{"id":2242,"slug":"finlen-hotel-butte-montana","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Finlen is the hotel copper built when the copper was running out. Butte's postwar slowdown had emptied the market, and the nine-story French Second Empire tower James Finlen raised on Broadway — modeled in miniature on New York's Hotel Astor — opened New Year's Day 1924 as one of only two substantial buildings the Richest Hill on Earth put up that decade. The town was contracting; the hotel argued otherwise.","Finlen money was Butte money — Miles Finlen came out of the Irish famine to mine the Buffalo, the Ramsdell-Parrott, the Minnie Healy, and his son James spent the fortune on the mansard tower that still crowns the district. The second tower, begun in 1927, stopped mid-rise when the Crash came — the unfinished ambition built into the skyline, a hotel that wears the copper bust in its bones.","The Finlen stayed the Mining City's address through everything — the labor wars, the Berkeley Pit eating the town's east side, the long decline and the preservation revival. The 1924 tower still operates beside its mid-century motor-inn wing, the Astor's miniature standing in the National Landmark district of the city that mined itself hollow — the grand hotel that outlasted the copper that paid for it.","The Finlen Hotel is the archive's copper-crown file — James Finlen's 1924 Second Empire tower on Butte's Broadway, modeled on the Astor, its second tower frozen unfinished by the Crash."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["The Finlen Hotel is the archive's Richest-Hill file — the 1924 tower built at the start of Butte's copper bust, a mansard-roofed Hotel Astor miniature that outlasted the mining economy it was bet on.","A hotel built against the bust keeps its tower — the file's suggestion being that the Finlen's hold is the second tower: the 1927 extension the Crash stopped, standing unfinished beside the one that opened."]}],"name":"Finlen Hotel","aliases":[],"type":"HOTEL","type_label":"Hotel","cats":["HAUNTED_PLACE","HISTORIC_HOTEL"],"groups":["hauntings","lodging"],"desc":"Butte’s 1924 tower—the Copper King’s city hotel.","full_desc":"Finlen Hotel is a hotel in Butte, Montana, built in 1924. Butte’s 1924 tower—the Copper King’s city hotel. It sits in the archive under haunted places and historic hotels. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend and 1 documented fact — documented record and retelling kept side by side. It still takes guests. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.","address":null,"city":"Butte","county":null,"state":"Montana","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":48.289615,"lon":-112.833777,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":1924,"year_opened":1924,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":"Hotel","research_notes":"Historic haunted hotel batch; VERIFY task auto-queued.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":59.4,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":1609,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Reported a woman’s figure and a man in the lobby. A hotel in Butte, Montana with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. Sources including 'Finlen Hotel' keep the claim in circulation. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.","evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","evidence_label":"Local folklore","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Finlen Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlen_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]},{"id":1610,"type":"REPORTED_ANOMALIES","description":"Reported footsteps and a presence in the upper floors. Finlen Hotel, a hotel in Butte, Montana, has kept the story in circulation longer than most of its guest registers. It's anecdotal evidence in the strictest sense — stories, repeated, unresolved. The anomalies are minor and stubborn — which is exactly why they're still in the record.","evidence":"ANECDOTAL","evidence_label":"Anecdotal","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Finlen Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlen_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"Opened 1924 on the earlier hotel’s site; hosted presidents and Copper King-era guests. Finlen Hotel's documented history in Butte, Montana is the record the rest of the file stands on. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The record appears in 'Finlen Hotel'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1924","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Finlen Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlen_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Reported a woman’s figure and a man in the lobby. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. The report is preserved in sources like 'Finlen Hotel'. Every community keeps one story like this; this is theirs.","earliest":null,"evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","source":{"name":"Finlen Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlen_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Operating or preserved hotel property; public areas vary—check directly for tours or overnight stays.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Finlen Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlen_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Hotel Finlen","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Finlen","desc":"Historic hotel in Butte, Montana","extract":"Hotel Finlen is a historic hotel in Butte, Montana, United States, built in 1924.","img":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Hotel_Finlen%2C_Butte%2C_Montana_%2871897612%29.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","score":89,"lat":46.01284,"lon":-112.53558},"counts":{"claims":2,"history":1,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}