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Kansas City's Hotel Savoy is more than the oldest continuously operating hotel west of the Mississippi. It's also rumored to be haunted.
Built in 1888, the hotel was an elegant stopping place for travelers, featuring intricate woodwork, a ballroom, a rooftop garden and a stained glass skylight. In 1903 the Savoy Grill, the oldest restaurant in Kansas City, was added. The murals, which portray the departure of pioneers beginning the Santa Fe Trail from Westport, grace the walls of the restaurant and have been featured in a Smithsonian Institution exhibit. One dining booth is known as the president's booth-Harry Truman, Warren G. Harding, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan have all dined at it.
For a time the hotel was a residential building with apartments. Owner Don Lee recently renovated the hotel into a bed and breakfast. The Savoy, which is in the National Register of Historic Places, was the ideal place to film scenes for the movies "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" and "Cross of Fire."
Many distinguished guests have stayed the night, including presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Will Rogers, Sara Bernhardt, W. C. Fields and John D. Rockefeller.
Some guests, however, are less than welcome. Staff members and residents have reported ghostly phenomena, including the usual suspects: footsteps in the hallways, doors opening on their own, appliances gone haywire.
One of the ghosts that supposedly haunts the building is Betsy Ward, an old woman who died in the bathtub (some reports say she died in bed from a heart attack) in room 505 and never left. One report from Sept. 1990, more ominous than the creepy shower scene in Hitchcock's "Psycho," involves a shower operating on its own in the room she died in. Larry Freeman, the occupant who witnessed the occurrence play out not once but three times, finally fetched the manager after the fourth instance.
Another time the manager heard music coming from Freeman's apartment when he hadn't turned on the radio and wasn't even home. A few months later Freeman's phantom once again paid a visit, this time to open the gravity-tilted sliding oak door. The possibility of a burglar was out of the question: the outer door was locked tight and there were no signs of forced entry. Supposedly a turn-of-the-century 32-caliber pistol was found sealed in the wall when the apartment was renovated, leading to the question of whether another incident prompted the peculiar happenings.
A male ghost who allegedly hangs around the hotel is Fred Lightner, who owned an apartment there with his wife, Kathy. Two witnesses, Kathy and her friend Reid Shaylor, a resident and waiter at Savoy, claimed to have seen his ghost, a gray spectre, standing in the hall outside his place after Shaylor came to lend her a cup of sugar.
While the hotel has quieted down in recent years, Betsy Ward is still rumored to reside in room 505.
Hotel Savoy is located at 219 W. 9th St. in downtown Kansas City, Mo.
eiorg@unews.com
