THE ELMS HOTEL & SPA
Hotel — Excelsior Springs, Missouri
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/the-elms-hotel-spa-excelsior-springs-missouri/

Hotel associated with documented cultural history.

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.

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.

THE POOL, THE MAID, THE THIRD FLOOR
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.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] haunting: 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.
  source: Missouri's Most Haunted Places (https://www.visitmo.com/articles/missouris-most-haunted-places)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Missouri's Most Haunted Places — Missouri Division of Tourism
  https://www.visitmo.com/articles/missouris-most-haunted-places

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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/