Omni Shoreham Hotel

The Omni Shoreham opened on 30 October 1930 on the lip of Rock Creek Park, built by the developer Harry M. Bralove to a design by Joseph H. Abel, and it has been part of inaugural Washington since Franklin D. Roosevelt's ball of 1933. Its ghost story belongs to one apartment on the eighth floor, which the hotel markets in a single line on its own history page: “Our Ghost Suite, #870, is said to be haunted by two ghosts; former Executive Housekeeper & a young girl.” The oldest version of that story anyone can date tells it differently. In the Washington Post of 3 April 1997, written while the hotel was preparing to sell the suite at $2,000 a night, the room is numbered 800G, the dead housekeeper is called Julia Benson and died in the 1950s, and the owners are “a wealthy Chilean family”. The Dohertys came from Ohio and New York. Grace Doherty died in 1949 running the family foundation, and her daughter Helen died in Denmark in 1964.

The eleven acres between Woodley Road and 28th Street, on the lip of Rock Creek Park, were supposed to carry apartment blocks. The Washington developer hired to build them was Harry M. Bralove; he walked the site and changed the brief. The hotel's own institutional history — Omni Shoreham Hotel: A Brief History, written by Judy Colbert and served as a PDF from the hotel's website until the file went dead around 2013 — puts it in one sentence: "He envisioned a hotel that would combine transient and residential living." Bralove hired the Washington architect Joseph H. Abel, who worked Renaissance and Art Deco detail into the same elevation and specified fireproofing, running ice water and high-speed Westbrook elevators. In the basement went a furniture factory that Colbert calls "the only one in a hotel in the country", turning out the fittings for the public rooms. Ground was broken in 1929 and the bill came to $4 million. Rooms opened "from $5 for a single and $8 for a double room to $12 for parlor and bedroom suites" of up to 2,600 square feet, kitchen and wood-burning fireplace included. The Shoreham opened on 30 October 1930, and the opening was a fiasco that the hotel has dined out on ever since. Sarah Booth Conroy went back over it for the Washington Post on the hotel's sixtieth birthday, using the bandleader's own account: the Shoreham had agreed to pay Rudy Vallée and his Connecticut Yankees $9,000; his plane out of Newark ran into a storm — "This was my third or fourth time in a plane and I wasn't too shaky about it," Vallée said, "until we suddenly felt ourselves in the grip of a terrific thunderstorm" — and put down at Camden, New Jersey. They reached Bolling Field at 3:15 a.m., by which time the five thousand ticket-holders had dwindled to about a thousand, and played from 4:15 to 4:30 a.m. before catching a train back to New York for an 8 a.m. rehearsal. On 4 March 1933 the first inaugural ball of Franklin D. Roosevelt was held here, with a ramp and a lift installed for a president who used a wheelchair. What the hotel says about the sequel is the hotel's own claim: "For the next seventy years, whenever there was an Inaugural Ball, it was held at the Shoreham." The building opened into the Depression, and Colbert's history is candid about the cost. Bralove "did, indeed, have some financial problems. He asked Henry Doherty to become a minority shareholder in the hotel", and Doherty moved his household into an apartment on the eighth floor, furnished with Persian rugs and a service of "Napoleon Bonaparte china". The same paragraph introduces the woman the ghost story is about: "They adopted a daughter named Helen and the hotel's executive housekeeper, Juliette Brown, lived with them and took care of the family." Henry Latham Doherty (1870-1939) was an Ohio utilities financier who ran his companies out of New York. Bobby D. Weaver's entry in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture records that he left school at twelve for the Columbus Gas Company, was its chief engineer by twenty and founded Cities Service in 1910, the holding company that became Citgo; that "By the mid-1930s Doherty became almost an invalid due to an arthritic condition, but he continued to operate his empire from a specially equipped bed"; and that "Henry Latham Doherty died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 26, 1939, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York." His widow, Grace Pauline Rardin Doherty (1885-1949), founded the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation; Centre College, one of its beneficiaries, records that she "remained the president of the foundation until her death in 1949". Their daughter Helen Lee Eames Doherty, born in Hamburg on 15 October 1908, married twice and died as Helen Lee Doherty Lassen on 29 July 1964 at Holme-Olstrup, in the Danish municipality of Næstved, and was buried in the family plot at Woodlawn. A Danish foundation registered care of the Herlufsholm estate office at Næstved still carries her married name: The Helen Lee Doherty Lassen Fund, CVR 11636276. The hotel changed hands repeatedly. Conroy's 1990 summary, spellings and all: "In 1973, the hotel was bought by the Mats Company and acquired the new last name of American. In 1980, William Zeckendorf bought the hotel and it became the Shoreham, 'a Dunfy Hotel.' In 1985, Dunfy merged with Omni and Omni became the Shoreham's first name." In 1993, as Judith Evans reported in the Washington Post, "two banks that were owed $23 million put the hotel in receivership"; in December 1994 Omni Hotels bought it and began a $60 million renovation of what was then a 771-room hotel. That renovation produced the oldest datable printed account of the haunting: Evans's article of 3 April 1997, "Above Rock Creek Park, Fixing Up an Old Haunt". Almost none of its detail matches the version told today. The room is 800G, a 4,000-square-foot top-floor suite that had "remained empty" "For 37 years" — that is, since about 1960. The dead housekeeper has a different name and a different decade: "Hotel employees trace the origin of tales of the Omni Shoreham's haunted suite to sometime soon after the death of Julia Benson, the housekeeper of the hotel's owner, Henry Doherty, in the 1950s." The owners are "a wealthy Chilean family"; Doherty is said to have "returned to Chile" and gone on paying "$85 a month to rent the suite until the 1960s". Two further deaths are attached to the room: "Doherty's sole heir, his 40-year-old adopted daughter, Helen, died of natural causes in the same suite", and "Doherty's wife, whose name is unknown, also had died in the suite." The article also says plainly why the hotel was telling the story. General manager Jose Campo on the suite's long dormancy: "What a total waste of space and potential revenue." On the plan: "We're going to make it a real presidential suite {$2,000 per night}, but keep the atmosphere of the historic part of it." By 18 October 2006, the date of the Internet Archive's capture of Colbert's PDF, the account had settled into its present shape: the housekeeper is Juliette Brown, who "wasn't feeling well one early morning and died of natural causes as she was calling for help"; "Some time later, Helen also died of an undetermined cause"; the family left in 1973; and "Now fully redesigned and restored, the area is named, appropriately, the Ghost Suite." Eric Nuzum slept in it for the Washingtonian of 1 November 2007 and repeated a three-death version. NBC4 Washington filmed there in October 2011 with staff on the record — chief engineer Steven Polli, security director Ralphaello McKeython, room cleaner Dollie Robinson, maintenance worker Art Perry — and with the hotel's director of sales, Handan Bas-Bailey, supplying the origin story. The hotel joined Historic Hotels of America as a full member in 2007. Since at least 3 August 2014 its own history page has carried one line on the subject, identical in the capture of 10 August 2025: "Our Ghost Suite, #870, is said to be haunted by two ghosts; former Executive Housekeeper & a young girl."

The hotel is open and trading. Its own history page, captured on 10 August 2025, gives the address as 2500 Calvert Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20008 and the telephone as (202) 234-0700. Colbert's history places it "just one block to the Woodley Park Metro station" — Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan on the Red Line — "two blocks from the Washington Zoo, minutes from Georgetown, and less than two miles north of the White House". The photograph on this file shows the south front, the side that faces the gardens and Rock Creek Park. Suite 870 is the one room a guest cannot simply book. Nuzum found "a simple plaque on the front door identifying it as the ghost suite" in 2007 and described it as "the only room in the hotel that the public can't reserve"; NBC4 reported in 2011 that it "can only be booked if the hotel is sold out", or by asking for an upgrade at check-in. The $2,000-a-night plan announced in 1997 was abandoned: by 2007 the suite was being kept for dignitaries and upgrades instead. The hotel sells nothing else on the subject. On its history page as captured on 10 August 2025, the words "Halloween" and "walking route" appear zero times, and the whole treatment of the haunting is the single line about the Ghost Suite. Everything else is a normal city hotel: public rooms and gardens open to people who are not staying there, with the Rock Creek Park path running behind the building. The file is free to read. Judith Evans's article of 3 April 1997 and Sarah Booth Conroy's of 18 March 1990 sit in the Washington Post online archive, and both are also preserved in the Internet Archive; Nuzum's Washingtonian piece of 1 November 2007 is on the magazine's site; and Judy Colbert's history of the hotel, which the Omni Shoreham stopped serving around 2013, survives only in the Internet Archive's capture of 18 October 2006.