The Goldfield Hotel: History and Legends of Nevada's Most Haunted Hotel

In 1908 you could check into a hotel in Goldfield, Nevada, ride an elevator to your room, pick up a telephone, and switch on an electric light. Six years earlier, the ground under the lobby had been open desert.

That's the part of the Goldfield Hotel story that stays with us. Not the ghosts, though we'll get to them. The nerve of it. A mahogany lobby in a mining camp. Gold leaf on the ceiling. Black leather chairs for men who had been sleeping in canvas tents a few seasons before. Somebody looked at a boomtown and decided it was going to be a city, then furnished it accordingly.

A Camp That Wanted to Be a City

Gold turned up at Goldfield in 1902, and what followed was one of the fastest booms the West ever saw. By about 1906 the town held some 20,000 people, briefly the largest city in Nevada. The money pooled quickly. George Wingfield and George S. Nixon formed the Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company, and by 1906 the two partners were worth $30 million between them.

Goldfield wanted the country to notice, and it did. In 1906 the town staged a world lightweight title fight between Joe Gans and Oscar "Battling" Nelson, and newspapers from coast to coast carried the dateline. A year later the mood had turned. Labor conflict involving the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World grew so bitter that President Theodore Roosevelt sent federal troops in December 1907. They stayed until March 1908, which is roughly when the new hotel opened its doors.

Mahogany, Leather, and Gold Leaf

Architect George E. Holesworth designed a four-story hotel of stone and brick with 154 rooms, built at a cost of more than $300,000. It rose on the site of an earlier hotel lost to fire, with J. Franklin Douglas and a group of investors as the first owners.

The finish was the point: a lobby paneled in mahogany, black leather upholstery, gold-leaf ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and telephones, electric light, and steam heat in the rooms. There was an Otis elevator, too, billed as one of the first west of the Mississippi. That is the kind of claim a boomtown makes about itself, and we like it better as a statement of ambition than as a record.

The men who ran the town soon owned the hotel as well. Wingfield and hotel man Casey McDannell formed the Bonanza Hotel Company and bought the property for $200,000 in cash plus about $250,000 in stock. For a few bright years, the Goldfield was where southern Nevada did its deals.

What the Rooms Were Made Of

This is the part we know best, because we handle furniture from these exact years every week.

A hotel in the middle of the desert didn't commission its bedrooms from a cabinetmaker. It ordered them. By 1908, factories in Grand Rapids and across the Midwest were shipping quartersawn oak by the railcar, and a mining-camp hotel could fill 154 rooms from a catalog and have the crates arrive within weeks. Turn over a golden oak dresser from that era and the story is written underneath: evenly spaced machine-cut dovetails, the ray-fleck figure of quartersawn white oak catching the light, stamped brass pulls, a bevelled mirror on a harp frame.

The lobby was the other end of the same moment. Mahogany and gold leaf belonged to the grand hotels of San Francisco and the East, and bringing them to Goldfield was a declaration. The look sits right on the hinge between Victorian weight and the cleaner lines that followed, which we explore in Edwardian Design: The Transitional Era Most People Miss, with the whiplash curves of Art Nouveau showing up in leaded glass and carved panels. If you own a mirror or lamp you think dates to these years, our guides to dating antique mirrors and antique lighting will tell you more than the style ever will.

Fire, Dry Holes, and a Long Silence

Booms end, and Goldfield's ended fast. The ore thinned, the people left, and in 1923 an exploding moonshine still started a fire that took most of the town's wooden buildings. The brick and stone held. The hotel was one of the survivors.

That same year Newton Crumley, who owned the Commercial Hotel in Elko, bought it. In 1925 he did something only a Goldfield owner would think to do: he sank two mine shafts beneath the building, betting there was ore under his own floor. Both came up dry. Through the 1930s the hotel wore down, and during the Second World War it housed Army Air Corps personnel from the Tonopah Air Base. It closed in 1945 and has not reopened.

The would-be rescuers came anyway. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. San Francisco investor Lester O'Shea bought it in 1985 and brought a restoration close to finished before bankruptcy stopped the work. In 2003 Carson City rancher Edgar "Red" Roberts bought it at auction for $360,000, with plans for rooms, a casino, and a café that never came to be. His son owns it now, and the building remains closed.

The Ghosts

You can't write about the Goldfield Hotel without them, so here they are.

The best known is Elizabeth, said to have been a young woman held against her will in Room 109, who never left. Others tell of a cold third floor, something unfriendly in the old Gold Room, children on the lobby stairs, and the smell of cigar smoke that people like to credit to George Wingfield himself. Paranormal investigators have been coming for decades, and the building has turned up on televised ghost hunts more than once.

We'll be straight with you: the record doesn't hold up. The Elizabeth story doesn't fit the hotel's documented ownership, and people who say they descend from those named in it have disputed it publicly. The hauntings belong in the file marked legend.

And yet we understand why people feel something there. A building that held the hopes of an entire town, then stood with its windows dark for eight decades, doesn't need a ghost to be haunting. The emptiness does the work.

If You Go

Goldfield sits on US 95, about 25 miles south of Tonopah and roughly four hours from Reno. It's still the seat of Esmeralda County, with 225 residents at the 2020 census, and the courthouse and the old Goldfield High School survive from the boom alongside the hotel. The hotel is private property and closed, so admire it from the street. Interior tours aren't offered, but the high school across the road does give tours, and visitors who want to help can look to the Goldfield Historical Society.

If you're making a longer loop through the old camps, our stories of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode and Aurora, the silver boomtown two states claimed cover the booms that came before Goldfield.

Goldfield bet that the gold would last, and the hotel was the size of that bet. The desert called it. What's left is a beautiful stone building on a quiet highway, and, scattered through homes across the West, the oak dressers and bevelled mirrors that came in on the same trains.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Goldfield Hotel haunted?

It's widely called one of the most haunted buildings in Nevada, best known for the legend of Elizabeth in Room 109. The stories are folklore. The historical record doesn't support the Elizabeth legend, and its details conflict with the hotel's documented ownership.

Can you go inside the Goldfield Hotel?

Not at present. The hotel is privately owned and closed, and interior tours aren't offered. You can see it from the street and tour the historic Goldfield High School across the road.

When did the Goldfield Hotel open and close?

It opened in 1908 and closed in 1945, after housing Army Air Corps personnel from the Tonopah Air Base during the Second World War.

How far is Goldfield from Reno?

About four hours southeast by road, on US 95 roughly 25 miles south of Tonopah.

Resources & Further Reading

• TravelNevada: Historic Goldfield Hotel, current status and visiting information.
• Goldfield, Nevada, the town's boom, labor history, and the 1923 fire.
• Online Nevada Encyclopedia, Nevada's mining camps and the people who built them.

Header image: The Goldfield Hotel, Goldfield, Nevada, early twentieth-century real-photo postcard. Miami University Libraries, Digital Collections, via Wikimedia Commons. No known copyright restrictions.