{"id":258,"slug":"the-elms-hotel-spa-excelsior-springs-missouri","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Excelsior Springs grew up around mineral waters credited with cures, and The Elms became its grand hotel. The first Elms — a 200-room wooden resort — opened in 1888 and burned to ash on May 9, 1898. The rebuilt hotel opened July 31, 1909, and burned again on October 30, 1910; no fatalities were recorded in either fire. The third Elms, built with limestone salvaged from the ruins, opened September 7, 1912, and still stands as a National Register property in the Elms Historic District.","The 1920s made it a resort with an undercurrent — the lap pool area is said to have run as a speakeasy and gambling den — and election night 1948 made it famous: Harry Truman slipped away from the press in Independence and spent the night at The Elms while returns came in, waking to learn he had beaten Dewey. A 2013 episode of Ghost Hunters put the hotel's reputation on television."]},{"heading":"The pool, the maid, the third floor","paragraphs":["The hotel's own published haunting history identifies the legend spots: the lap pool, where a gambler tied to the Prohibition-era games is said to linger — some versions have him killed by the mob; a maid in a 1920s-style uniform who assists or annoys housekeeping; and a woman reported roaming the third floor looking for her child. Paranormal teams that worked the building concentrated on the pool and Room 214 — the 'Al Capone room' — and filed no definitive evidence.","The file notes the symmetry worth keeping: two documented fires with no recorded deaths, a real speakeasy layer, a genuine presidential footnote — and a ghost population the hotel itself describes as friendly."]}],"name":"The Elms Hotel & Spa","aliases":[],"type":"HOTEL","type_label":"Hotel","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["hauntings","lodging"],"desc":"Hotel associated with documented cultural history.","full_desc":"The Elms Hotel & Spa is a hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. Hotel associated with documented cultural history. The archive files it under haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.","address":null,"city":"Excelsior Springs","county":null,"state":"Missouri","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":39.339929,"lon":-94.240992,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","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":null,"research_notes":"Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":43.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":200,"type":"HAUNTING","description":"Guest reports associate paranormal activity with the lap pool. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. It's the kind of claim that outlives debunkings — too many witnesses, too few explanations.","evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","evidence_label":"Local folklore","entity":null,"where":"lap pool","first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.7,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Missouri's Most Haunted Places","url":"https://www.visitmo.com/articles/missouris-most-haunted-places","publisher":"Missouri Division of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Guest reports associate paranormal activity with the lap pool. A hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. The story outranks the documentation, which is how you know it's folklore.","earliest":null,"evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","source":{"name":"Missouri's Most Haunted Places","url":"https://www.visitmo.com/articles/missouris-most-haunted-places","publisher":"Missouri Division of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","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":"Missouri's Most Haunted Places","url":"https://www.visitmo.com/articles/missouris-most-haunted-places","publisher":"Missouri Division of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}