Rooms With a Boo

The grand staircase at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, 1939.

Recipe for a ghost story: a dramatic setting. A tragic passing. A moody aesthetic. A history of uncanny events, unexplained happenings, and unsettling experiences.

The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver certainly checks all the boxes. Constructed between 1928 and 1939 as part of the national chain of grand château-style railway hotels, the building, with its emphatically pitched copper roof, carved-stone exterior, gothic dormers, and leering gargoyles, is the perfect setting for a quintessentially Canadian spook tale. Inside, the hotel’s grand ballrooms, expansive halls, and out-of-the-way nooks and crannies provide plenty of opportunity for unsettling scenes and jump scares.

Of which there have been plenty. Footsteps in an otherwise empty corridor; whispers from unlit corners; doors and closets opening with eerie, extended creaks; elevators opening, closing, or stopping without buttons being pressed—all have been reported by guests over the years. All can surely by explained by some combination of 95-year old foundations, aging electrical systems, and jet-lagged guests… can’t they?

The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, approximately 1940.

Harder to explain is the hotel’s longest-residing guest, the Lady in Red, believed by some to be the ghost of Jennie Pearl Cox, a young socialite who died in a roadway collision in front of the hotel in 1944. The elegant spirit has been seen in a flowing scarlet dress, floating through doors, following guests into rooms, disappearing into elevators, sneaking a peek at crews filming in the building, or even peering out a window of the then-locked-off 16th floor in a 2017 photo. One oft-repeated anecdote tells of a Japanese family phoning down to the front desk to ask if their room had been double-booked: a woman in a bright red ballroom gown has been seen in the room as they entered.

Every hotel is, on one level, a functional building: a place for the weary to rest while away from home. The best, however, are something more: a kind of cloverleaf where time and place, culture and history intersect and cross each other in intricate combinations. The same goes for ghost stories, the best of which transcend their role as fireside hair-raisers to become tales in which the real and the fantastic curve and weave in layers, leading us to new understandings of perception, memory, and what it means to be alive (or not).

Heady stuff for those simply looking for a room for the night. Then again, these are the things that can turn a downtown sojourn into an experience worth talking about. Come for the room, stay for the stories. You can check out any time you like. Others, however, can never leave.

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