Geiser Grand Hotel

The ghosts are younger than the restoration. Samantha Swindler, who stayed at the hotel for The Oregonian in October 2022, wrote that "the ghost stories began shortly after the reopening" at the end of 1996: a dropped tray of glasses, dining chairs that seemed to move on their own, strange sounds in the walls. A 2008 article in AAA's Via magazine, quoted by the Baker City Herald, moved them back into the decades the building stood empty — "Rollicking ghosts, some say, were the only guests of the 1889 Geiser Grand Hotel in Baker City, Ore., for decades after the building was shuttered in 1968" — without naming anyone who said so. The best-known figure, the Lady in Blue of Room 302, has a name only inside the hotel: the staff call her Annabelle and describe her as a Geiser matriarch who kept a room there. Swindler searched genealogy records and found no one called Annabelle Geiser. The nearest real candidate she found was Annie Bernice "Birdie" Geiser, Albert's wife, who married him at 16 in 1894 and had moved to Portland without him by 1930. Swindler spent a night in the suite and wrote: "If there was a ghost, she never made herself known to me." The owner's own experience is the fullest account in print. Barbara Sidway told The Oregonian that, staying overnight during the renovation, she woke to "a party, like a dozen or more people, glasses clinking, music"; her husband searched the closed building and found no one, and months later an old bartender described the same late-night party to her. Swindler reports that Sidway "claims to be agnostic on the subject of ghosts", and quotes her: "Who am I to poo-poo other people's perceptions? It's something completely not provable either way, but the power of suggestion is very strong to us human beings." The hotel sells the setting for that suggestion. Its events listing, read on 4 October 2026, offers three-hour night ghost hunts with the investigators of Big River Paranormal, for up to 15 people, with "professional ghost-hunting equipment" and a route through "the haunted third floor"; the archived 2023 version of the page priced the hunts at $50 a head, and in 2022 the Halloween programme added séances with dinner at $39.