Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

The guest ledger is the file's spine. Monroe lived in a poolside cabana suite for two years at the start of her career and shot her first print ad on the Tropicana pool's diving board. Montgomery Clift kept room 928 for three months in 1952 while preparing to play a bugler in From Here to Eternity. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard's penthouse went for five dollars a night. Errol Flynn allegedly distilled gin in the barbershop during Prohibition; Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson is said to have taught Shirley Temple the staircase dance in the lobby; David Hockney painted the bottom of the pool.

The Cinegrill ran jazz through the middle of the century — Mary Martin and Eartha Kitt opened there to raves — and the Blossom Room took the wrap parties after the awards decamped for larger rooms.

Monroe's is the headline apparition: the blonde in the mirror, first reported by Leonard in 1985 and since claimed by guests photographing the mirror where it now hangs in a mezzanine hallway. She does not appear to have identified the figure as Monroe — the manager supplied the attribution — and the archive notes, with investigator Joe Nickell, that the hotel once listed the story under promotional material headed 'Tall Tales.'

Clift is the acoustic haunting: a bugle practicing scales in the hallways near room 928, cold spots, the sense of the actor still rehearsing. The rest of the inventory includes a little girl in a blue dress the staff call Caroline, phone calls to the operator from empty rooms, photographic orbs, and the standard cold drafts of a building that has held this many people.

Nickell's Center for Inquiry investigation in 2000 concluded the sightings clustered around the restoration — a bout of expectation among a staff cleaning toward a deadline. The file reports the finding. The mirror still gets photographed.

The Roosevelt still operates on the Walk of Fame across from the Chinese Theatre — 300 rooms, the Hockney pool, the Gable-Lombard penthouse bookable by name. The hotel's own site now says only that staff say Monroe hasn't entirely left, which is the careful grammar of a business that has learned the ghost is a tenant. The haunting reports, like the clientele, are disproportionately famous; the file cannot tell whether that is evidence or marketing, and suspects the hotel cannot either.