Want a creepy kick? Check into a deadly hotel

By Ralph Martin

updated 9:16 a.m. ET Oct. 29, 2008

Rickety old haunted houses are for lightweights. Want to really feel the fear? (You sicko.) For seekers of creepy kicks, there's nothing quite like a bona fide gruesome death site. Hotels are primo spots for dubious deeds—including big-time murders, overdoses, and suicides, as well as run-of-the-mill accidental biotoxin poisonings. So in the spirit of a forensics-leaning Halloween, here's our list of 12 inns that hosted famous passings. They range from rock 'n' rollers' expiration sites off L.A.'s Sunset Strip to a sumptuous boutique hotel on Paris's Left Bank. Most have successfully scrubbed themselves of their dubious reputation, while a few happily trade on the notoriety. But one thing is shared by every place listed: You don't need a ghost-busting team to get a genuine shudder from their bloodstained histories.

For a complete slideshow of Deadly Hotels, click here.

1. Chelsea Hotel, New York City
The Chelsea's facade is like Tim Burton's fantasy of a grand hotel: 12 stories of bloodred brick, broken up by black wrought-iron balconies. The hotel's guest book reads like the history of 20th-century American culture—you could call it the birthplace of Beat poetry, American modern art, and the singer-songwriter movement—but it is still best known as the place where Dylan Thomas spent his last days and Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Nicknamed the "exploding dimwit" by the music press, Vicious was the former bass player for English punk band the Sex Pistols. Vicious and Spungen were a volatile couple, and were regularly seen covered with bruises and cigarette burns. On October 12, 1978, after a pair of early-morning anonymous phone calls to the hotel's front desk calling attention to room 100, Spungen was found dead on the bathroom floor with a single knife wound in her abdomen, while Vicious walked the halls, muttering. The actual stabbing is still a punk rock mystery: There are theories that Spungen was murdered by one of two drug dealers who visited the hotel room that night. Vicious died of a heroin overdose before he could go to trial, and rumors of a shared suicide pact continue to this day.

Chelsea Hotel
Tel: 212 243 3700

2. Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast, Fall River, Massachusetts
Death, New England–style: After a breakfast of bananas and johnnycakes and a stroll in town, return home to receive 40 whacks with an ax. This was the nature of Andrew Borden's last day on earth, a day guests at the Lizzie Borden B&B can relive in most of its particulars, save the actual ax blows. Borden was murdered on August 4, 1892, along with his second wife. Suspicion has always fallen on their daughter Lizzie, though she was tried and found not guilty. Unlike the typical hotel-cum–murder site, however, the owners of Lizzie's former digs play up the Borden deaths, and the ambiguity that still surrounds them, giving the Lizzie Borden House a dash of creepiness to go with the cheesy feeling of a 19th-century theme park. The Greek Revival house in the Massachusetts industrial town of Fall River contains six bedrooms; fans of gore can pay $200 a night to sleep in the bedroom where Abby Borden, Lizzie's stepmother, was found hacked to death. Lizzie's own bedroom is also available for the same price, if the idea of getting into a likely murderess's head appeals. A prominent Lizzie-didn't-do-it theory has Bridget Sullivan, the family maid, taking the hatchet to her masters after they asked her to wash the windows on a particularly hot day; her attic room, at $175, is one of the house's cheaper pleasures.

Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast
Tel: 508 675 7333

3. L'hôtel, Paris
These days, the fab L'Hôtel, on Paris's Left Bank, is as far from a stained-floral-bedspread overdose motel as you can get. Not so, however, when Oscar Wilde lay in his death throes, which ended on November 30, 1900. One of his last quips, "I am dying beyond my means," referred not to the hotel's elegance, but to his own total insolvency (there is an unpaid bill of 26,000 francs still outstanding). But Wilde's last days in room 16 are shrouded in mystery. Did he die of syphilis, or cerebral meningitis resulting from an ear infection? Did he willingly join the Catholic faith, or was he dragooned into accepting last rites by pushy priests? One thing is clear: The hotel's decor was not up to the aesthete's standards. His last words are reputed to be, "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go." The hotel has transformed itself, meanwhile, into one of the most praised boutique hotels on the planet, full of rich brocades, wood paneling, and framed mementos of Wilde's stay. Though it took them another 100 years to finally change that wallpaper.

L'Hôtel
Tel: 33 1 44 41 99 00

4. Cecil Hotel, Los Angeles
Take a deteriorating building, a skid row neighborhood, proximity to a clinic for sex offenders, and serial killers as long-term guests, and you come close to describing the magic of the Cecil Hotel in the 1980s. The hotel is now a boutique establishment that plays on its access to the nearby Staples Center, but in its glory years it hosted a ghoulish assortment of losers and killers, including "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez and Austrian journalist-cum-murderer Jack Unterweger. Ramirez, who was found guilty of 14 murders in the 1980s, stayed on the 14th floor for several months in 1985, paying (creepy coincidence alert) $14 a night.

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And Unterweger, a writer and prostitute-killer released by Austrian authorities for good behavior and then sent to America on a high-profile journalistic junket, also used the hotel as a base to pick up at least three prostitutes who were later found murdered. The two may have been feeling the vibes from Pauline Otten, who jumped out a window in 1962 and killed a pedestrian, as well as herself, in her fall; or from the still unsolved murder of Goldie Osgood, the "pigeon lady" of Pershing Square, who was found strangled in her Cecil room in 1964. But you have to give the new management some respect: At least they haven't named a drink after Ramirez or done up Unterweger's room in period decor.

Cecil Hotel
Tel: 213 624 4545

5. Beau Rivage, Geneva
Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni could not have chosen a more pristine murder spot than Geneva's white-wedding-cake Beau Rivage Hotel. On September 10, 1898, Empress Elizabeth of Austria was leaving the hotel to catch a boat on Lake Geneva when Lucheni repeatedly stabbed her with a file that penetrated her heart and lungs. When aid was administered, the empress did not allow her corset to be undone until she had reached the relative privacy of the boat; when the stays came off, she was revealed to be bleeding to death.

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The assassination gave Geneva's reputation for pampering the rich and famous an extra frisson of danger. Today, most visitors to this ostentatious palace on Lake Geneva are ignorant of the more recent passing of prominent German politician Uwe Barschel, who was found dead, fully dressed in a bathtub full of water following an overdose of prescription drugs, on October 11, 1987. Barschel had recently been involved in a Watergate-style scandal and his career was over. The breezes off Lake Geneva seem to inspire the darkest deeds—there's definitely something in the water.

Beau Rivage
Tel: 41 22 716 66 66

6. Landmark Motor Hotel, Los Angeles
The two-story 1950s cast-concrete building, the palm trees and bougainvillea surrounding the big pool, the empty bottles lying around, the unemployed actors hoping for a big break—the former Landmark Motor Hotel was the perfect stage for a celebrity's last act. And on October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin provided just that, dying of an alcohol-and-heroin overdose in the wee hours of the morning. Joplin obtained some startlingly strong heroin, injected herself, went to the lobby to buy cigarettes, returned to her room, and keeled over from her bed into an end table. She was found the next day, dressed in a blouse and panties, by her road manager.

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Change from the lobby's cigarette machine was still in her fist, and a bottle of Ripple wine left on the nightstand. Joplin was thus a founding member of the "27 club," the dubiously honorable circle of musicians who expired at that tender age, along with Brian Jones, who died the previous year, and Jimi Hendrix, who preceded her by a mere two weeks. The Landmark Motor Hotel has been renamed the Highland Gardens Hotel, and is still home to up-and-coming actors attracted by its central location just off the Sunset Strip—though it is doubtful at this point if any of them know that the singer of "Me and Bobby McGee" (a posthumous No. 1) spent her last moments there.

Highland Gardens Hotel
Tel: 323 850 0536

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