It was June 22, 2017. Reid hadn’t been born yet. That wouldn’t happen until the following year. Liz and I weren’t married yet either, though we both knew we were headed there. We had Jack and Ben with us, and my sister Stacy had come along with her two boys, Nathan and Cameron. Seven people total.
We didn’t own any paranormal investigation gear. We hadn’t started Stay Spooked. We hadn’t even fully admitted to ourselves that we were going down this rabbit hole. But Liz and I had both had mild paranormal experiences in our pasts, we were both genuinely curious about the unexplained, and we’d been talking about the Jerome Grand Hotel for years.
A few months earlier, in March 2017, we’d taken the kids up to Jerome as a day trip. We wandered the town. We took in the views from Cleopatra Hill. We ate lunch at the Haunted Hamburger, and Liz got stuck in the bathroom there. The door wouldn’t open for several seconds, no obvious reason. It freaked her out enough that we still talk about it.
But we also kept looking up at that giant Spanish Mission building above the town. The Jerome Grand Hotel. We just kept thinking about it.
By June we’d booked the Grand Suite.
In hindsight, it was the trip that started everything.
About the Jerome Grand Hotel
The Jerome Grand Hotel doesn’t try to hide what it is. It sits on the side of Cleopatra Hill at over 5,200 feet, dominating the skyline of a town with a permanent population of under 500. From every angle in Jerome, you can see it. Five stories of poured concrete and Spanish Mission architecture, holding the high ground over the Verde Valley like a lighthouse for whatever might still be in there.
It was built in 1926 and opened in January 1927 as the United Verde Hospital, funded by the United Verde Copper Company to serve a booming copper district that local accounts put at up to 15,000 people. The hospital was state-of-the-art for its day: poured concrete construction, fireproof, with one of the first self-service Otis elevators in Arizona. The same elevator, still operating, that we’d ride up to our floor.
It served as an active hospital from 1927 until 1950. Phelps Dodge, which had bought the mines in 1935, closed the hospital that year and shut down the last big mine in 1953, and Jerome nearly emptied out overnight. In those twenty-three years, local legend says thousands died within its walls. The often-quoted figure of 9,000 isn’t backed by any records we could find, but a hospital serving a mining district for more than two decades saw more than its share of death. Mining accidents, tuberculosis, lingering effects of the 1918 flu pandemic, infant deaths, complications of every kind. An entire town’s grief, absorbed by one building.
After the hospital closed, the building sat empty for forty-six years. It was finally renovated and reopened as a hotel in 1996.
It’s been a paranormal destination ever since. Ghost Adventures has investigated here. Ghost Hunters has investigated here. The reputation is real, and it’s earned. (For the full history and the legends behind the building, from Claude Harvey in the elevator shaft to the stories told around town, see our guide to Jerome ghost stories.)
We didn’t pick the Grand Suite by accident.
The Arrival
The drive up the hill toward the hotel is part of the experience. Jerome’s main road is a series of switchbacks carved into the mountain, and the Grand stays in your peripheral vision the entire climb. Appearing, disappearing behind a curve, reappearing larger. By the time we pulled into the parking lot, all seven of us had been staring up at the building for ten minutes.
The first impression wasn’t paranormal. It was awe. The architecture is early-1900s institutional in the best way: thick walls, tall windows, original detailing preserved by people who clearly cared. Nothing in modern Arizona looks like it.
Check-in was the same. Old, but well-maintained. The lobby still feels like it could be 1930. They handed us the keys to the Grand Suite, and we walked over to the original 1926 Otis elevator.
If you’ve never been in an elevator that old, it’s an experience on its own. It has a sliding cage door that you pull shut by hand. It creaks. It groans. It moves slowly. You can see every floor pass through the gap as you ride. The Grand Suite is on the third floor, and even that short ride felt long.
The Grand Suite
Walking into the Grand Suite is unlike walking into any hotel room I’ve stayed in before or since.
You enter through a single door into a corridor, a small foyer. Then there’s a set of glass-paned double doors with a glass window above them. You push through those, and there’s another small foyer. And then the swinging double wooden operating room doors. The kind you see in hospital films from the 1940s, the kind that swing both ways and don’t have a regular latch.
Past those, the suite opens up.
- To the right is a bedroom with its own bathroom, and a small adjacent movie room.
- Straight ahead is the former operating room itself, now converted into a living room. Antique couches and chairs. An antique Steinway piano. The windows on this room look out over Jerome and the Verde Valley, one of the best views in the building.
- To the left is a dining room that opens into the kitchen.
- Turn right from the kitchen and there’s the main bathroom, a small hallway with a built-in Murphy bed, and the main bedroom.
It’s not really a suite. It’s a small apartment, built directly into the original hospital structure, with the bones of a surgical floor still visible everywhere you look. The operating room doors. The wide hallways. The hospital-grade trim.
We set up. Jack started filming a YouTube video (he was old enough to be excited about that kind of thing). The kids took photos. Liz unpacked the borrowed ghost hunting gear she’d brought along. We’d come prepared even though we didn’t fully know what to do with it.
Then we did something I still think about: I sat down in a specific chair in the main bedroom, and I got cold.
Not metaphorically cold. The temperature in that one spot dropped, the hair on my arms stood up, and I had the very distinct sense of connecting to something. Not threatening. Not aggressive. Just present. I don’t know what or who. I just know that chair, in that spot, felt different from the rest of the room.
I got up. The feeling stayed in the chair.
That was our first hint of the night to come.
The Night, Hour by Hour
The kids kept a journal. The next morning before we checked out, Jack and one of his cousins wrote down what had happened in our family notebook. I’m going to pull from their actual words throughout this section, because they captured the timeline better than I could from memory eight years later.
Late afternoon: Lunch at the Asylum, dinner in the suite
After getting settled, we headed downstairs for a late lunch at the Asylum Restaurant, the hotel’s in-house restaurant, named for the building’s hospital-and-asylum history. The food is genuinely good, well above what you’d expect from a “themed” hotel restaurant, and the view from the dining room is one of the best in the Verde Valley.
Back in the suite, we ate an early dinner with food we’d brought up ourselves. We had a ghost tour booked for 7:00 PM and didn’t want to rush.
Stacy mentioned she smelled something strange in the suite. Sweet, kind of musty. Not unpleasant. Just out of place. None of us could find a source for it.
7:00–9:30 PM: Ghost tour through Jerome
The town’s nighttime ghost tour walks you through Jerome’s mining-era streets, stopping at historic buildings with their own stories. The kids carried EMF meters (their first time using them) and we took photos throughout.
We got a few shots that night with orbs in an alleyway that we still have. Orbs are notoriously easy to fake (dust, moisture, lens flare), so we don’t claim these as evidence of anything. But the photos exist.
We also ran a spirit box for part of the tour. We got back miscellaneous phrases. Nothing clear enough to call communication, but enough fragments to be interesting.
In one of the cousins’ journal entries the next morning: “We got to talk to some spirits.”
9:30 PM: Back at the hotel
We came back from the tour and started settling in. Stacy and I walked into one of the bedrooms, and both of us got the chills at the same time. Not metaphorical chills. Actual cold-on-the-skin chills. We looked at each other. We didn’t say anything in front of the kids. We walked back out.
~11:30 PM: Worse in the other bedroom
We watched TV in the living room for a while. Around 11:30 PM, Stacy and I walked into the other bedroom together. The chills hit again. Worse this time.
From Jack’s journal: “My dad and my Aunt walked into the other bedroom and said they got chills even worse then before. By then we were all freaking out.”
The kids weren’t wrong.
12:30 AM: HELP ME on the window
This is the one we still talk about most.
At about 12:30 AM, one of the boys noticed it first. The words “HELP ME” were on the outside of the kitchen window of the suite.
The kitchen sits along the suite’s exterior wall. The window faces out onto the Verde Valley. There is nothing on the other side of that window. We were on the third floor of a five-story building, on the edge of a mountain. No fire escape. No ledge wide enough to stand on. Just a sheer drop.
The letters were clear. They weren’t a smudge or condensation that we were interpreting. They were drawn deliberately on the outside of the glass.
From Jack’s journal: “My cousin noticed writing on the window. It said ‘Help Me.’ We thought it was a joke but shortly after my dad said ‘I heard a knock on the window. I was just standing here eating chips and I heard a knock.'”
That part is exactly what happened. I had been standing in the kitchen, eating chips out of a bag, when something knocked on the window from outside. Once. Clear.
I said something out loud about calling the cops. I half-meant it. From one of the kids’ journals: “I said ‘I’m gonna call the cops’ because I was freaking out.”
We didn’t call the cops. But we did start checking the locks.
~1:00 AM: The operating room doors
The suite has those swinging wooden operating room doors between the main entry foyer and the living room. They swing both ways. There’s no latch.
Around 1:00 AM, we tried to close them. They wouldn’t stay shut.
From Jack’s journal: “We tried closing the operating room doors but they wouldn’t stay still.”
We pushed them closed. They opened. We pushed them again. They opened again. It wasn’t a slow drift, like a draft. It felt like something on the other side was holding them open. Not slamming them, not pushing hard, just keeping them open against gentle pressure.
In the morning, the same doors worked perfectly normally. They swung. They held position. They acted like ordinary doors.
That night, they wouldn’t stay shut.
2:00 AM: Everyone in one bed
Stacy didn’t want to sleep alone in the living room. Honestly, none of us wanted to sleep alone in anything by that point.
So we all moved into the main bedroom. Liz and I took the bed. Stacy slept at the foot of it. All four kids fit in with us somehow. On the bed, on the floor next to it, on the Murphy bed in the small hallway just outside the bedroom door. Nobody was more than about six feet from anyone else.
We went to sleep around 2:00 AM.
3:00 AM: The gurney
I was asleep. So was almost everyone else.
Liz was awake. And she heard, unmistakably, the sound of a gurney being wheeled down the hallway outside the suite. Creaking wheels. Slow, steady, with the rhythm a gurney makes when a person is pushing it.
The Jerome Grand Hotel hasn’t been a working hospital since 1950. There were no gurneys in the building. There was nothing in the third-floor hallway that should have made that sound. Liz didn’t go check. She told me about it in the morning.
Nobody else in the suite heard it.
Morning: what the kids wrote
We woke up. We compared notes. The kids’ journal entries that morning are the best record of what people were processing:
“My step mom said she felt a cat crawling on her feet.”
Liz described it as feeling like a ghost cat at her feet. Small, light, walking across the bed in the middle of the night. There was no cat in the room. There was no cat in the hotel.
“We all heard banging and me and my cousin saw an old man walking in the hall.”
Two of the kids reported seeing an old man in the hallway. Neither could describe him in detail. Both were sure they’d seen him.
“We also saw a clock swinging a lot.”
A pendulum clock on the wall was reportedly swinging more than it should have been for the time of morning. And when we looked around the suite carefully, we noticed something else: multiple antique clocks throughout the room had stopped at different times. A small wooden mantle clock. A tall longcase grandfather clock against the wall. An ornate Victorian wall clock on a carved shelf. None of them were running. None of them showed the same time.
We photographed all three before we left.
And from another of the kids’ journal pages, listing his own experiences from the night:
“While asleep, when I would wake up my blanket would be off or on the ground. Doors would also shake.”
When the kids signed off the journal entry, they ended it: “Had a Great Stay! Awesome!”
That’s about right.
Daytime in Jerome
We’d been to Jerome before. That March 2017 day trip was when the seed for this stay was planted. So by the time we checked out of the Grand the morning after our night in the suite, we’d already spent real daylight hours walking the town.
Jerome in daylight is almost the opposite of Jerome at night. The town is full of art galleries, weathered storefronts, ice cream shops, antique stores, and the kind of slow, easy vibe that comes from being on top of a mountain with not much to prove. The architecture tells the same story as the Grand. Buildings from the 1900s and 1910s, lovingly preserved or weather-worn, every one of them with history.
If you’re a couple, or a group of adults, Jerome is fantastic. If you’re traveling with kids, it’s an honest mixed bag. There’s ice cream. There are shops. But there’s not a lot built specifically for kids, and after a few hours, our boys were ready for something more active.
If you’re bringing children to Jerome, plan on the kid-time being short and the adult-time being the main event. The town doesn’t feel haunted in the daylight. The Grand Hotel does. Even during the day, it carries a weight. But the town itself, in the sun, is just a charming, quiet artist’s village.
The haunting belongs to the hill.
What the Equipment Showed
We hadn’t planned to do a real investigation. We had borrowed gear, not owned gear, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. But we ran what we had:
- EMF meters got readings in several spots throughout the suite, particularly in the bedroom near the chair where I’d felt the cold spot, and along the wall near the operating room doors. We also got readings in various hallways of the hotel on different floors when we walked around late at night.
- Spirit box during the ghost tour gave us those miscellaneous phrases. Nothing definitively coherent.
- Photography gave us the orbs in the alley. Take that for what it’s worth.
We didn’t run audio recorders for EVPs. We didn’t have full-spectrum cameras. We didn’t have a SLS camera or a structured light scanner. We didn’t have any of the gear that we’d later use on real investigations.
What we had, and what made the night what it was, were seven people in a former hospital room, paying attention to what was happening around them, and writing it down before they forgot.
What That Trip Started
We didn’t know it at the time, but the Jerome Grand Hotel was where Stay Spooked actually began. Even if it would take us several more years to start treating it that way.
Reid was born in 2018, less than a year after that trip. The next few years were taken up with the realities of having a new baby and getting through the daily logistics of life with three kids. The “we need to do this again, but with more gear and a real plan” conversation kept happening, but it kept getting deferred.
We finally made it back to the Grand in 2021. By then we had real equipment, including a homemade SLS (Structured Light Sensor) camera we’d put together specifically for that trip. We had specific parts of the building we wanted to investigate, and a plan we’d been refining for years.
The 2021 stay had its own chilling moments. But that’s a story for its own field report.
But that first night was the one that hooked us. No gear, no plan, kids and family and no idea what we were getting into.
The chair in the bedroom. The HELP ME on the kitchen window. The knock on the glass while I was standing there eating chips. The operating room doors that wouldn’t stay shut. The gurney in the hallway at 3:00 AM. The old man two of the kids saw. The cat that walked across Liz’s feet. The clocks all stopped at different times.
We’ve been chasing those moments ever since.
If You’re Going to Stay
A few honest things to know before you book the Grand Suite:
- The suite is on the third floor. That’s the former surgical floor. There’s a reason it has the activity reputation it does.
- Bring a group. This suite was built to sleep multiple people, and you’ll want them. We had seven of us and we still ended up in one bedroom by 2 AM.
- Don’t go in expecting fireworks. Plenty of people stay in the Grand Suite and report nothing unusual. The Grand Hotel isn’t a guaranteed haunted experience. It’s a building that has paranormal history. Your night might be quiet. Or you might have a night like ours. There’s no way to know in advance.
- Take the elevator. Even if you can take the stairs. The original Otis is part of the experience and you’ll want to ride it.
- Eat at the Asylum. Genuinely good food, and the view is worth it.
- Document everything. Even if you don’t think anything is happening. The kids’ journal entries from our morning checkout are now the best record we have of that night. Better than my memory, better than the photos. Write it down at the time. Don’t trust yourself to remember.
And if you’re someone who’s been thinking about taking your first paranormal trip and you don’t know where to start, Jerome is a good place. The hotel is real. The history is real. The atmosphere is real. Whether or not anything happens to you, the building itself is worth the trip.
If something does happen, you’ll know.
The Bottom Line
The Jerome Grand Hotel is the place where we figured out that we couldn’t just take one paranormal trip and walk away. It’s the building that turned our curiosity into a project. Without that night in the Grand Suite, there’s a real chance Stay Spooked wouldn’t exist.
We can’t promise that your night there will be like ours. Plenty of people stay there and have a perfectly quiet, beautiful weekend with mountain views and great food.
But on June 22, 2017, with seven of us in that suite, a borrowed ghost hunting kit, and no real idea what we were doing, the building paid attention.
If you’ve stayed in the Grand Suite yourself, or in any of the other rooms at the Jerome Grand, we’d love to hear about it. Send us your story through our contact page. Firsthand accounts go into our paranormal experiences archive.
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We’ll see you at the top of the hill.
