This Nevada Hotel Is Said To Be One Of The Most Haunted Places In America

In the high desert of Nevada, against the backdrop of gray hills and the expanse of Western sky, looms the old Mizpah Hotel. When it was built, in 1907, it was an oasis of luxury by Nevadan standards. It was the tallest building in the state, with a rare electric elevator, and the rooms had hot and cold running water, along with carefully selected oak furniture. In the 1940s, the lower saloon was converted into a casino.

As might be expected, strange things have happened in the Mizpah Hotel. In 1940, on the night of a major election, Senator Key Pittman suffered a major heart attack in his room at the Mizpah and died. According to the legend told by the hotel, his supporters laid him in a bathtub filled with ice and waited for the results to be counted before they called the hospital, ensuring that they would decide who succeeded him.

But there's another story, even more eerie than the Pittman tale, that has earned the Mizpah Hotel its modern reputation. A ghost haunts the Mizpah: the mysterious Red Lady.

Travel Nevada recounts that the Lady in Red is believed to have been a prostitute who lived in room 502, on the top floor of the hotel. The sophisticated Mizpah, with its brass fixtures and elegant oak tables, was still a frontier hotel, a bridge between modern Nevada and the Old West; the management seem to have been indifferent to their rooms being kept by ladies of the night. In any event, the Red Lady was choked and then stabbed by a jealous ex-lover, just in the doorway of her suite — or so the story goes.

Visitors to room 502, or to the Lady-in-Red-themed adjoining rooms next door, have long reported eerie, uneasy feelings as they approach the spot of the lady's murder. Men have reported hearing a disembodied voice in the elevator, whispering sweetly, "Hey, you." According to Buzzfeed, she may not be alone: a bevy of other ghosts reportedly haunt the rooms and corridors of the Mizpah. Two miners thump away in the basement. Unseen children giggle and run on the fourth floor. Perhaps the Mizpah really is the most haunted place in America.