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Historic haunted places in Prescott, AZ. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
5 listings shown.
ARIZONA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Violinist Stanislaus Scherzel played before silent films here from 1912, and cleaning crews after closing say they hear violin music from the empty stage. An usher once saw a man i…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
ARIZONA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The hotel's ghost, Faith, is tied to Suite 426: as the hotel tells it, her new husband left on an errand during their 1927 honeymoon and never came back, and she died in the suite.…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
ARIZONA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
In its rooming-house days dozens of lodgers died in this Whiskey Row building. Guests in Room 315 report floral perfume with no source, knocking at the door with no one there, and …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
ARIZONA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Staff say Abby Byr has occupied Room 16 for over a century, adjusting the lights and fan and switching off TV shows she dislikes. Housekeepers also hear a cat pawing inside the clo…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
ARIZONA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Arizona's oldest bar is said to host Jennie Clark, killed here in 1884, seen near the original bar as if searching for something. Staff also tell of a mortician who lost his busine…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Prescott sits at about 5,300 feet in the mountains of central Arizona, and its Wikipedia article records the sequence that made it: designated capital of the Arizona Territory in 1864, replaced for a time by Tucson, then territorial capital again from 1877 until Phoenix took the title in 1889. It began as a frontier gold and silver mining town — gold was struck at Hassayampa Creek, just south of town, in 1863, and Fort Whipple was established the same year — and its article calls it a stereotypical "wild west" town of the late 19th century, with Doc Holliday and Virgil Earp among its famous residents before the O.K. Corral. The 2020 census put its population at 45,827.
Fire is the other documented author of modern Prescott. The wooden town burned several times, in its article's account, and was finally rebuilt in brick. The fire everyone in Prescott still dates things by is the Great Fire of July 14, 1900, which consumed Whiskey Row — the block of saloons on South Montezuma Street facing Courthouse Plaza — in a single night, in the ghost-tour operator's collected account. The Row was rebuilt in brick and stone, and the buildings that rose from that fire are the bars, hotels and theatres the haunted Prescott of today walks between: the Palace Saloon, rebuilt in 1901; the Hotel Vendome, built in 1917 a half-block from the Square; and the Hassayampa Inn, opened in 1927 on Gurley Street.
This section is folklore — reported by the hotels, the tour operators and the haunted-hotels lists, and never asserted as fact here.
Two Prescott legends have names. At the Hassayampa Inn, the name is Faith. Historic Hotels of America's haunted-hotels account tells it as legend: soon after the inn opened in 1927, a young bride named Faith and her husband checked in on their honeymoon; the husband went out to buy cigarettes and never returned; after waiting nearly three days, Faith is said to have taken her own life in despair. Guests and employees have since reported a young woman crying at the end of a bed, a figure in a pink gown in the hallway, cold spots in the honeymoon suite, and kitchen burners going out on their own. The account itself frames all of this as legend — no source in this guide's material documents Faith as a historical person, and this guide does not present her as one.
At the Hotel Vendome, the name is Abby. Tour listings for Prescott's ghost walks report that Room 16 is said to be occupied by Abby and her cat Noble, neither of whom is said ever to have left, and guests report sightings and sounds tied to that story. The Prescott Ghost Tour operator goes further in its own billing, calling the Vendome "the most haunted place in town" — that is the operator's claim, quoted here as its claim. The Vendome's own website, notably, tells a straight documented history and publishes no ghost lore at all; its story below keeps that separation.
The Palace Saloon's reported activity is anonymous by comparison: former patrons who "still seem to show up," in the ghost tour's phrase, in a bar whose documented patrons included the Earps and Doc Holliday. A claim about a room, a claim about a bride, and a saloon full of unnamed regulars — that is Prescott's folklore roster, and each entry below is labelled with whose telling it is.
Hountix lists 5 places in Prescott, AZ. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The Vendome's documented skeleton comes from its own website, and it is a good one. Built in 1917 to meet Prescott's housing demand — people arriving from the East for mining work and for the dry desert air, in the hotel's account — it opened with 31 rooms and 16 bathrooms, and the Prescott Journal Miner called it "the classiest place in town." A meticulous overhaul in 1983 preserved even the numbers on the guestroom doors, the hotel says, and today it houses 20 guest rooms with private bathrooms at 230 South Cortez Street, a half-block from Courthouse Square, with an upstairs veranda, clawfoot tubs in some bathrooms, and the BarVendome beer and wine bar off the lobby.
Against that record, the haunting is entirely other people's telling — and this guide keeps it that way. The hotel's own site publishes no ghost lore: no Abby, no Room 16, no haunting claim of any kind appears in its collected pages. The Abby story reaches this guide through Prescott's ghost-tour listings, which report Room 16 as said to be haunted by Abby and her cat Noble, and through the Prescott Ghost Tour, which bills the Vendome as "the most haunted place in town" and calls its reputation "earned, documented, and deeply unsettling" — the operator's words, not this guide's finding. Wikipedia's List of reportedly haunted locations in the United States also carries the Vendome in its Arizona entries, which is this story's Wikipedia anchor alongside the hotel's own first-party history: the place is real, its 1917 history is documented by the business itself, and its haunting exists on the record as a reported claim. Whether Room 16 holds anything but a good story is a question the hotel, to its credit, leaves to its guests.
*Website: http://vendomehotel.com/*
The Hassayampa Inn has its own Wikipedia article, and it anchors the documented half of this story. The article records a three-story hotel built in 1927 at 122 East Gurley Street, designed by El Paso architects Trost and Trost in a blend of Spanish Colonial Revival and Italian Renaissance Revival styles, built after local residents formed the Hassayampa Hotel Company in 1924 and raised the money by selling shares — a project the Prescott Kiwanis Club later resurrected when it stalled. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, with the register calling it the best-preserved and largest example of its stylistic period in Prescott, and it joined Historic Hotels of America in 1996. Its own website adds the living detail: 67 rooms, the Peacock Room restaurant, a rooftop terrace, and its original 1927 elevator, in the heart of the downtown historic district.
Historic Hotels of America's haunted-hotels account, summarized in the city legend section above, reports the 1927 bride, the husband who never returned from buying cigarettes, the pink gown, the crying at the foot of beds, the flowers, and the kitchen burners that go out — all attributed to "countless hotel guests and employees" over the years, in that account's words. The Prescott Ghost Tour makes the Hassayampa its final stop and calls it "Prescott's most elegant ghost story" and "the story that stays with people long after they leave town." Elegant, durable, and — on the evidence in this guide's material — unproven: no historical record in these sources confirms a Faith Summers, and the story is published here as the folklore the inn's reputation runs on, not as a death this guide can document.
*Website: http://www.hassayampainn.com/*
The Palace is the one Prescott attraction whose own Wikipedia article is also a haunted-locations anchor, and its documented history needs no ghost to hold a reader. The article records the saloon opened in 1877 on Whiskey Row — D.C. Thorne built it on a lot he had bought in 1867, three years after Prescott's founding — as one of more than 40 bars standing side by side on the Row, with Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp and Doc Holliday among its patrons in the 1870s before they headed south to Tombstone. It burned in 1883, was rebuilt and reopened in 1884 with the hand-carved Brunswick bar, and burned again in the Great Fire of 1900 — the fire in which, the article and the saloon's own telling agree, patrons carried that bar across the street to safety and kept serving from it. The present building rose in 1901. The article's verdict is the saloon's own billing, and it is documented: the oldest business and the oldest bar operating in Arizona.
Today's Palace, at 120 South Montezuma Street, is a working steakhouse and saloon — period-costumed staff, the original bar still in use, lunch and dinner daily, in its own site's description. Its own collected pages tell that 1877-and-the-fire history proudly and publish no ghost lore; the haunting attached to it in this guide comes from the Prescott Ghost Tour, which lists the Palace first among its stops — "A few of the former patrons still seem to show up" — and from the reported-activity tradition the tour trades in. That is the correct proportion for the Palace: a documented 1877 saloon that survived two fires and Prohibition, whose reported ghosts are, fittingly, its own former regulars. The bar they carried out of the fire is still there. Whether any of them still lean on it is folklore, and is labelled so here.
*Website: http://thepalacerestaurantandsaloon.com/*