Overview
The Hay–Adams Hotel overlooks Lafayette Square and the White House from the site where the linked mansions of John Hay — Lincoln's secretary and later Secretary of State — and historian Henry Adams once stood, salons of Gilded Age Washington; the houses came down and the Italian Renaissance hotel rose in 1928, becoming the city's most storied address for visiting power. Its lore centres on Marian 'Clover' Adams, Henry's brilliant photographer wife, who died in the Adams house in 1885 — a death by her own hand, told here plainly and with respect, and memorialised by Saint-Gaudens' famous shrouded figure at Rock Creek Cemetery. Hotel telling, traded quietly by staff for decades, describes a woman's presence on the fourth floor in early December around the anniversary: a faint crying or voice, the scent of mimosa, doors and lifts behaving oddly, and housekeepers feeling watched. The hotel neither promotes nor denies the stories. They should be presented as staff telling around a real and tender loss, hedged and dignified. Current details should be confirmed from the official site.