FRENCH LICK SPRINGS HOTEL
Hotel — French Lick, Indiana
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/french-lick-springs-hotel-french-lick-indiana/

Hotel associated with documented cultural history.

A hotel in French Lick, Indiana, French Lick Springs Hotel is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Hotel associated with documented cultural history. Its signature presence is Thomas Taggart — the figure the file’s accounts keep returning to. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

French Lick is the resort the springs built — the hotel Dr. William Bowles opened in 1845 beside the mineral wells that had drawn people to the Salt Licks since George Rogers Clark passed through in 1778. Bowles bottled the water as Pluto — 'If Nature Won't, Pluto Will' — and the hotel grew into a health resort, then, under politician Thomas Taggart after 1901, into a dozen-building complex with golf, gambling, and a convention hall where Roosevelt came courting the 1932 nomination.
The valley's other economy was the casinos — illegal, tolerated, and famous — that ran in the Springs Valley hotels until the state shut them down in 1949. Pluto Water stopped in 1971 when lithium became controlled. The hotel declined with the springs era until the Cook Group restored it and West Baden, won Indiana's last casino license, and reopened the resort in 2006.
The file keeps French Lick: the Pluto Water slogan, Taggart's expansion, the gambling valley, and the 2006 resurrection of the mineral-springs resort.
French Lick is the archive's springs-resort file — the water that was medicine, the casinos, and the restoration that brought it back.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
French Lick is the archive's springs-resort file — the Pluto Water empire, the Taggart expansion, and the 2006 revival.
A resort built on laxative water keeps its slogan — the file's suggestion being that French Lick's hold is the improbability: the springs that promised health, the valley that ran on vice, and the hotel that outlasted both.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] phantom smell: Guest accounts associate cigar odors with Thomas Taggart. 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. '13 Haunted Places in Indiana to Visit on Friday the 13th' carries the account. It's the sort of report that survives precisely because it asks you to listen, not look.
  source: 13 Haunted Places in Indiana to Visit on Friday the 13th (https://visitindiana.in.gov/blog/post/13-haunted-places-in-indiana-to-visit-on-friday-the-13th/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· 13 Haunted Places in Indiana to Visit on Friday the 13th — Visit Indiana
  https://visitindiana.in.gov/blog/post/13-haunted-places-in-indiana-to-visit-on-friday-the-13th/

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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/