Description of Place: The Arcadian Hotel was an eighteen-story steel-frame structure, one of the New York City's grandest hotels in the heyday of the Thirties and the Forties. Architect Ted Moseby passionately described her as including "Neo-Classical fenestration with Palladium windows, marble cornices and an iconic lion-head stone work beneath large neon letters fifteen feet tall on the roof." The structure had five hundred rooms, twenty suites, a grand dining room and a two-story high palatial lobby.

Ghostly Manifestations: The Old Arcadian Hotel seems to have been cursed from the start. It opened for business just two weeks after the 1929 stock market crash known as "Black Monday" that set off the Great Depression. Hotel magnate James Bradley Harris, the son of Civil War Major James Patrick Harris, built the Arcadian atop an earlier hotel in the 1920s. The stories of ghosts and hauntings began in the Arcadian long before it ever closed. A porter who worked there during the Thirties and Forties was the first known to witness the ghost of the woman on the seventh floor. She was possibly the mistress of the hotel manager. Distraught from her affair, she jumped to her death from the top of the building. The year of the incident has not been verified but the room she stayed in, apparently quite comfortably, was a suite on the southeast corner of the seventh floor known as the Amber Room. Many have reported smelling her perfume and her spirit is said to be quite flirtatious with men she may fancy. Male guests there experienced the sweet odor of her rose perfume often, and one man reported finding the outline of a woman next to him on the bed when he awoke one morning,

Employees were well aware of the hauntings of the hotel but encouraged not to speak about them. A maid in the hotel reported that on several occasions she found empty drinking glasses in the room with red lipstick stains on the rims. This took place at times when no one was staying in the room. It has been claimed she has been discovered sitting on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette, but no one ever smells cigarettes, just the scent of rose perfume pervading the entire floor..

For more stories about the hotel, architect Ted Moseby recommended CGS to talk to Noah Chance, a paranormal historian at New York University. Chance also directed us to talk to Quentin Jefferson, a former security guard in the waning days of the Arcadian before its demolition. Quentin once managed tours of the building on weekends when time allowed and is quite knowledgeable on the history of the hotel as well as the reports of a few sightings of disembodied guests. Once constantly chasing kids out of the location, he eventually let it be known that he would allowed secret tours of the location. One night, he was near the main lobby on the first floor when he heard the distinct sound of a woman in high heels walking across the lobby. Thinking the footsteps to be those of Mavis Radnor, the building super, he yelled out her name; however, the footsteps faded away and upon further inspection, Quentin found himself all alone. Later he discovered that Mavis had not been in the building that day.

Quentin has also heard the sound of breathing coming from the fifth floor. Strange shadows and figures are not in common. At first, he tried to pursue all of them, but later, he learned to differentiate the apparitions from the kids sneaking into the building. One day, he was leading eight college students through a tour of the eighth floor and one of them looked out the window and saw a woman in the next room leaving the room and entering the bathroom. They all saw this figure, but when Quentin went and checked the room, the room was deserted and the bathroom was empty.

"Needless to say, those kids wanted to end the tour very quickly." Quentin adds. 

In the spring of 2000, Quentin recalled speaking with a local woman who claimed to be a psychic. As he recalls: "She told me, ever since she was a young girl, she had had the ability to see spirits, and that he she had been in the Baker many times and had even managed a shop on the same street back in the early 1980s. She said the stories are true. The Baker is very haunted, but the spirits were mot malevolent. They were just the ghosts of people recalling happy moments in the hotel.

"She went on to say that most of the spirits in the hotel do not want to be seen or heard with the exception of a small boy, about six to eight years old, who was the only one to communicate with her. He told her he was lost and looking for his parent's room in the hotel. She reported a large shaggy dog always accompanied the child. He also bounced a ball to get her attention and was watched by an unknown older woman who was always near him.

"The psychic went on to tell me the spirits don't necessarily look the age they were when they died. Some were employees of the building while others for reasons she doesn't understand died elsewhere bur returned for other reasons to the hotel. One was a helicopter pilot who attended basic flight training at Fort Sherman in the Forties and was killed in a helicopter crash at Fort Marshall in South Carolina. He had returned to the hotel to be with his fiancée because of the happy memories they had while dating there.

"Another was a police officer named Mulroney who had been shot and killed five blocks away in 1937 by an unidentified mobster, but he returned to the Arcadian because it was on his beat and he had always wanted to stay there."

On another occasion, Quentin reported being on the seventh floor and re-setting an electrical breaker to the Christmas lights, which continuously tripped every night during display. As he was inspecting the fuse box, attempting to locate the breaker switch, he heard the footsteps of an unseen person walking up to his left - quietly - as if not to bother him. A bit startled, he turned to look and saw no one. Ronny spoke to the possible ghosts and assured them he meant no harm. After that night, the lights never tripped off again.

Another incident occurred during a tour of the hotel by a group of World War Two veterans and their spouses. As the group entered the "Ocean Room" on the first floor, which was near the main dining room and dance area, a couple suddenly stopped and reported what they heard as Big Band music coming from the main dining room. About that time, several other people in the group also began to hear sounds of dishes and silverware clanking as well as people talking with orchestra music in the background. Most of the people there reported this event. It has never happened before nor since - according to Jefferson, but the witnesses were sure they were experiencing the ghostly echoes of a time long past.

After the hotel closed, Mavis stayed around the supervise and manage the workmen who came in to remove fixtures and furnishings. Workmen in the halls removing the bras fixtures told her they saw people moving through the hotel and entering the rooms. A man with a mustache wear a suit and bowler hat was once seen entering Room 513. That door has been found locked whenever one tries to get into it. Children were heard playing and laughing in Room 726. They can be heard bouncing on the bed, long after it had been removed. Footsteps echo from empty halls, and Earl reports having seen a phantom bus boy pass him going down the stairs. He stopped, looked down and the young man was gone.

"Even before it closed," Mavis adds. "The back elevator was known to go up and down by itself. People would see the doors open, no one in it, and then it would leave again. Rumor is it was haunted by Toby, a former elevator operator who had joined the army and was killed in action in France. His spirit returned to the job he loved so much, and long after the hotel closed, the sound of it moving continued."

A young woman who worked at a local drive-through bank in the early Nineties reported that she and other tellers had their workstations facing the huge hotel. During slow times, they noticed hotel windows open on various floors. Later they would notice these windows closed and others would be open. After awhile, they began to take note and count which were opened and closed. The pattern changed. One of the girls told the others "it must be the man who lives in the building, and takes care of it. "After that, the interest ceased and they stopped noticing. The strange thing is, no one has ever stayed in the Baker at any time since its closure in 1990. There never was a caretaker, and Quentin testifies he never opened the windows on his rounds.

History: The Arcadian was built over the site of a hotel that had been erected in the 1890s. Damaged by fire in 1917, the new hotel was rebuilt and refurbished in the 1920s, re-opening November 12, 1929, two weeks after the Stock Market Crash that caused the Great Depression. Named for the village of Arcadian Wells in northern New York where James Bradley Harris had spent several happy summers, the Arcadian was once an impressive site for its day. It served as a home for captains of injury and American G.I.'s during the war. Guests as diverse as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, John Rockefeller, Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding once stayed here. Celebrities like Laurel and Hardy, Errol Flynn, Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Will Rogers, Jean Harlow, Judy Garland and Mae West once did shows here. Composer Josef Weir was its band director for much of its existence, but the local failed to compete with the much larger more grandiose hotels to come. It was forced to file bankruptcy in 1939. For a few years in the 1940s, the building housed families of World War II military personnel, reopening as a hotel in 1965, but by then it was already falling in decline. It closed for good in 1998, but by then it was becoming a haven for prostitutes, inebriates and the homeless. Despite a noble ten-year crusade to save the hotel by preservationalists and nostalgic former guests, it looked like the hotel might be saved from demolition in April 2011based on the front facade and lion-head sculpture, but when the lion-head vanished (supposedly by vandals or by malcontents from GNB), demolition went underway. It was finally demolished on May 16, 2011.

Today, no one is quite sure the ghosts are gone. Shadows have been seen mulling about the construction site, workmen get tapped on the shoulder by nonexistent people and the sounds of children are heard playing nearby. Workmen on the lift have described hearing a voice say, "Floor, please?"

Identity of Ghosts: There are no accounts of any women jumping off the roof, but the hotel has had its fair share of deaths. A man burned to death in Room 513 after falling asleep with a cigarette, a boy climbing on the second floor balcony fell to his death into the lobby and broke his neck and a doctor took his life on the Eighth floor after discovering his wife with her lover. While no one has a name for the Air Force pilot, a police officer named Dan Mulroney did lose his life in a shoot-out with an unidentified mobster on April 11, 1937 on nearby 74th Street. He has been seen walking through the lobby in his police uniform and vanishing into the elevator, but he is just one of numerous ghosts passively and quietly making their existence known. 

Source/Comments: How I Met Your Mother (Episode: "Challenge Accepted") - Activity based on the Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells, Florida, the Holbrooke Hotel in Grass Valley, California, the Majestic Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the Korakia Hotel in Palm Springs, California and the Paramount Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

Fort Marshall from the "Army Wives" TV-Series (2008 - Recent)