TIPTON HOTEL
Location: The Tipton is located at 138 St. James Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Considered the finest hotel in the area, several guests find it best to book months in advance.
Description of Place: The twenty-five story Victorian Renaissance hotel has 556 guestrooms and suites featuring the best in rich and opulent lifestyles with fine dining and luxuries. The hotel includes room service, two restaurants, a game room, indoor and outdoor swimming pools and fitness center for its guests. The exterior features a pitch copper roof and a decorative frieze at both the eight and tenth floors. There are rumors that there are forgotten tunnels in the basement connecting to former Boston locations, but these alleged tunnels have yet to be discovered.
Ghostly Manifestations: When one enters the Tipton, the first thing that comes to mind is the expense of just a night's stay. The lobby has the presence and grandeur of a castle in Britain with the regal furnishings belonging to someone in the decadent aristocracy. Like several of the castles in England, and hotels in Boston, the Tipton has a ghost or few, but the staff and cleaning crews are not permitted to speak of their stories or experiences. However, rumors do wander out and several guests have tried to specifically tried to get into Suite 613 to see the beautiful and heartbroken ghost. Officially, there is no ghost at the Tipton, but the guests who come here, get the truth from the restrained employees.
Like any successful place of business where the employees are at the mercy of an often indifferent and demanding public, the staff and employees of the Tipton know where the hiding places are to catch a breath, a disgusting nicotine habit or even a chance for a brief moment of peace. Hotel manager Marion Moseby knows several of the supposed stories of the hotel, and despite reticent about repeating those tales, it takes only a little bit of encouragement for him to tell a tale or two. He recalls that back in the Seventies, a bell hop which he is hesitant to name used to slip into Suite 613 to catch a few moments of peace and was subsequently scared back to his job by someone, or something in the room. Other members of the hotel staff add that there is a sensation of being watched by someone of an other worldly nature in 613 and objects move by themselves in there. Items can fling themselves through the air, and the furniture sometimes changes places. Chairs sometimes change location, and a table comes and goes from the room without reason.
"I was returning past Suite 613 after taking guests to their room." Employee Esteban Ramirez tells of his experience. "I don't know why I headed in that direction because the path to the elevator is shorter in the other direction; I guess I was just trying to stall for time or something made me go that way, I don't know, but when I passed Suite 613, the door was hanging open, and that's odd because the doors to the suites are always locked. They lock automatically unless one has a key. Anyway, I stopped, I looked inside and strolled inside looking for someone who had wandered in and I discovered the small lamp on the table near the bedroom doors was flickering. It was going on and off. Now, maybe a maintenance man was working in there and had left to get a tool or I had just missed someone else leaving, but I had reached to turn it off and for an instance, I thought I saw reflection of someone standing behind me in the mirror on the wall. I think it was a woman, but it was so fast. I whirled around, but no one was there, and I didn't want to look back in the mirror so I just hot-footed my way out of there and closed my eyes as I pulled the door shut, but you know, as I headed back downstairs, it dawned on me that as I left, I thought I heard someone laughing at me."
Guests on the seventh and eight floor have seen a woman in a dark cocktail dress standing on the balcony of 613 near the sculpture of a gargoyle watching over the room. Brunette and attractive, she is often described as cold and distant, but when she does make eye contact, she exudes a tragic and heart-broken feeling. A male guest wanting to meet her sent a glass of champagne to 613 with an invitation to his room. The champagne was delivered to be never seen again, but no one ever accepted the invitation.
Guests sometimes feel cold spots outside Suite 613 near the elevators. The sensation is described as a bucket of cold air or a blast of Arctic winter contained in an invisible pocket in the hotel. Other individuals have experienced being joined by a beautiful young woman as the elevator passes the sixth floor from the tenth or thirteenth floors. She often described the same way: a beautiful but quiet woman in a long dark cocktail dress standing to the back of the lift, but when a gentleman steps aside to let her exit first, he often finds himself looking for a woman who is no longer there.
A limited amount of poltergeist and psychokinetic behavior has been claimed. The door to Suite 613 has opened by itself a few times or has been found open only to slam shut by itself. On July 13, 2004, a housekeeper named Muriel entered to clean a room on the fourth floor and came out to find her cart missing from outside the room. Twenty minutes later, it was found blocking the door to Suite 613 on the sixth floor.
On October 14, 2005, a couple of teenagers including the daughter of the hotel owner used Suite 613 as the basis for a pre-Halloween séance and as such rigged the room with a series of ghost-oriented practical jokes. While they didn't notice any ghosts that didn't stem from mischief or pranks, one young man from the group returning to the room after the fact said he and his brother encountered a woman in the room. She simply strolled out of the back bedroom area smiling, handed over a lost piece of clothing and then turned into the wall where the portrait is and then vanished. She was later described as wearing a long dark cocktail dress.
There may or may not be other ghosts in the hotel. In addition to the ghost in Suite 613, there have been sightings of a young blonde female employee poking up from darkened areas of the hotel. The appearances supposedly started in the 1950s and are believed a former hotel employee. The story goes that a young woman who had started working in the hotel vanished while heading up to the penthouse and was never seen again. Rumors are that she met dire ends at the hands of a irate lover or the whims of a jealous rival. Her confused spirit tends to wander the catacomb-like bowels of the hotel cellar or the darkened stairways. Still yet another theory claims she was claimed by the ghost of Suite 613 for poking into areas she was not meant to explore.
"Back in June of this year," Marion Moseby recalls a 2004 incident. "I recall an incident that, well, reminded me just how intimidating the hotel really can be. It had been a humid summer, and it had been raining almost constantly for about two weeks, and I was on the second floor landing of the employee stairway that goes up through the back of the hotel from the kitchen. In that stairway, the lights are on timers and go off at six in the morning and then on at eight at night, but since the staff almost exclusively uses the elevators, the stairs are always deserted. Because of the rain that day, I had little light to make my way and as I came down, I distinctly recall seeing a young woman coming toward me with long blonde hair. I thought she was our candy girl because she also has blonde hair. Anyway, as she passed me, I said to her, 'Good day, Maddie' or 'Keep up the good job' or something to that effect and went on my way. As I returned to the front desk, I passed Maddie at the candy counter, looked at her, paused and looked back." Moseby chuckles under breath. "I met the ghost and didn't even know it."
Children's happy voices have been heard splashing in the hotel pool after hours; several employees have rushed in to catch the stray pranksters, but no one has been there. A waitress in the hotel dining room carried out a cup of coffee to a man in a gray suit sitting at a table, but when she looked back, he was missing when she looked back. Employees knocking at the doors of unoccupied rooms have been answered by voices from no where, and strange shadows wander inaccessible maintenance areas of the hotel.
"Could be the kids of one of the employees...." Irwin Hawkhauser, a Tipton maintenance man, replies. "They crawl through and infiltrate the rooms through the air conditioning ducts, or not... I like thinking the Tipton is haunted. It gives me hope of something else existing after I'm gone."
History: The hotel was built in 1939 on the foundation of an old deserted church from the Eighteenth Century, and possibly occupies area that was once a graveyard, but this is unconfirmed. Edward Tipton acquired the hotel in 1947, and it has been in custody of his heirs ever since. His granddaughter, London Tipton, still presides in the penthouse. It has undergone over $75 million in restorations over the years. During the time of Prohibition, the hotel served as the location for such underworld figures as Alphonse "Hot Lips" Dealio, who is reportedly as having left a fortune somewhere in the hotel, but this is unlikely due to numerous renovations over the years. Modern celebrities to have stayed here at one time or another include Orlando Bloom, Hanna Montana, Christina Aguilera, Brad Pitt, Jesse McCartney, Tony Hawk and the Jonas Brothers.
Identity of Ghosts: The ghost of Suite 613 is said to be that of Irene DeMontoya, whose family owned the hotel in the Thirties and Forties. Rich and beautiful, Irene lived in the hotel while her fiancé, Hector Vasquez, went off to fight in World War Two, but instead of returning home after the war, he stayed in Italy and married another girl. Irene was so heart struck over the news that she smashed a mirror with her hairbrush; a fragment of which struck her in the neck and she died of blood loss. Her room was afterward closed up to be never used again. While this is the official version, it is not entirely accurate. While Irene really did exist, military records list three Hector Vasquez's who fought in World War Two with one dying over the North Sea and another missing in action. The third man with that name retired in Pisa after the war. Of the men, the Hector Vasquez reported as MIA was the only one with a stateside residence in Boston. As far as why Room 613 remains unused, there is a logical reason; 613 is one of seventeen rooms continually rented by parties not in residence in the hotel. Room 613, however, is not on the regular housekeeping schedule and that fact might be part of the reason the haunting story continues.
There is no validating research to confirm any deaths or disappearances in the hotel, however, childhood photos of Irene show her with flowing blonde hair, but could it be possible that Irene is able to take a form of herself from more happier years? Former and current employees don't think so. Their descriptions of the young woman have her as wearing the old red and blue hotel uniform from the Fifties. Since Irene never served as an employee to the hotel, the identity of the blonde spirit remains as ever elusive as ever.
Source/Comments: The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (Episode: The Ghost of 613). Description based on the Fairmont Hotel depicted in the series opener located in Ottawa, Ontario. Hauntings based on similar stories from the Miami Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, the Hotel Conneaut in Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania and the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.