Jerome Grand Hotel

Jerome, Arizona, clings to the side of a mountain.

The town is built on the steep slope of Cleopatra Hill, more than five thousand feet above sea level, its houses and shops stacked on top of each other along switchback streets, looking out across the Verde Valley toward the red rocks of Sedona. In the early twentieth century, it was one of the richest copper mining towns in the world, with a population of perhaps fifteen thousand people. It was called the “wickedest town in the West.”

Then the copper ran out. The mines closed. By the 1950s, the population had dropped to a few hundred, and Jerome was well on its way to becoming a ghost town. In a sense, it became one — in more ways than one.

At the very top of the town, the highest building of all, is a big Spanish Mission-style structure of poured concrete. It was built as a hospital. Now it’s a hotel. And a lot of people say not all of its old patients have checked out.

The Hospital

The United Verde Copper Company, which owned the main mine, built the hospital in 1926 to care for its miners and their families. It opened in January 1927. It was one of the most modern hospitals in Arizona, with an X-ray machine, an operating room, a pharmacy and an elevator — an Otis, state of the art for its time.

The hospital needed to be modern. Copper mining was brutally dangerous work. Miners were crushed by falling rock, killed in explosions, burned, electrocuted, and poisoned by fumes. Many developed lung disease from years of breathing dust underground. Jerome’s hospital saw a steady stream of the injured and the dying. There were also epidemics — influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis — and the ordinary births and deaths of a mining town.

By the time the hospital closed in 1950, as the mines wound down, thousands of people had been treated there. Many of them had died there.

The Man Under the Elevator

The best-known death at the hospital is that of a maintenance man named Claude Harvey.

On April 3, 1935, according to the hotel’s history and newspaper accounts of the time, Harvey was found dead at the bottom of the elevator shaft, beneath the elevator itself. His head was crushed. His death was ruled an accident — investigators believed he had somehow become trapped beneath the car. But questions lingered. Some people at the time wondered whether he had been killed elsewhere and placed under the elevator to make it look like an accident.

The elevator still runs today. It’s the original 1926 Otis, still carrying guests up and down the five floors of the old hospital. And according to staff, Claude Harvey still rides it — or at least, something does. Guests report the elevator moving on its own, stopping at floors where no one called it. Some say they’ve seen a man in work clothes in the basement near the elevator shaft, where Harvey’s body was found.

The Empty Years

After the hospital closed in 1950, the building sat almost entirely empty for more than forty years. Jerome was nearly deserted. A caretaker lived there, but most of the building’s rooms — the wards, the operating room, the morgue — stood silent at the top of the hill.

In those years, people in the town below began to tell stories about the old hospital. They said they saw lights in the windows of rooms that had no power. They heard voices and moans. They saw figures walking the halls. Some said they heard coughing and labored breathing coming from the empty wards.

In 1994, a man named Larry Altherr bought the building and began a long restoration. In 1996, it reopened as the Jerome Grand Hotel.

The Guests Who Stay

Guests at the Jerome Grand report one of the widest ranges of ghostly experiences of any hotel I’ve researched.

They hear coughing and labored breathing in empty rooms — the sound of patients struggling with lung disease. They hear the squeak of gurney wheels rolling down the halls at night. They smell flowers, or medicine, or cigar smoke. They report a woman in white, perhaps a nurse, walking the corridors. Doors open and close. Lights switch on and off. The phone at the front desk rings from rooms that are unoccupied.

Some guests say they’ve heard a baby crying on the third floor. Others report that something sits down on the edge of their bed in the night, or that they wake up to find someone standing over them.

The hotel offers ghost tours using electromagnetic field meters and other devices. It has been featured on many paranormal television shows.

A Town of Ghosts

What I love about Jerome is that the whole town has leaned into its ghosts.

After the mines closed, artists, writers and hippies moved into the abandoned houses in the 1960s and 1970s, drawn by the cheap rent and the spectacular views. They revived the town. Today it’s a lively place full of galleries, wine-tasting rooms, restaurants and shops, many of them in buildings that once housed saloons, brothels and miners’ boarding houses. There are ghost walks every weekend.

And at the top of the hill, the old hospital still looks out over it all, as it has for nearly a century.

There’s something fitting about a hospital becoming a hotel. Both are places where strangers come and go, where people stay for a night or two, or longer, and then move on. The difference is that, in a hospital, some of the guests never leave.