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. Survivors leaped from upper windows into firemen's nets, and one Pulitzer-winning photograph froze a woman in mid-air against the burning facade. After decades as an abandoned shell, the building reopened as the Ellis Hotel in 2007, and guests and staff began reporting the dead lingering in its halls. Visitors describe the smell of smoke in empty rooms, calls placed from unoccupied lines, screams and running footsteps in vacant corridors, and faces pressed to the upper windows seeming to scream in pain. The most-repeated legend holds that the fire alarm sounds on its own in the small hours of the morning, as if the building is still trying to wake its sleepers.
📍 176 Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta, GA · Get directions