wandering the halls together as if still making rounds from the hospital era.
— from Phoenix Ghosts
In 2008, a guest in Room 20 photographed what appeared to be a cat sitting on a table and looking directly at the camera; the photo is kept at the front desk. Other guests have felt the animal brush against their legs, heard purring and scratching at doors, and woken to find a depression in the bedding.
— from Phoenix Ghosts
