'This room has the most ghostly activity.' She explained that she'd set up banquets here only to return the next morning to find tables and place settings inexplicably disorganised. 'The acoustics are alive,' she said, snapping her fingers, as we reached the Venetian Room, an ornate ballroom on the top floor. Riley added that a woman in a red dress, not always detectable as a phantasm, is said to lurk in the halls. To get a more in-depth understanding of the hotel, I sought out Susan Riley, who, until recently, served as its in-house historian.ĭuring Riley's six and a half years working at the hotel, she claimed she often heard a crying baby during her shifts, but later realised that when a side door was opened in blustery Oklahoma, it let in a banshee-like cry from the gust.Ĭlimbing up to the 10th floor, we searched, to no avail, for a bullet hole supposedly lodged near the elevator bank in one of the many Wild West-style shootouts while up on the 11th floor, a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door handle flapped strangely, perhaps from a draught beneath the door. 'But never say never…' she added as the lift's bell chimed. Raised in a funeral home, she said she's seen no evidence of paranormal activity during her 10 years at the hotel beyond the costume-wearing Mary Kay conference attendees infiltrating the premises. 'I'm a see-it-to-believe-it gal,' said Kelsey Huber, the hotel's express meeting manager, during an elevator ride. The forgotten story of the US' black cowboys.'The history and grandeur of The Skirvin are palpable,' said general manager Skip Harless. 'It feels almost haunted by or heavy with the DNA of all those who have visited here and all that has happened in this special, majestic place.' But for hotel management, the legendary visitors of yesteryear – past guests include US presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, as well as Paul McCartney and Elvis Presley – is the true ghostly inheritance the property bears. A rigged roulette wheel and Prohibition hijinks fomented Wild West-style gun fights inside the place. Its first manager is said to have shot himself in 1913 – a suicide that was later investigated as a murder. You have even these famous people claiming they've had encounters with a horny Effie.'Įffie aside, the hotel has a colourful past.

This is the most legendary ghost story in Oklahoma City, if not the entire state. 'And with the NBA it tends to be the latter. 'There's the spooky, sad Effie, and then there's the Effie that wants to get it on to Barry White music,' said Steve Lackmeyer, co-author of the book Skirvin, as we sat at the hotel's Red Piano Bar.

Such stories, like the tornadoes that plague the region, have swept through the hotel's English Gothic lobby into the city and beyond, most notably among visiting NBA basketball teams who have overnighted here before playing the Oklahoma City Thunder, only to experience inexplicable creaks, groans, cries and ghostly molestations. The Skirvin Hilton, the grande dame of Oklahoma City – a sort of Waldorf Astoria in America's Heartland – is an imposing 14-storey, Art Deco property from 1911 that's said to be haunted by Effie, a Prohibition-era chambermaid who jumped to her death with a love child fathered by hotel founder WB Skirvin. In perhaps an ill-advised move, I booked a stay with my family at what may be the US' most haunted hotel – and one of its most notorious.

Effie hotel