Mission Inn

The inn began in 1876 as the Glenwood Cottage, Christopher Columbus Miller's adobe boarding house in downtown Riverside. His son Frank spent three decades, 1902 to 1932, expanding it in obsessive stages — the Cloister, Mission and Spanish wings, the International Rotunda — into a Mission Revival labyrinth of domes, cloisters, chapels and courtyards that became a National Historic Landmark in 1977. Frank Miller collected compulsively: some 800 bells, scores of statues, hundreds of paintings, most still embedded in the hotel.

Its register of guests is a presidential roster — the Nixons were married here in 1940, the Reagans honeymooned here — and its survival was not guaranteed: by the 1980s the building was termite-worn and closed for the renovation that produced the ghost interviews. It reopened, added a spa, and remains the anchor of downtown Riverside.

Beneath the hotel runs a network of basement passages built in 1917 — cool corridors before air conditioning, used partly to store Miller's collections — which the hotel itself once signed as "The Catacombs." The name outran the plumbing. Legend files the tunnels as an ossuary, or as a secret passage running a mile east to Mount Rubidoux; the record says neither, but notes the passages stayed closed to the public long enough for both stories to grow moss.

The hotel finally opened them for Halloween tours in 2024 — extended indefinitely on demand — with art and relics rather than bones. Reported claims of maidenly screeches issuing from a restroom in the underbelly are filed, solemnly, under reported experience.

Room 413 holds the core claim: Frank Miller is said to pace there, and the 1985 staff reports — the face in the window, the footsteps, the rearranged hardware — remain the file's best-sourced entries. The rest is the usual hotel ledger spread across a very unusual hotel: figures in the cloisters, presences in the chapel, the sort of reports a building acquires when it has ninety years of guests and half a mile of corridors.

The archive observes that the Mission Inn is a rare case where the architecture alone out-tells the haunting — and the haunting still gets the tour.

The inn operates; the catacombs now take reservations; Room 413 remains on the floor plan. The record keeps a boarding house, a collector and a landmark. The legend keeps Frank on his rounds — which, given that he spent thirty years building the place and has spent ninety more refusing to leave it, is the file's most defensible claim, and its oldest continuously occupied room.