Hotel Palace - Most Haunted Hotel In The World

For years on out, we always hear stories being told by our friends about their experience of living in haunted houses or hotels. Some of their scariest experience will be being locked in a room for no reason, the lift going up and down by itself as well as hearing those whispering voices while being alone in their room.

These experiences alone are good enough to give anyone goosebumps just by reading this and make you think twice about visiting the most haunted hotel in the United Kingdom: Hotel Palace.

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Hotel Place is located in Birkdale, Southport. During its glory days, it once was a place for famous celebrities to stay like Frank Sinatra, Peter Sellers, and Boris Karloff. In fact, during the World Cup in 1966, Hotel Palace was the place to stay for the Hungarian Football team.

Hungarian football team Lajus Tichy in World Cup 1966 in Hotel Palace. Credit (Southport Visitor)

However, it also has its own dark side of the story. According to one local legend, the architect that created the floor plan and designed this hotel in the 1880s decided to commit suicide. This is after he found out that the front of the hotel which should have faced the ocean was changed to face inland instead.

Feeling devastated by the design he made himself, the architect took his own life by jumping from the top level of the stairs. The dead fell down to the place which became the location of the haunted lift of Hotel Palace.

Ever since then, the spirit of the dead was believed to have haunted the lift of the hotel to scare those who were assigned to take down Hotel Palace. According to Joseph Smith in an interview with Daily Post on May 1969, the lift of the hotel will move by itself despite having the electricity cut off.

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Another strange thing is that one of the ways to move the lift will be the control panel at the top level which never occurred at all. Aside from this, there is also some occasion when the person inside the lift will be surprised when the light panels inside the lift will turn on or even the elevator door opens by itself.

Other scary things will be hearing the sound of arguments and the sound of footsteps of high heels being made around the foyer of the hotel. These paranormal activities have attracted many news crew members and paranormal investigators to come to this haunted hotel. It also has become one of the prime subjects of BBC at the time.

Hotel Palace. Credit (Southport Visitor)

Aside from the death stories of the architect, Hotel Palace is also cursed by the murder and rape incident of a small little girl named Amanda Graham in 1961. Graham who was found dead at the time was under a bed in room 13.

The culprit was a night stander named Alan Victor Wills. Wills was then arrested and punished in November of the very same year. Based on the court's statements, Graham was kidnapped by the accused on his way home from one place called Pleasureland. After that, the girl was brutally raped and choked to death.

Seeing the stories of Hotel Palace has definitely given us goosebumps on all the gruesome events happening. Starting out as a luxury hotel in 1866 and ultimately closed down for a while before relaunching as a hydropathy hotel in the 1880s.

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During the Second World War, the hotel was taken by the American Red Cross to be made a resting home for the United States Air Force (USAF) until 1945. It became the biggest recovery center for the USAF at one point in time being occupied by 15,000 crews. It also became one of the Red Cross stations that accept bombing crew pilots of the USAF as one unit.

But the financial crisis has once again haunted the Hotel Palace. After the owner, Heddon Hotels decided to file for bankruptcy in 1967, what's left of the hotel is only memories and stories before being demolished in 1969. Even then, some part of the hotel's structure still remains to this day. In fact, it became a place for many films to shoot such as The Sorcerers (1967) and What's Good For The Goose (1969).

One of the structures of Hotel Palace that still exists will be a bar called The Fisherman's Rest. This bar has once become a burial place while 14 rescuers died drowning in an attempt to save the passengers of the Mexican ship on the coast of Southport beach.

The name of the bar was inspired by the fisherman who died here. Similar to Hotel Palace, some claimed that the place is haunted by a small little boy that hangs around.

Source:

• Roberts-Haslam, B. (2022, 10 April). Merseyside hotel where workmen were ‘scared out of their wits’. Liverpool Echo.

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