{"id":3100,"slug":"oatman-hotel-oatman-arizona","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Oatman Hotel's famous honeymoon suite is a legend the building refuses to correct. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard married in Kingman on March 29, 1939 — during a break in Gone With the Wind — and the hotel maintains they spent the night in Room 15. The record says otherwise: the couple drove back to Los Angeles for a press conference the next morning and honeymooned in Baja months later. The hotel doesn't care. The suite is decorated anyway, a replica of Lombard's blue wedding dress on the bed, and the owners say the pair loved the place so much they never left — whispers and laughter in the hallways, the ghosts of Hollywood's golden couple in a room they probably never slept in.","The hotel is real enough — built in 1902 as the Durlin, the only two-story adobe in Mohave County, the building that survived the 1921 fire that took the rest of Oatman. The bar's ceiling and walls are papered with thousands of signed dollar bills, a tradition the miners started: pin a dollar to the wall when you're flush so there's always credit when you're broke. It's the most photographed bar décor on Route 66.","The resident ghost is Oatie — supposedly William Ray Flour, an Irish miner who died in a shaft behind the hotel — but the real haunting is the town itself: a gold camp that produced $40 million, housed ten thousand people, and was bypassed by the highway in 1953. The hotel outlasted the mines, the fire, the interstate, and the truth about the honeymoon. It'll outlast the correction too."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["The Oatman Hotel is the archive's preferred-legend file — a mining hotel that chose the better story over the verified one, keeping a honeymoon that never happened because the town needed it to have happened.","A hotel that survived a fire keeps its honeymoon — the file's suggestion being that Oatie and the Gables are the same kind of ghost: stories Oatman adopted because the real history — gold, fire, bypass — wasn't enough to keep the lights on."]}],"name":"Oatman Hotel","aliases":[],"type":"HOTEL","type_label":"Hotel","cats":["GHOST_TOWN","LOCAL_FOLKLORE","HAUNTED_PLACE"],"groups":["ghost-towns","hauntings","legends","lodging"],"desc":"The 1902 hotel—where Lombard and Gable honeymooned.","full_desc":"Oatman Hotel is a hotel in Oatman, Arizona. The 1902 hotel—where Lombard and Gable honeymooned. The name the accounts keep returning to is William Ray Flour. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend, 1 documented fact and 1 named or described presence — documented record and retelling kept side by side. It still takes guests. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"Oatman","county":null,"state":"Arizona","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":35.027375,"lon":-114.38386,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":"Historic site","research_notes":"AZ66 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":3038,"type":"NAMED_GHOST_LEGEND","description":"William Ray Flour is reportedly seen. Oatman Hotel, a hotel in Oatman, Arizona, 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. A ghost with a name outlasts a ghost without one; the reports keep it employed.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":"William Ray Flour","where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Oatman Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatman_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]},{"id":3039,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Reported figures in the hotel. A hotel in Oatman, Arizona with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. It's an investigation claim — the kind that convinces the people who were in the room. 'Oatman Hotel' carries the account. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.","evidence":"PARANORMAL_INVESTIGATION_CLAIM","evidence_label":"Investigation claim","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Oatman Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatman_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"Built 1902; the honeymoon is documented. A hotel with this much documented history gives the dossier real substance underneath the lore. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. The record appears in 'Oatman Hotel'. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1902","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Oatman Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatman_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"William Ray Flour is reportedly seen. A hotel in Oatman, Arizona with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. The report is preserved in sources like 'Oatman Hotel'. The legend does what legends do — it explains the place in a way the records can't.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Oatman Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatman_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"entities":[{"name":"William Ray Flour","claimed_identity":"William Ray Flour","verified":null,"summary":"William Ray Flour is reportedly seen. A hotel in Oatman, Arizona with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. Sources including 'Oatman Hotel' keep the claim in circulation. Named presences persist where anonymous reports fade — the file's name here is William Ray Flour.","behavior":"William Ray Flour is reportedly seen.","area":null,"first_ref":null,"source":{"name":"Oatman Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatman_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"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":"Oatman Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatman_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Durlin Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durlin_Hotel","desc":"United States historic place","extract":"The Durlin Hotel, which was renamed the Oatman Hotel, is located on Main St. in\nOatman, Arizona, United States.  It was built in 1924 by John Durlin and includes Spanish Colonial Revival architecture.\nIt was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.  It is significant as the only two-story adobe building in Mohave County, Arizona, and for association with the gold mining era of Oatman.","img":null,"score":64,"lat":35.02666667,"lon":-114.38277778},"counts":{"claims":2,"history":1,"legends":1,"entities":1,"sources":1}}