Ellis Hotel
Opened in 1913 and advertised as "absolutely fireproof," the 15-story Winecoff Hotel on Peachtree Street became the site of the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history on December 7, 1946, when flames raced up a single open stairway and killed 119 people, including thirty Georgia high school students in town for a YMCA youth assembly. After decades as an abandoned shell, the building reopened as the Ellis Hotel in 2007, and guests and staff soon began reporting the dead lingering in its halls: the smell of smoke in empty rooms, calls from unoccupied lines, screams and running footsteps in vacant corridors, faces pressed to the upper windows.
The most-repeated legend holds the fire alarm sounds on its own in the small hours, as if the building is still trying to wake its sleepers.
📍 176 Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta, GA · Get directions