👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9475
ACTIVE
Skirvin Hilton Hotel
Skirvin Hilton Hotel is a location reputed to be haunted in Oklahoma, US. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is Skirvin Hilton Hotel?
- Location
- Oklahoma, US
- Type
- Hotel / inn
- Coordinates
- 35.469, -97.514
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Skirvin Hilton Hotel said to be haunted?
The Skirvin opened in 1911 as Oklahoma City's grand hotel and is still one, at 1 Park Avenue. Its ghost is a chambermaid called Effie, said to have been made pregnant by the owner W. B. Skirvin, shut in a room on the tenth floor, and to have jumped from the window with her baby. No record of her has been found. The 1979 National Register nomination — written by a Daily Oklahoman reporter working from her own paper's clip files — never mentions a ghost, a suicide or a chambermaid, and the hotel's own website today disposes of the subject in one sentence: “Rumors of paranormal activity circulate, though no evidence is found.” The Oklahoma historian Marilyn A. Hudson, who interviewed former staff, showed that the plot is the same one told about the Goldfield Hotel in Nevada, and that the only documented Effie nearby was a brothel keeper murdered in 1904, seven years before the hotel existed. What made the legend national was basketball: in January 2010 the visiting New York Knicks and Chicago Bulls — not the home Thunder — blamed a bad night at the Skirvin on its ghost.
What is the history of Skirvin Hilton Hotel?
William Balser Skirvin came to Oklahoma City in 1906 with money made from land and oil in Texas, and between 1910 and 1911 he raised the hotel that carried his name on the corner of Broadway and First Street — now Park Avenue. The nomination filed with the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 puts the cost at $1.8 million and calls it the most expensive building in Oklahoma City at the time. The architect was Solomon Andrew Layton, the principal architect of early-statehood Oklahoma City, who went on designing the Skirvin's additions until his death in 1943.
The shape of the building matters to the ghost story, so it is worth getting right. The Skirvin was built as two sections of ten storeys each, with 250 rooms according to the nomination. Later campaigns added a third section and took all three up to fourteen storeys and past 450 rooms. The original roofline can still be read on the façade: at the tenth level there is a belt course of limestone, and above it the eleventh and twelfth floors carry Corinthian pilasters and a heavy cornice that did not exist in 1911. The tenth floor of the legend is the top floor of the hotel Skirvin actually built.
He ran it, in the nomination's phrase, "like a feudal baron". It had its own water well, its own electrical generating plant, a private gas pipeline and its own laundry, and it disposed of its own rubbish. It stood across the street from the Rock Island depot and a few blocks from the Santa Fe and Frisco stations, which is why oilmen made it their headquarters — Robert Galbreath, William Skelly and Walter Ramsey among them. A 1921 addition opened a Venetian summer roof garden and brought in Ted Weems, Jimmie Joy, Jan Garber and the Seven Aces; a 1929 remodelling added a coffee shop finished in black Belgian marble that swallowed almost half the ground floor. In 1936 Skirvin built a second hotel across Broadway, the Skirvin Tower, and tunnelled under the street to connect them; those tunnels were later folded into the underground concourse Oklahoma City dug in 1974–75.
The Skirvin children grew up in the building. The eldest daughter, Pearl, gave her first party there and became Perle Mesta, the Washington hostess whom Harry Truman appointed United States minister to Luxembourg in 1949.
After the founder's death in 1944 the hotel was sold and began to slide. By late 1970 it was in the hands of a receiver, and an $8 million renovation in 1973–74 stripped the Ionic columns from the Broadway sidewalk. The hotel's own timeline credits a sit-in led in 1958 by the Oklahoma City schoolteacher and civil-rights organiser Clara Luper with forcing the Skirvin to integrate — an event at this address that is a good deal better documented than Effie. Suburban flight and the oil bust finished the job: the Skirvin closed in 1988, and the hotel now calls the two decades that followed "the Pigeon Era".
It took a city to reopen it. Oklahoma City set up a Skirvin Solutions Committee in 1999 and then bought the building outright with federal Community Development Block Grant money from HUD, which pulled the project under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and obliged the city to sign a memorandum of agreement with the State Historic Preservation Officer. Skirvin Partners LLC, which included the Hilton group, was chosen as developer. The rehabilitation installed 900 new windows, left the original corridors in place, saved 29 hand-carved Bacchus busts finished in gold leaf, the 1911 lobby tile and the art-deco tile of the Park Avenue Grill, and peeled modern stucco off the first two storeys. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation puts the total at $56.3 million and the vacancy at nineteen years. The Skirvin Hilton reopened in 2007 and created some 230 permanent jobs. In 2025 its owners since December 2022 — a local investor group together with the Chickasaw Nation — finished a further $22 million refurbishment of the 225 rooms.
Timeline: the documented record of Skirvin Hilton Hotel
- 1904 Effie Fisher, keeper of a bawdy house on West Second Street in Oklahoma City, is killed by her husband. The historian Marilyn A. Hudson, searching for a documentary Effie behind the Skirvin legend, found this woman and no chambermaid: she died seven years before the hotel opened, and in a different building.
- 1910–1911 William Balser Skirvin builds his hotel at Broadway and First Street to designs by Solomon Andrew Layton, at a cost of $1.8 million — the most expensive building in Oklahoma City at the time. It opens as two sections of ten storeys each with 250 rooms, so the tenth floor of the legend is the top floor of the original hotel.
- 1921–1929 Successive additions take the Skirvin to three sections of fourteen storeys and more than 450 rooms. The 1921 campaign opens a Venetian summer roof garden; the 1929 remodelling adds a coffee shop lined in black Belgian marble that takes almost half the ground floor.
- 1944 W. B. Skirvin dies and the hotel is sold. His eldest daughter Pearl, who had given her first party in the building, was by then on her way to becoming Perle Mesta, the Washington hostess appointed United States minister to Luxembourg by Harry Truman in 1949. By late 1970 the Skirvin is in the hands of a receiver.
- 10 October 1979 The Skirvin is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, reference 79002010, on a nomination written by Mary Jo Nelson of the Daily Oklahoman from her own paper's clip files, Oklahoma County records and Perle Mesta's memoir. The document says nothing about a ghost, a suicide, a chambermaid or anyone named Effie.
- 1988 The Skirvin closes. Urban renewal had demolished hundreds of downtown buildings and the oil bust finished the job; the building stands empty for nineteen years, a period the hotel's own timeline now calls "the Pigeon Era".
- 2007 The Skirvin Hilton reopens after a $56.3 million rehabilitation financed with federal and state tax credits, New Markets Tax Credits, a HUD grant, city urban-renewal money and private equity, and steered through Section 106 by an agreement between Oklahoma City and the State Historic Preservation Officer. Nine hundred new windows, the original corridors and 29 gilded Bacchus busts survive the work; some 230 permanent jobs are created.
- May 2008 Marilyn A. Hudson, librarian and Oklahoma historian, publishes her theory of the Effie ghost after interviewing former staff of the old hotel: the deaths of demolished downtown hotels drifted onto the surviving Skirvin, and the imprisoned-mistress plot is the same one attached to the Goldfield Hotel in Nevada. She reissues the piece in November 2014.
- 11 January 2010 The New York Knicks — the visiting side, not the home Thunder — lose 106–88 in Oklahoma City after a night at the Skirvin, and blame the hotel. Eddy Curry told the New York Daily News: "They said it happened on the 10th floor, and I'm the only one staying on the 10th floor. That's why I spent most of my time in (Nate Robinson's) room. I definitely believe there are ghosts in that hotel."
- 27 January 2010 Two weeks later the visiting Chicago Bulls tell the same story to ESPN's Nick Friedell. The rookie Taj Gibson: "At one point, at around 12:15 at night, my bathroom door just slammed completely shut. I don't know what it was, but it just completely slammed." Derrick Rose, who had asked to room with James Johnson: "If everybody in the town is saying it, then it's got to be true."
- 2025 The owners since December 2022 — a group of Oklahoma City investors together with the Chickasaw Nation — complete a nine-month, $22 million refurbishment of the hotel's 225 rooms and public spaces. The hotel's own history page still disposes of its ghost in a single sentence: "Rumors of paranormal activity circulate, though no evidence is found."
Is there a rational explanation for Skirvin Hilton Hotel?
The 1979 National Register nomination for the Skirvin was written by Mary Jo Nelson, a reporter on the Daily Oklahoman, and the sources she listed were the clip files of the Daily Oklahoman and the Oklahoma City Times, Oklahoma County records and Perle Mesta's memoir. It runs to several pages on the builder, the architect, the guests, the additions and the finances. It does not contain the words ghost, haunting, suicide, chambermaid, mistress or Effie. A newspaper's own morgue, worked through by that newspaper's own reporter, produced no ghost in 1979.
The hotel does not sell one either. On the official history page today the only line on the subject is a single sentence in the panel for 2007: "Rumors of paranormal activity circulate, though no evidence is found." As a control on the same sweep of that page, the word Skirvin appears nineteen times; ghost, haunted and Effie appear zero times, and paranormal only in that one sentence. The version of the site archived on 17 December 2017 does not raise the subject at all: fourteen mentions of Skirvin, none of ghost, haunted, paranormal or Effie. The Historic Hotels of America listing, which the hotel joined in 2008, is silent too. A hotel that wanted the trade would have a ghost tour and a haunted room. This one has neither.
The most useful work anyone has done on Effie is by Marilyn A. Hudson, a librarian and Oklahoma historian, in an article she published in May 2008 and reissued in 2014. Hudson interviewed people who had worked in the old hotel and went looking for the deaths. She found few in the Skirvin and plenty in the downtown hotels that no longer stand — the Grand, the Lee and others — along with a manager's suicide at the Skirvin in 1911 that was investigated as suspicious, a workman who fell to his death, and the ordinary tally of guests who killed themselves by poison or pistol, "as they did in all the local hotels". The nearest thing to a documentary Effie she turned up is not a chambermaid at all: an Effie Fisher, keeper of a bawdy house on West Second Street, killed by her husband in 1904, seven years before the hotel existed. Hudson's argument is that the deaths of the vanished hotels drifted onto the surviving one, "the more Gothic and imposing Skirvin", because, as she puts it, when a place "looks haunted" people expect to be haunted.
She also noticed the shape of the tale. The Goldfield Hotel in Nevada has its "Elizabeth": a poor woman made pregnant by a married man who either killed herself, or was imprisoned, or was murdered. Jerome, Arizona, has a Julia; Cripple Creek, Colorado, a Maggie. Hudson calls the Skirvin version "more the urban legend than real tale", and adds a blunt practical objection — a rich married man in 1911 with a pregnant employee had cheaper options than a locked room.
The versions do not agree with one another either, which is what folklore does and events do not. The story is set variously in the 1900s, the 1920s and the 1930s; the woman jumps, is pushed, or is left to go mad; the baby is thrown from the window or dies in the room. The earliest printed retellings that can be dated are recent, Wesley Treat's Weird Oklahoma of 2011 among them, and haunted-tourism pages now attach a specific room number, 1015, which no source before 2010 supports and which the hotel does not confirm. Eddy Curry, in 2010, said only "the 10th floor".
What made the story national was not archive work but basketball, and the reporting needs the same care as the folklore: the line most often quoted from the Knicks' Jared Jeffries circulates in two incompatible wordings, so it is not reproduced here.
Can you visit Skirvin Hilton Hotel?
The Skirvin is a working hotel, not a ruin and not a museum. The address is 1 Park Avenue, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73102, on the corner of Park Avenue and Broadway in the middle of downtown; it trades today as Skirvin, a Hilton Hotel, and has 225 rooms over fourteen floors. Rooms are booked through Hilton like any other Hilton, and rates move constantly — treat any figure you find quoted online, including on this page, as out of date.
You do not have to be a guest to see the parts of the building that matter. The lobby, with the restored 1911 tile floor, the arched wooden entries and the gilded Bacchus busts, is a public space; the Park Avenue Grill and the Red Piano Lounge take non-residents. That is the honest way to see the interior, and it costs the price of a coffee. There is no ghost tour, no haunted-room package and no plaque about Effie: the hotel does not run this story and asking the front desk for the tenth floor is not a service it offers. The 225 rooms were refurbished in a nine-month, $22 million programme completed in 2025, and the room inventory includes mobility- and hearing-accessible rooms and roll-in showers.
The Paycom Center, home of the Oklahoma City Thunder, is a short walk away, which is precisely why visiting NBA teams are booked into the Skirvin and why the ghost story is retold every winter. Bricktown, Scissortail Park and the Oklahoma City National Memorial are all within walking distance, and the downtown streetcar stops nearby.
Sources consulted
- Mary Jo Nelson, «National Register of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form: Skirvin Hotel (ref. 79002010)» — United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1979 archive
- Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, «Success Story: Rehabilitating the Architectural Heart of the City Showcases Partnerships — Oklahoma City, Oklahoma» — Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, 2008 report
- Lori Matta-Rhode, «New York Knicks Boo-Hooing Over Haunted Hotel (reproducing the New York Daily News quotes of Eddy Curry and Jared Jeffries)» — Bleacher Report, 2010 web
- Nick Friedell, «Chicago Bulls rookie Taj Gibson got a scare at the haunted Skirvin Hotel in Oklahoma City» — ESPN Chicago, 2010 newspaper archive
- Marilyn A. Hudson, «Skirvin Hotel, the "Effie" Ghost, and a Theory» — Oklahoma Paranormal News (May 2008), reissued on Mystorical, 4 November 2014, 2008 web
- Skirvin, a Hilton Hotel, «A Living Legacy Since 1911 — Skirvin History» — skirvinhilton.com, 2026 web
- Wesley Treat, «Weird Oklahoma: Your Travel Guide to Oklahoma's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets» — Sterling, 2011 book
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-13 · How we verify our content
💬 Field testimonies (0)
No testimonies yet. Add the first.
Add your testimony
🔒 Log in to add a testimony