Hot Lake Hotel

A Colonial Revival hotel built in 1864 at one of the world's largest hot springs. Served as a luxury resort, sanitorium, asylum, and nursing home. The first known commercial building in the world to use geothermal energy.

Long before European settlers arrived in the Grande Ronde Valley, Native Americans considered the hot springs at what would become Hot Lake to be sacred ground, a place of healing where tribal disputes were set aside and the mineral waters were used for drinking and recovery. The first hotel was constructed on the site in 1864, capitalizing on the springs' reputation. The property's transformation began in 1904 when Dr. William Thomas Phy, a flamboyant and well-known physician in the Pacific Northwest, began working with the hotel, and in 1917 he purchased it outright and renamed it the Hot Lake Sanatorium. Dr. Phy added a state-of-the-art hospital on the third floor complete with a surgical theater and x-ray facilities, and by 1924 the complex served one hundred twenty-four daily guests with three hundred rooms and dining capacity for over a thousand people, making it one of the largest resort hospitals in the West.

A devastating fire on May 7, 1934, destroyed most of the wooden structures, leaving only the brick portions standing. The property cycled through increasingly grim uses over the following decades: a nursing home, a training center for nurses, a World War Two flight school, and finally a mental health asylum that operated until 1975. During a brutal winter typhoid epidemic, the building even served as a temporary morgue. After a brief stint as a restaurant and country-western dance club, the building was abandoned entirely in 1991 and stood empty for over a decade, its decaying halls attracting urban explorers and the curious.

The paranormal activity at Hot Lake draws from every era of the building's troubled past. A male apparition believed to be a former groundskeeper who committed suicide on the property has been reported walking the grounds. A nurse who was scalded to death in the hot springs is said to haunt the areas near the water. The most haunting reports come from the third floor, the former surgical ward and later asylum wing. During the 1970s, owners Donna Pattee, her husband, and their caretaker Richard Owens reported hearing screams and cries coming from the empty third floor and observed rocking chairs moving on their own with no draft or vibration to account for the motion. Strange fog appears inside the building without apparent cause, and disembodied voices, whispering, and unexplained footsteps have been documented throughout the facility.

Perhaps the most evocative detail involves a piano that once belonged to the wife of Robert E. Lee, which was placed on the third floor during the hotel's heyday. Witnesses across multiple decades have reported hearing the piano playing itself, its notes drifting down through the empty corridors of the former surgical ward where Dr. Phy once operated on patients and where, in later years, asylum patients were confined. In 2001, the building was featured on ABC's The Scariest Places on Earth. The Manuel family purchased the property in 2003 and invested millions in restoration, opening a gallery and bronze foundry. The Lodge at Hot Lake Springs now offers tours and overnight stays at a property where the mineral waters still flow at their ancient temperature, and the spirits of over a century of suffering appear reluctant to move on.