The Hotel Congress sits across from the Amtrak depot in old downtown Tucson, and everything about it hums a little. It has watched the city grow from wild west stop to what it is now, and it treats its ghosts the way it treats its regulars: by name. The original researcher behind our Tucson tour has been visiting the Congress for close to two decades, staying overnight, eating at the Cup Cafe, and collecting stories. These are the best of them.
Like Flagstaff's Hotel Monte Vista, the Congress publishes its own paranormal lore, and it appears on most lists of Arizona's most haunted hotels. Start with Room 214. A well-dressed male figure is sometimes spotted in its window by people on the sidewalk below. Heart attack, gunfire, or nothing of the kind, nobody has pinned down who he was. The consensus is only this: the sighting looks like a dapper gentleman, right up until he disappears.
Vince's room: the butter knives of Room 220
Vince was a real man, a World War II veteran who came to the Congress as a pensioner back when people of means lived in hotels the way we live in apartments. He liked to be useful, and he carried a small butter knife he used as a screwdriver to fix things around the building. After Vince passed, staff began finding butter knives in odd places, and they decided Vince was saying hello.
On one stay in Room 220, our researcher slept soundly, came downstairs early, and found the front desk clerk alone. Asked about Vince, the clerk told the story, paused, and then blurted out the kicker: a butter knife had turned up that very morning, the first in a long while.
The woman in white of Room 242
Room 242 carries the hotel's saddest story. A woman is said to have taken her own life in the bathroom there, and when she appears, a heaviness comes first, the air turning thick and oppressive. She has been seen as a partial apparition, a woman dressed in white. Unlike Flagstaff's ladies in white, there is no dancing with this spirit.
And then there is the Dillinger gang
The Congress has one more claim to fame, and it has nothing to do with ghosts. In January 1934 a basement fire flushed the Dillinger gang out of their rooms and into the hands of the Tucson police. That story involves a $12 tip, a detective magazine, and the most wanted man in America, and we tell it properly in The Notorious Dillinger Gang.
Walk this story
The Congress anchors our downtown Tucson ghost tour, evenings at 8 PM, $29 per person. Monk, our Tucson guide and a master storyteller, tells the Vince story steps from the front door, then adds the details we keep off the internet. Bring your questions, and maybe count the butter knives on your way out.
