Overview
The Elms Hotel & Spa in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, first opened in 1888 at the height of the town's mineral-water boom and was twice destroyed by fire, with the present limestone building completed in 1912; a National Register resort set on landscaped grounds, it famously hosted Harry Truman on the night of the 1948 presidential election, when he slept there while the country wrongly concluded he had lost, and in earlier decades its lore includes Prohibition-era visitors said to have included Al Capone. Its haunted reputation is embraced by the hotel itself, which runs ghost tours for guests: staff and visitors describe a spectral maid said to search for a lost child, a gentleman in 1920s dress in the lap-pool area, doors and lifts behaving oddly, and voices and footsteps in the lower levels. These accounts should be presented as guest reports and folklore rather than proven phenomena, and the sadder legends handled with care. Current room, spa and tour details should be confirmed from the official site before publishing.