FRENCH LICK AND WEST BADEN
Hotel — French Lick, Indiana
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/french-lick-and-west-baden-french-lick-indiana/

The Pluto Water resorts—the dome that was the eighth wonder.

French Lick and West Baden is a hotel in French Lick, Indiana. The Pluto Water resorts—the dome that was the eighth wonder. HauntHunt files it with local folklore and haunted places. Its accounts name only a collective — the resort ghosts. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 2 legends, 1 documented fact and 1 named or described presence — documented record and retelling kept side by side. It still takes guests.

In 1902 a hotel went up in the southern Indiana hills in under a year, on a budget of $414,000, and opened billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World — a circular palace capped by a dome 200 feet across and 100 feet tall, the largest free-span dome anywhere until the Houston Astrodome took the title sixty years later. That was West Baden Springs, Lee Sinclair's answer to the fire that had just destroyed his earlier hotel. A mile down the road, its rival was doing well enough to get into national politics: Thomas Taggart, former mayor of Indianapolis and Democratic national chairman, had bought the French Lick Springs Hotel in 1901 and made it an unofficial party headquarters.
Both hotels grew out of the same sulfur water. Dr. William Bowles opened the first French Lick inn in 1845; Dr. John Lane answered with a resort at Mile Lick a mile north in the 1850s, later renamed West Baden after Wiesbaden. For a century the two towns sold the same proposition — French Lick bottling its laxative-famous Pluto Water, West Baden pouring Sprudel — while the clientele took the waters and, increasingly, took the gambling.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
Sinclair's architect for the dome was Harrison Albright of West Virginia, who accepted the one-year deadline; the engineering was Illinois Steel's. The atrium enclosed two rings of rooms beneath the dome, and the guest book ran to presidents, gangsters, and everyone between. Taggart's French Lick hosted the 1931 governors' conference at which Franklin Roosevelt gathered the support that nominated him.
The Depression ended both palaces. West Baden closed in 1932 and spent decades as a Jesuit seminary and then a college campus; French Lick survived diminished. A massive restoration in the 2000s returned both hotels to operation under one resort, and the dome holds a National Historic Landmark designation.
One detail belongs in this file: during restoration in the 1990s, workers found a hidden circular room above the dome, reachable only by trap door, containing eleven angels painted directly on the steel — unsigned, undated, earliest graffiti over the paint reading 1918. The credit goes by legend to the DeJaco brothers' church-mural crew, or to a Jesuit seminarian who took the secret to his grave. Nobody knows.

WHAT IS REPORTED
French Lick's roster is led, fittingly, by management. Staff accounts put Thomas Taggart at the service elevator — musts of tobacco smell, the car reportedly answering summons on its own when the house is busy — and report him riding a horse through the ballroom or down the halls. The ballroom is also said to hold parties staff hear through closed doors when the room is empty. A red stain in a guest-room bathtub is attributed to a bride's suicide; the sixth floor files shadows, footsteps, laughter, and calls to the front desk from unoccupied rooms; a spectral bellhop has appeared in photographs of the bell stand. Room 2439's door has opened and closed itself for witnesses in the hall.
West Baden reports are gentler: the smell of roses arriving on the sixth floor at evening — attributed to Lillian Sinclair, the owner's wife, who bathed with rose petals — and a quiet spirit on the stairs and in the dining room said to kneel and untie guests' shoes. Management, the record shows, declines to comment on any of it. Crime novelist Michael Koryta grew up near the ruins and turned the atmosphere into a novel and a filmed-on-location movie, which is the most productive haunting in the file.

FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] apparition: Reported figures in the dome and the halls. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. It circulates as local folklore — the kind communities keep rather than verify. Whatever walks there, it walks often enough to keep the reports coming.
  source: French Lick / West Baden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Lick_Resort)
· [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The resort dead are said to linger. The presences go by the resort ghosts in the file. French Lick and West Baden, a hotel in French Lick, Indiana, has kept the story in circulation longer than most of its guest registers. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. 'French Lick / West Baden' carries the account. The name travels further than the proof; the sightings keep renewing the lease.
  source: French Lick / West Baden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Lick_Resort)

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· The resorts’ history is documented; the dome is preserved. French Lick and West Baden's history is documented rather than told — this entry is part of that spine. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The record appears in 'French Lick / West Baden'. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· French Lick / West Baden — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Lick_Resort

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/