Dallas, Texas is Haunted

Built in 1912, the Adolphus Hotel’s elevator waited a whole five years before taking its first victim. Sixteen-year-old Otis Bellinger, an elevator operator, stepped aside to allow a rather large patron to maneuver himself off the platform and onto the sixth floor. The man said as he headed towards his room, he realized he hadn’t thanked the young man and so turned around. But there was no one there. The elevator was empty. Otis had missed his step up and plunged 100 down the shaft to his death.

Sated, the elevator waited.

In 1924 one of the restaurant cooks (unnamed) grew impatient waiting for the elevator and poked his head into the shaft to see how close it was. It crushed his head against the wall.

Just before the beginning of WWII in 1939, a family staying in the hotel couldn’t find their eight-year-old son. Hotel employees knew exactly where to look. His broken body was found at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

And in 1955 a local debutante threw a Christmas party at the Adolphus. Many of the guests chose to stay at the hotel rather than drive home. Unfortunately one of them never made it out alive. You guessed it. The man-eating elevator struck again.

The last reported elevator fatality was in 1971. A porter was asked to let a band of musicians know when the elevator had reached their floor so they could load their equipment. The last words the porter said was, “Oh it’s here” as he stepped out into… nothing. At the time of his fatal misstep, the elevator was on the fourth floor.

Nowadays hotel staff take the stairs as often as possible. Night owl patrons tell of a mangled teen in an old-fashioned uniform that waits by the elevator doors on the sixth floor. Or the night desk clerk might whisper about the boy that chases his ball onto the elevator and then disappears. And sometimes, if you’re really listening on your ride down, you can hear an excited voice call out, “Oh it’s here.”

Review of the Adolpus from 2017

*This doesn’t touch on the other deaths that happened here - just the elevators