HGB Ep. 604 - The Elms Hotel

Moment in Oddity - The Tombstone House

Here at History Goes Bump, we often talk about how much we love cemeteries and old unique homes and architecture. In Petersburg, Virginia, there is a unique blending of all of the above. It is known as the Tombstone House. From the street, it looks like any ordinary block home. The two-story structure was built in 1934 at a cost of only $45 for the 2,200 marble blocks that were used for constructing the home. We are sure that by now, you have guessed where the marble blocks were sourced from. These were the bottom half of marble headstones. In the siege of Petersburg, during the last nine months of the Civil War, many of the Union soldiers who died in the battle, were buried at Poplar Lawn Cemetery. After the original wooden markers were beginning to rot away, the government replaced them with upright marble headstones. As we know, maintenance of old cemeteries can fall by the wayside, and it was during the Great Depression that the Poplar Lawn Cemetery decided to cut the existing tombstones in half, laying the inscripted parts flat on each individual grave vs having them stand erect. Of course this saved on mowing and maintenance fees for the cemetery. The construction of this modest home is quoted in articles as being, "A wonderful example of waste not, want not. Or is it waste not, haunt-not?". Local lore suggests that paranormal activity is experienced here. Haunted or not, a house constructed of repurposed headstones, certainly is odd.

The Elms Hotel (Suggested by: Jared Spangler)

Thirty minutes north of Kansas City is Excelsior Springs, Missouri. This town was formed around natural springs that attracted Native American populations for centuries. Europeans eventually discovered them, settled here and marketed the waters for what they believed were their curative effects. The Elms Hotel was one of several lodgings offered in the city. The location burned down twice before this third version that stands today was built. There have been deaths here and that has led to hauntings. Join us for the history and hauntings of The Elms Hotel!

Excelsior Springs was shaped by water and not just any water, but water rich in Iron and Manganese. These waters were unique as compared to other mineral waters in the area. These waters were found in shallow places that had iron-bearing rocks along them and underneath them and this caused the water to take on a reddish hue. There was also a distinctive metallic taste to the water. Excelsior Springs had seven wells that contained this type of water. The Native Americans knew of these wells for hundreds of years and considered them healing. The Nebo Hill People were an early indigenous group near here. Europeans would arrive in 1682. Rene-Robert de LaSalle claimed for France all the land drained by the Mississippi River at that time. The United States would buy the territory in 1803 and that is when settlers would flock there. Anthony W. Wyman bought land near the Fishing River and apparently had no idea he was sitting on a spring of healing waters. That was until a black farmer named Travis Mellion came through the area in the summer of 1880 with his family. Stories vary on whether he was sick with scrofula or one of his children was. The main story shared claims it was a daughter named Opal, but census records reveal she wasn't born until later. Anyway, this scrofula was awful and a form of tuberculosis that afflicted the lymph nodes of the neck. It rarely is seen today, except in HIV/AIDS patients. These painful masses would grow on the neck. The narrative goes that Travis was told about these springs nearby that might be able to help and then either he or his child got in the water and bathed in it for weeks and the scrofula was cured.

Word reached a man named Frederick Kigler who had rheumatism and an old Civil War injury and he tried the water too and was also healed. Before long, word of these healings began to spread and people flocked to the region. A merchant-preacher named Rev. John Van Buren Flack in nearby Missouri City heard the rumors about these healing springs and he traveled to the springs and collected samples for analysis. The chemists who tested it reported that the water "justified expectations of curative results." Rev. Flack was a fan of Henry Longfellow, so he named the spring Excelsior and told Anthony Wyman that he should plat the land because people were going to want to move here and they needed a proper town. Flack and Wyman had the land surveyed and then they platted the entire 40 acres. One hundred houses were built within a year and the town of Excelsior Springs was founded.

Now our listeners are probably asking the same thing. This Wyman guy owned the land, so what in the world does Flack think he is doing? He just kinda moved himself right into ownership here. The two men formed an agreement on August 7, 1880 that read, "...on a part of said land is located the spring known as Excelsior, and to promote said enterprise, the said Wyman agrees that any and all of his land as owned and as needed shall be used in said enterprise, except his residence, mill site, and one square acre of land. Said Flack agrees to carefully collect and collate all evidence as to the merits of said spring, and to write and publish a pamphlet setting forth the same in full detail, and to mail the same to his numerous friends and acquaintances." So basically it seems that Wyman didn't want to run a business, he just wanted to keep run his farm and mill. He gave Flack an acre of land to build a hotel, residence and business house and left the promotion of everything to Flack and if he kept up his end of the bargain, he would receive 25% of "seen and unseen developments" and a percentage of town lot sales. So the good doctor was now tasked with being a marketer. And he did just that, running circulars in nearby towns, boasting of the curative effects of the waters in Excelsior. These boasts included curing people of dyspepsia, gravel, fever sores, sore eyes, scrofula, throat diseases, liver complaints and many other ailments. Flack eventually moved on to other endeavors, but he still would run ads for the springs.

Excelsior Springs got very popular at the end of the 1800s because the Progressive Era was in full swing and one of the reforms at that time involved a Clean Living Movement. This incorporated proper hygiene, exercising and a healthy diet. Bathing in natural springs was a part of the craze. Before hotels were built, people had to bring tents since there was nowhere to stay and they had to bring their own tin cups to draw water from a barrel sunk into the mud that captured water from the spring. In 1881, this spring was named Siloam and a wooden Oriental-style pagoda was added, so that made things a little nicer. 

Other springs were discovered nearby and they were named the Regent Spring, Lithia No. 1, the Soterian, Excelsior Springs Lithia Spring, Salt Sulphur Spring, Superior Spring, the Seltzer Salt Soda Spring, the Sulphur Salt Soda Spring, the Relief Spring and the list goes on. Well into the 1920s, more springs were discovered until there were over 30 and there were different chemical contents in several of them. Most were the ferro-manganese (so the iron) but there was also sodium bicarbonate, saline, calcium bicarbonate and sulphur. Each new well was tested and different curative effects were linked to each one. So Excelsior Springs really lived up to its name. The town built the Hall of Waters and bought nine of the springs. This facilitated the bottling and distributing of the mineral water. The Excelsior Springs Bottling Company took the water to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and both of their entries were awarded first prizes. 

Some of the successful businesses in Excelsior Springs incorporated modalities like massage into their services and there were a variety of bath types. And some of the most successful entrprenuers in the late 1800s and early 1900s were black. W.A. Doxey and his wife Alice had a popular bathhouse and they served a white clientele. 

The most successful black entrepreneur was Dt. Dee Amos Ellett. His parents had been slaves and he escaped captivity when he was 15-years-old. He fled from Virginia to Massachusetts where he became a body servant to Colonel Francis Washburn. When Washburn was killed in battle a man named Rev. Gray took him under his wing and made sure that he attended college. He became a teacher and then attended Howard University and earned his medical degree in 1885. Dr. Ellett arrived in Excelsior Springs in 1888 and set up a private practice, but was asked to head up the Elms Hotel’s bath facilities. He watched over that as he continued to run his own business and he eventually opened the first Star Bath House. An advertisement read, "The Star Bath House, D.A. Ellett, M.D., Prop. Gives all kinds of BATHS, Including mineral, plain, mud, vapor, Turkish, shower, douche, electric, magnetic. Chalybeate water (also known as ferrous or iron) used if desired. Magnetic treatment, oil rubs and massage. Everything first class."

The original Elms Hotel would be built here in 1888 by the Excelsior Springs Company. This was a three-story hotel with broad verandas that sat on a 50-acre site. Orchestras would entertain the guests on the verandas and they could sip their spring water as they gazed out at the lush forests around them. The hotel also had a large heated swimming pool, a four-lane bowling alley, a target range, and a billiards room. After only standing for ten years, the hotel caught fire and burned to the ground on May 8, 1898. The cause of the fire was thought to be a candle in the ballroom. Dancing by candlelight was probably not a good idea.

It was decided to rebuild, but it would take several years before construction would begin in 1908. The grand opening of this even bigger and better version of The Elms took place in July 1909. This hotel lasted even less time than the first. It burned down completely the following year in 1910 after a large party had been hosted in the Grand Ballroom. A boiler ignited and the roof was set ablaze. Thankfully, nobody was killed in either of these fires. So, they decided to try once again, but they got smart this time. They decided to make the place as fireproof as possible and so they built the hotel that stands today out of limestone and stucco. This is a really neat hotel because one wouldn't expect to see Tudor Revival architecture in Missouri. The architects were Jackson & McIlvain and they designed a five-story hotel with a full basement that resembles an H-shape with two, two-story semi-circular bays: one in the front and one in the back. Those bays have double-gable-on-hip roofs and the entire hotel has a gable-front roof. The entrance has a long porch with Tudor-arched spandrels between stone columns that are square and two oriel windows extend from the third to fourth story. The interior featured the same stone feel with tile floors and a brick front counter and a massive stone fireplace. There was a marble staircase leading to the grand ballroom with its own large stone fireplace. There are Tudor-inspired end spandrels in here. There was a dining room and restaurant and the really unique part of the hotel is found down in the basement - a large lap pool that is shaped in an oval with stone columns in the center creating a median, so it really is like a lap track. Construction was completed in 1912 and over 3,000 visited on opening day. 

The landscaping was amazing as well and was designed by landscape architect George E. Kessler. The 15-acre grounds feature curving graveled walkways with grass and large trees of all varieties dotting the landscape. A gazebo stands on the upper grounds. There is an outdoor swimming pool and hot tub added in 1956, a courtyard, tennis courts, picnic area and herb garden. Out buildings include a pump house and carriage house, which is today used for meeting space. The Fishing River runs nearby.

The 1920s were a successful time for the hotel, but the Great Depression would prove to be hard on the hotel and in 1931, it filed for bankruptcy. Prohibition had become law during this time as well and part of the reason for The Elms' success was that it became a speakeasy and gangsters frequented the hotel. "Big City" Tom Pendergast was the crime boss of Kansas City, so he hung out at the hotel and several times Al Capone came to the hotel. Pretty Boy Floyd and Bugsy Moran liked to host bathtub gin parties here. The police tried raiding the place many times and one time, the Missouri Governor was there at a party and he told the police to go bust people really breaking the law. President Harry Truman's early political career had connections to Tom Pendergast as he was military buddies and good friends with Perndergast's nephew. The Pendergast organization helped Truman with elections to county-wide positions and eventually Senator. Truman became President when FDR died in 1945. When he sought to retain the Presidency on November 2, 1948, President Truman checked into The Elms Hotel secretly. He was given Room 300 and he ordered a ham and cheese sandwich. He told the Secret Service he was going to retire early and that they should wake him if anything important happened. Truman clearly figured that the polls and political talking heads were all right and that Thomas Dewey was going to win the election. The Secret Service woke him up at 4am and turned on the radio where it was being reported that President Truman was in the lead and was projected to win. The President went to Kansas City for victory pictures and returned to The Elms for a party and really put the place on the map.

The 1950s and 60s would find the hotel a hotspot for weddings and honeymoons and corporations like the location for conventions. But then business slowed down and this became more of a motor inn and Sheraton bought the property, finally closing it in 1970. The hotel sat vacant for eight years. One of the reasons for this decline was due to the falling interest in the spring water.

Dr. Samuel Ball came to Excelsior Springs in 1918, and opened a private practice, that grew into the Ball Clinic that opened in 1919. This clinic specialized in the treatment of arthritis and rheumatism and would eventually have seven buildings. Dr. Ball drilled his own wells to begin with, but eventually used the water supplied by the Hall of Waters. Like all the other businesses in the area, Ball made big claims about the water. He retired in 1953 and died in 1956, shortly before the medical community started getting more vocal about being skeptical of clinics like this. The downfall for the Ball Clinic, and basically much of Excelsior Springs, came through a scathing expose written in the Saturday Evening Post by Ralph Lee Smith in the August 24, 1963 issue entitled The Hucksters of Pain. Smith revealed that $250 million a year had been made through peddling dubious remedies. He visited the clinic and lied about having issues with pain. Before this trip, he had visited one of the nation's most eminent specialists on arthritis and he found nothing wrong with Smith. However, Smith was told by the Ball Clinic that he had fibrositis also known as lumbago. They told him that this was a forerunner of arthritis, which it is not. The Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation didn't think highly of the Ball Clinic and they told Smith that the Clinic's "theories about the causes of arthritis were 'disproven by medical science many years ago'." Weird machines were also used like the Sonus Film-o-Sonic machine, which the FDA tested and found to contain nothing therapeutic and they took legal action, seizing the machines. It was only a matter of months before the Ball Clinic closed its doors for good on December 31, 1963.

By 1981, there was a new owner and the hotel was refurbished and this brought an all-new spa renovation and this is when the lap pool went in that has a jogging track around it, there are cool and hot tubs, a waterfall tub and environmental rooms with cool mists and hot tubs. Part of the hotel was sold as time-share condos. Things were great for a decade, but 1991 brought another bankruptcy. The city stepped in and slowly bought interest in the hotel until it owned it in 1994. There was another huge renovation at that time and then another one in 2011 and today it is known as The Elms Hotel & Spa and has been proclaimed a Grand Dame of Hospitality with 152 guest rooms. 11,000 square feet of meeting space, including the 3,900-square-foot Elms Ballroom, a 42-seat amphitheater, a stone carriage house, and a 20-person boardroom. Amenities include two restaurants, two lounges, a 10,000-square-foot spa, an indoor European swim track, an indoor banked jogging track, a fitness room, an outdoor pool, a challenge course, a walking trail, and a professional volleyball court. 

The hospitality seems to run to the unseen as well. Several spirits find the hotel a comfortable place to remain in the afterlife. The Elms embraces their ghost stories. They offer a paranormal package that includes a one hour tour. The lap pool hosts someone from Prohibition days that is usually seen in a fedora hat. Gangsters stored their liquor down in the coolness of the basement and ran card games down here, out of sight. No one knows for sure, but it is believed that this man was killed during one of the illegal parties. Or maybe it was a hit that committed at the hotel. 

One of the spirits is a woman seen wearing a 1920s style maid uniform that usually appears on the third floor. She is said to be a nice spirit and ensures that the cleaning staff does their work correctly. Another female spirit is not so nice. She pulls people's hair and throws things. The story goes that she lost a child and is searching the hotel for that child and so she is angry. Room 422 was said to have a murder-suicide happen in there and this has led to a TV turning itself on and off. People have been scratched in Room 347.  

Everyday Outdoor Family on TikTok shared an experience she and her husband had at the hotel when they decided to book an overnight stay to get away from the kids for a night. They decided to go on the ghost tour and when they told the tour guide their room number, the guide asked if they wanted to know the stories connected to their room and she said that "of course they did." The room is known for things to move around. So as they were returning to their room after the tour, she and her husband were like, "Oh, is anything going to be moved around?" Everything was fine. So they went down to the pool and nothing happened. They returned to their room and again were kidding each other about whether stuff would be moved around - nothing. They get into bed and she asks her husband to close the curtains. These are really heavy curtains, not something that could easy be blown open. She wakes up at 2am and notices that the curtains are wide open. She goes back to sleep and asks her husband the next morning if he opened the curtains. He looks at them and goes, "Nooo." They couldn't figure out any reason why the curtains would be opened. The air conditioner was across the room. A person commented under the video, "I actually got married at the Elms, and when we were staying there that night, my husband was sleeping and I woke up, and I felt like someone was sitting on the side of the bed…..twice!!!!!" Another person commented, "My husband and I just stayed and had similar experiences. Doors opened when we woke up that we had shut before bed. LOTS of voices."

Investigator Janet Reed told 41 Action News that their team saw four wet footprints going away from the pool and disappearing like someone had just jumped out of the pool and walked off. She said of the girl ghost that roams the third floor, "I had a friend that stayed here and they thought I've got to get out there and tell that mother to take care of that child. they open the door and look down the hallways and there was no one there."  

These two guys named Jacob and Lucas stayed at the hotel in 2024 and they took the ghost tour at the hotel. They remarked that it seemed strange when they got to the Lap Pool and the tour guide told them that people see a male spirit standing at the far end of the room sometimes. They had both thought they saw something out of the corner of their eyes before when they were filming the pool area and doing a little swimming and they both had turned their heads at the same time, which made them think that something had to be there since they simultaneously thought they saw something., hearing the story on the tour convinced them that they probably did see an apparition. We just wanted to point out that there was this great moment in this video where they are partaking of a charcuterie board and they called it an adult lunchable. 

Ghost Moms stayed at the hotel in July 2025 and they set up a music box motion detector in the bathroom, which went off for quite a while. They wrote, "A motion detector being triggered by something unseen in the middle of the night is never going to not be terrifying. We were staying on the third floor of the Elms Hotel where guests have seen an apparition of a woman looking for her child and a maid roaming the halls. Maybe she was just trying to tidy up our room for us."

A woman was interviewed by the Excelsior Citizen and she was staying at the Elms with her husband. He went out for a bit and she decided to take a bath. In the middle of that the door handle jiggled and she wondered if he had left his key and so couldn't get in. She got out of the bath and went to the door and no one was there. Later, when he returned, she asked if he had tried to get in earlier an he said, "no." They checked the door handles and realized that moving the outside door knob doesn't move the inside doorknob, so how the handle was jiggling on the inside, they didn't know.

Ghost Hunters investigated in 2013. They brought a device with them that could detect when the water in the pool was disturbed. They also had something called a Shadow Detector that went off because the laser beam path was disturbed. At the end of the visit, they were comfortable claiming that the hotel indeed seemed to be haunted. But is The Elms Hotel haunted? That is for you to decide!