Hotel Monte Vista

Route 66, Hollywood Westerns and a knocking bellboy

★★★★★📍 Downtown Flagstaff, Arizona$$

The history: the community-funded hotel was a symbol of Flagstaff's ambition in the railroad and lumber era, and its years as Hollywood's northern Arizona headquarters gave it a glamour that the room names still advertise. It has hosted travelers continuously through the Route 66 decades, and its ghost reputation has grown with every generation of guests who leave a story behind. The hotel's own history is specific: fundraising began in April 1926 and raised about $200,000 within a month, ground was broken that June and the doors opened on January 1, 1927. In its first year Mary Costigan, said to be the first American woman licensed to broadcast on radio, hosted a daily show from Room 105, and the lounge ran as a speakeasy during Prohibition. Guests over the years are said to include John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Jane Russell and Harry Truman.

Room craft: ask for one of the rooms associated with the ghost stories if that is the point of the trip, or a quieter room away from the street if sleep comes first; downtown Flagstaff is lively at night. Have a drink at the Rendezvous, and walk the historic downtown and the railroad district. The rooms tied to the lore: Room 210, the Zane Grey room, is linked to the knocking phantom bellboy; Room 220 to a long-term boarder who died there and whose coughing is still reported; Room 305 to the woman in the rocking chair, which is said to return to the window however often staff move it; and the lounge to a bank robber said to have died there after a 1970s holdup.

Practicals: corner of Aspen Avenue and San Francisco Street, downtown Flagstaff; Grand Canyon South Rim about 90 minutes; Sedona about 45 minutes. Fit: a Grand Canyon trip with a haunted night, and the northern anchor of a haunted Arizona loop with Boothill and the Copper Queen in the south.