Colonial Williamsburg was putting travelers up in 1750. The Queen Mary did not carry a paying passenger until her maiden voyage in 1936. Both are on the same 25 names this year, because Historic Hotels of America published its 2026 Top 25 Most Haunted Hotels list on Monday, drawn from a membership of more than 300 properties.
The group says it picked the 25 on “the quality and quantity of their ghost lore, their openness to sharing these accounts with guests, and the Halloween-themed experiences they are offering in 2026,” which is a polite way of saying a hotel has to be willing to talk about it. “More than merely ghost stories, these enduring legends and folklore contribute to the unique character of the inns, resorts, and hotels inducted into Historic Hotels of America,” said Lawrence Horwitz, the organization’s executive vice president.
The Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe Del Gave Richard Matheson a Novel
Hotel del Coronado’s entry rests on Kate Morgan, who died on the hotel’s steps in 1892 and is attached to Room 3327. The list also credits more than 400 documented anomalies in Room 3519, which is a specific enough number that somebody has been keeping a ledger.
What the hotel does not advertise is the book. Richard Matheson checked in for several weeks and dictated impressions into a tape recorder while imagining himself as his own protagonist, and the novel that came out of it, Bid Time Return, is set entirely at the Del. It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1976 and became Somewhere in Time four years later. The man who wrote I Am Legend and Hell House used this hotel as a writing room.
The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, photographed around 1886. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe Crescent Was a Fake Cancer Hospital
The 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, offers two regulars: Theodora, who tidies guests’ belongings, and the man the hotel still calls Dr. Norman Baker, who turns up in a purple shirt. Baker is the one with a paper trail. He bought the building in 1937 with no medical training of any kind, called it a castle in the air on his own radio broadcasts, and sold cancer patients a cure that came down largely to drinking the local spring water. Federal prosecutors charged him with mail fraud in 1940 and he served four years. An excavation on the grounds in 2019 turned up his medicine bottles.
Every hotel on this list has a lady in white or a boy on a staircase. One of them sold dying people spring water and went to prison for it, and no flashlight is required to find that floor.
The Queen Mary, permanently docked at Long Beach, California. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsArizona Got Three Spots
The Queen Mary closes the list as its newest entry at 1936, carrying Watertight Door 13, a Lady in White and what the write-up calls a paranormal vortex, which is the kind of claim that keeps 500 hours of ghost-hunting television in business. Arizona takes three of the 25 with Tubac Golf Resort and Spa, the Hassayampa Inn in Prescott and The Hermosa Inn in Paradise Valley. New Orleans sends Hotel Monteleone and its two best-known residents, a boy named Maurice who comforts his grieving mother and a housekeeping spirit the hotel calls Mrs. Clean. Annapolis contributes a doomed pair, The Bride and Navy Captain Charles Campbell. Colonial Williamsburg has phantom bellhops and, allegedly, Thomas Jefferson.
Salem’s Hawthorne Hotel, open since 1925, is on the list as well, in the one town in the country where a hotel does not have to work for the association. Salem is also where the Warren Occult Museum now keeps Annabelle. Four of the 25 opened in 1927 alone. The criteria reward a hotel that leans in, which makes this less a ranking of hauntings than a ranking of front desks willing to hand over a key and a story.