True Haunted Hotel Stories Uncover True Ghostly Encounters 4 Eerie TRUE Haunted Hotel Stories

America’s 25 Most Haunted Hotels and the Rooms That Don’t Stay Quiet

If someone asks, “What is the most haunted hotel room in the world?” they usually expect a neat, one word answer. There isn’t one. Instead, there’s a list. You see it recycled over and over across travel articles and ghost blogs: America’s 25 Most Haunted Hotels, The 12 Most Haunted Hotels in America to Visit If You Dare, 13 of the Most Haunted Hotels in America, Stories From 15 of the Most Haunted Hotels, These 12 Haunted Hotels Have Chilling Real-Life Ghost Stories.

If you look closely, the same places keep popping up:

• The old roadside properties where people used to disappear.
• The historic hotels built over old hospitals or sanatoriums.
• The “beautiful” wedding venues that quietly have more stories about tragic brides than happy ones.

And always, always, certain rooms. The most haunted room in the hotel. The room staff warn each other about. The room that guests ask for on purpose or beg to be moved out of in the middle of the night.

The questions pile up:

• “Are hotel hauntings based on real events?”
• “Which hotels are actually haunted in real life?”
• “Can you book a room in a haunted hotel and actually stay there?”

The short answers: yes, yes, and yes. The longer answer is the rest of this story.

Haunted, Hallowed, or Just Wrong: Hotels with Bizarre Histories

Behind almost every haunted hotel, there’s a story that doesn’t sit right. A suicide. A murder. A missing guest. A fire. A bride who never made it down the aisle. A child who never checked out. A war. Some of these places were once hospitals, boarding houses, sanitariums, or even retreats for sick families. Then they became “historic hotels,” which sounds nicer on a brochure. But the walls don’t forget what they saw.

So you get:

• Rooms where people hung themselves from ceiling pipes back when nobody talked about depression.
• Rooms where a jealous lover shot someone and then turned the gun on themselves.
• Rooms where long term residents died alone and weren’t discovered for days.

Those rooms don’t just get cleaned. They get remembered. And sometimes they get renamed by the living:

• “Don’t put anyone in that room unless we’re sold out.”
• “That’s the room the crying woman likes.”
• “That’s the one where the phone rings at 3 a.m. and nobody’s on the other end.”

Those are the real haunted hotel stories. The ones staff share in whispers and guests accidentally stumble into.

Hawthorne Hotel (1925): Haunted Rooms 621 and 325

Take a classic example: Hawthorne Hotel, built in 1925 in Salem, Massachusetts.
It looks dignified on the outside, but ask around and you’ll keep hearing the same room numbers: 325, 612, 621.

Guests in room 325 talk about:

• Little hands tugging at their blankets at night.
• The feeling of someone standing beside the bed, watching, but never quite seen.
• A child’s crying in the middle of the night cut off mid sobs when the lights are turned on.

Room 621 and the sixth floor in general have a “woman in white” people spot walking down the hall, heading toward a door, and then just… not getting there. She just vanishes. Some guests book those rooms on purpose, hoping for paranormal encounters, ghostly touches, or at least a creepy hotel story to take home. Others walk in and instantly feel like they’ve stepped into someone else’s space.
When people ask, “Are hotel hauntings based on real events?” Places like that are why it’s hard to say no.

Hotel Congress in Tucson, Arizona: Rooms 242 and 214

Then there’s Hotel Congress in Tucson, Arizona. They don’t hide from their ghosts; they advertise them. You hear about rooms 212, 214, 219, 220, and especially 242. Room 242 has the classic “lady in white” tied to it, and depending on who you talk to, it’s linked to a suicide or a woman who died tragically long ago. Guests talk about:

• Doors locking themselves from the inside.
• Something sitting on the edge of the bed.
• Footsteps in the hall when nobody’s booked nearby.

So yes if you’re wondering, “Can you book a room in a haunted hotel?” You absolutely can.
In many of these places, you can even ask for specific haunted hotel rooms, join ghost tours, and pay extra for full on paranormal investigations. The real question isn’t can you. It’s should you.

Dare to know the truth? Tap now to unveil 10 terrifying, true facts about the world’s most haunted places if you think you can handle it.

The Stanley Hotel and Room 237: The Locked Room That Isn’t

Another name that never leaves the conversation: the Stanley Hotel. Everybody knows it because of The Shining.
People love to ask:

• “Is the Stanley Hotel really haunted?”
• “What happened in Room 237 at the Stanley Hotel?”
• “Why are rooms like 304 or 237 even considered haunted?”

The funny thing is, in real life it’s room 217 at the Stanley that has the strongest stories. A chambermaid was horribly injured in an explosion there, and ever since, guests report weirdly domestic hauntings: clothes being folded, bags rearranged, couples who aren’t married waking up in separate beds like some invisible housekeeper didn’t approve. Room 237 is more of a film legend changed for the movie, then burned into pop culture. But that’s the thing: once a number becomes famous, it becomes a magnet.
When people walk into a room labeled 237, or 304, or any number that’s known for ghost stories, they bring all that fear and expectation with them. Sometimes, what they bring wakes something up.

Story 2: Room 237 – The Quiet Door That Wasn’t Locked

One reader told me about staying in a mountain hotel that “felt like a cheaper cousin of the Stanley.”
They were a skeptic. They made jokes at the front desk about haunted hotels when they got assigned room 237. They were excited to have a creepy number. The elevator creaked, the hallway mirrors warped the light a little bit, the usual old hotel stuff. Nothing dramatic. The first weird moment was at the door. They swiped the keycard, but before it beeped, the handle clicked and sagged down on its own like someone on the other side had just unlocked it. They shrugged it off.

Inside, it was all the little things:

• The suitcase zipper kept inching itself open.
• The bathroom light flickered in a slow, steady pattern that felt almost deliberate.
• Their phone alarm jumped from 7:00 a.m. to 3:07 a.m. for no reason they could explain.

They fixed it, went to bed, double checked that the deadbolt and safety latch were locked. Sometime later, they woke up to the sound of the door handle thrashing. Not a gentle test. A full, rattling, angry attempt to open it. They stared at the digital clock. 3:07 a.m. The deadbolt, they swear, made this heavy, metallic click. Like it slid open. But the door didn’t move. The latch stayed in place. When they finally got up, the latch was icy cold to the touch, colder than the rest of the metal in the room. And the little hotel notepad on the desk had been moved, straightened, the pen laid across it perfectly. No dramatic message. Just that quietly unsettling feeling that something had been there, waiting. They checked out early. They didn’t argue, they didn’t complain. They just left. And then they wrote to me. “Are haunted hotels safe to stay in?” they asked. “Because whatever was in that room knew exactly how locks work.”

The Last Call from Room 304 – A True Real Haunted Hotel Story

Now we get to Room 304. The story that made me stop reading halfway through and just sit there feeling watched by my own walls. The subject line in the email was: “The Last Call from Room 304: Real Hotel Hauntings and Terrifying True Stories”. No fluff. Just that. The guy who wrote it worked night audit at a fairly normal looking, slightly old hotel. The kind that shows up in lists about “haunted hotels in America” without being as famous as the Stanleys or the big historic spots. Officially, all the rooms were usable except a couple listed as “maintenance only.” Unofficially, everyone on staff knew that 304 was weird. Housekeeping hated going in there alone. The door would be unlocked when it shouldn’t be. The bathroom lights had a habit of flicking on by themselves. Worst of all, guests in that room had complained about:

• The in room phone ringing exactly once at 3:04 a.m.
• No one being on the line when they answered.
• Or a woman’s voice saying, “Don’t hang up,” and then silence.

After enough bad reviews and one guest leaving in the middle of the night, management quietly stopped assigning 304 unless the hotel was overbooked. Eventually, they marked it out of order. On the night this happened, 304 was blocked in the system. Nobody checked in. The keycard for it sat in a locked drawer. Around 2:50 a.m., the night auditor let’s call him Matt was at the front desk, doing paperwork, running reports, trying not to fall asleep. The internal phone rang. He glanced at the display.
ROOM 304. He stared so long it almost stopped ringing. You know that feeling when your brain just refuses to process something because it’s too wrong? That. He answered. “Front desk,” he said. No reply. Just a faint hiss, like a dead TV channel. “Hello? Front desk. Are you calling from 304? That room isn’t… we don’t have anybody checked in there.” More quiet. Then, in this distant, dragged out voice: “Don’t… hang… up.” He told me it didn’t sound threatening. It sounded desperate. While he was on the call, he checked the system. 304: blocked, vacant, zero nights, zero guests, zero keycards. He checked the third–floor hallway camera: no movement. The door to 304 was closed and still. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Do you need help? Are you hurt?” Silence for a long time. Then the sound of running water started bleeding through the line like a bath filling somewhere close to the receiver.
Then three words, very quiet: “Too… late… now.” Click. The line went dead.

Stepping into the Most Haunted Room in the Hotel

If this were a movie, this is the part where you’d be yelling at the screen. Because of course he went up there. He grabbed the skeleton key and a flashlight not even the good kind, just the weak plastic one and took the stairs. He said the third floor hallway felt wrong the second he stepped out. Not just quiet. Hotels are always quiet at three in the morning. This was more like the whole building was holding its breath. As he walked down the hallway, every door looked the same except one. The door to 304 wasn’t standing open or anything obvious like that. It just had its handle turned a little bit down, like someone inside had just let go. He knew the room was supposed to be double locked. He tried the handle without using the key. The door opened. Inside, the room was dark except for the faint red glow of the digital clock on the nightstand. The time read 3:04. He called out, “Front desk, I’m coming in,” because that’s what you’re supposed to do, even when you’re terrified. No answer. The bed was made, perfectly. The TV unplugged. No suitcases, no shoes, no clothes, no sign that a human being had been in there for days. The bathroom door was half open. The phone on the nightstand caught his eye. Its cord was twisted tight around the base, like someone had grabbed it, spun, and then dropped it. Like a panic gesture frozen in place. Against his better judgment, he picked it up and hit redial. No dial tone. Just that same hiss. Then the sound of water again only louder this time, like the receiver was being held right above a filling bathtub. He walked into the bathroom. The tub was totally dry. The faucet was off.
But when he looked in the mirror, he swore his reflection moved a fraction of a second too late, like he was watching a delayed video of himself, not the real thing. That was his line. He stepped back, left the bathroom, left the room, locked the door with the skeleton key, and went straight back down to the lobby without stopping. He printed out the call record from the system that showed an internal call from 304 to the front desk at 2:59 a.m., lasting just over two minutes. He stapled it into the log. He didn’t sleep when he got home. The next morning, he told his manager everything. They pulled the security footage. On camera, Matt walks down the third floor hallway, slows down, stops several doors before 304, stands there for a second, and then turns around. He never appears at 304’s door. The door never moves. No video of him going in. No video of him coming out. Later that day, they opened room 304 with two people present. The dust on the dresser was undisturbed. The bed was still made. The phone cord was neatly coiled not twisted. But the printed call record from the night before was still stapled into the logbook downstairs. So when people ask, “What are the scariest true hotel ghost stories?”
For me, it’s not the ones with screaming or flying objects. It’s the ones where time, tech, and physical evidence don’t agree on what happened.

Why Certain Room Numbers – Like 304 and 237 – Stay Haunted

People want logic. They ask:
The truth isn’t neat, but it’s consistent. Certain rooms have:

• A violent or sudden death in their history.
• A missing person tied to them.
• Years and years of repeated stories about the same sounds, the same times, the same sensations.

Those numbers get whispered about. They get written down. They get posted on Reddit and in travel articles and on sites like mine. And once a room has a reputation, it doesn’t go away. Energy builds. Attention feeds it. Every new guest walks in primed for paranormal activity in hotels, and sometimes, whatever’s already there wakes up a little more each time someone says, “I heard this room is haunted.”

How to Tell If Your Hotel Room Is Haunted (And What You Can Do)

People don’t just want stories. They want survival tips.
They ask:

• “How to tell if your hotel room is haunted?”
• “Which haunted hotels offer ghost tours or investigations?”
• “Are haunted hotels safe to stay in?”

Signs your room might not be entirely yours:

• Cold spots or weirdly warm patches that don’t match the vents or windows.
• The feeling that someone just walked past you when nobody did.
• The phone ringing once in the middle of the night with silence or strange sounds on the other end.
• Doors, closets, or bathroom lights changing state when you know you left them the other way.

Haunted hotels in America and around the world have started embracing this stuff. A lot of them offer ghost tours, overnight ghost hunts, full paranormal investigation packages. You can book haunted hotel rooms on purpose if that’s your thing. Are they “safe”? In the normal sense no serial killers hiding under your bed probably. In the spiritual sense… it depends on what you believe, and what you carry home with you.

If you ever feel seriously uncomfortable in a room, you’re allowed to:

• Go downstairs and ask for a new room. You’d be surprised how often staff quietly agree and don’t ask many questions.
• Speak out loud and say you don’t want company. It sounds silly until you’ve tried it, but lots of people swear it helps.
• Check out. No content, no TikTok, no blog post, no “I survived the most haunted hotel room in the world” story is worth ignoring a gut feeling that’s screaming at you to leave.

Real Haunted Hotel Stories That Are True

So, back to those questions that started all this:

• What is the most haunted hotel room in the world?

There’s no single winner, just a growing list of contenders: 217 at the Stanley, 237 in our collective nightmares, 242 at Hotel Congress, 325 and 621 at Hawthorne, and countless 304s scattered across real haunted hotels.

• Are hotel hauntings based on real events?

Again and again, when you scratch at the surface, you find a real death, a real tragedy, or at least a very old story everyone in the building knows but doesn’t put on the website.

• Which hotels are actually haunted in real life?

More than you think. Anywhere that shows up in those “most haunted hotels” and “true haunted hotel stories” lists has earned its place with years of guest reports.

• Can you book a room in a haunted hotel?

Yes. Sometimes you even pay extra for it.

• What are the scariest true hotel ghost stories?

For me, it’s not always the loudest or bloodiest ones. It’s the quiet ones. The elevator that opens by itself. The door that unlocks on camera but never moves. The call that comes from a room that no longer exists in the system.

• Is the Stanley Hotel really haunted? What happened in Room 237?

The Stanley is famous for a reason. Room 217 is the real nerve center, with a documented explosion and decades of stories of a lingering maid. Room 237 is the film’s twisted reflection of that, proof that sometimes fiction hooks onto something very real and amplifies it.

• Why are rooms like 304 or 237 considered haunted?

Because something happened there or enough people are convinced something did and the stories never stopped. Rooms remember.

• Which haunted hotels offer ghost tours or investigations?

Plenty of the big names do: the ones on all those “most haunted hotels” lists, the historic places, the properties proud enough of their ghosts to make them part of the brand.

• Are haunted hotels safe to stay in?

Physically? Usually. Spiritually, emotionally, psychologically… that’s between you and whatever is waiting in the dark when you turn the lights off.

As for room 304?

The hotel eventually changed its number during a renovation. They shuffled the floor, rebuilt some walls, called it something else entirely. On paper, room 304 doesn’t exist there anymore. But if you stay in that building whatever name it’s going by now and you wake up around 3 a.m. to the phone ringing just once, and the display on the handset is strangely blank, and a faint voice whispers, “Don’t hang up”… Remember this story. Because sometimes, the last call from room 304 isn’t someone asking for help. It’s something making sure you know: You’re not the only one in the room.