Chris Altheer was raised in the Jerome Grand Hotel, the town's former hospital, which just happens to be one of the most haunted buildings around.
“As a kid, running through the building and playing around up here, I definitely felt a presence,” Altheer said. “A lot of the housekeepers even would share their stories and they would say they'd be cleaning rooms from time to time and you would just get that real cold chill, kind of go through you.”
“Just hearing all of the old hospital stories. There was one death a day, approximately, in this building. They were doing a lot of operations and a lot of those were amputations.”
And the chute where all those body parts were disposed is right in one of the hotel hallways.
“The surgeons and the doctors were able to come out of the operating room, which is down in this hallway, and they were able to walk to that chute and dispose of some pretty gruesome things that were coming out of the operating room,” Altheer said.
Visitors at the Jerome Grand Hotel say they’ve seen ghosts.
“We get probably one call every two to three days from a paranormal group that would like to come up and search at the Jerome Grand Hotel,” Altheer said. “The biggest group that came up here is without a doubt the Arizona Paranormal Society, and they brought 14 investigators up here on one night, and in one night with those 14 people, they got over 40 hours of paranormal activity evidence.”
Most hotels would probably want to keep the hauntings quiet, so as not to scare away guests. But not the Jerome Grand Hotel -- they promote it.
The hotel offers a “ghost” package which includes digital cameras and ghost meters.
According to guests, sightings of a woman in white are common. And rumor has it, an angry man believed to be an elevator repair man, who was found crushed to death by the elevator, supposedly walks the hallways.
But it’s not just the guests, creepy things happen to Altheer too.
“We had nobody scheduled to check in that day, we had nobody in the building, in fact, and the phone started ringing down behind the front desk, and it was on the switchboard. And this phone call was coming from room 41, up on the top floor, so I picked up the phone, and it was a woman and she was speaking a very, very fast language, it was very foreign. It sounded like this woman was in trouble, Altheer said. “And then all of a sudden, the phone cut out and went dead. So I hung up the phone, and I took my keys, I ran up to that room, on the top floor, and there was nobody in the room, I picked up the phone and made sure that it rang down on that same line, and it did, it was working fine. So I left and I went back downstairs and I sat in my chair, and as I sat in that chair, it rang again. The phone started ringing and I picked it up, but this time there was just some very, very eerie breathing noises, very disturbing, very raspy breathing noises.”
If you like the feeling of fright, the Jerome Grand Hotel is the place to stay for a night.