Hotel Monte Vista

The Hotel Monte Vista opened in 1927, a community-funded hotel on the highway that would soon be signed as Route 66. Its register reads like a matinee bill: John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy. Its neon sign is still the brightest landmark on the downtown skyline.

The hotel has never pretended to be quiet. Its lounge poured drinks through Prohibition by way of a speakeasy that opened on New Year’s Day of its first year, and a century of guests, boarders, and passing celebrities have left the building more stories than any two hotels deserve.

Room 220 belonged to a long-term boarder in the early 1980s who hung raw meat from the chandelier and was found days after he died. Housekeepers and guests since have reported the television blaring static and bedding stripped by no one. The book gives him the name locals actually use, the Grizzly Meat Man.

In Room 305, a rocking chair returns to the window no matter where it is left. Room 306 carries the hardest story in the building, two women thrown from the third floor in the 1940s, and male guests who wake with hands over their mouths. And outside Room 210, a phantom bellboy knocks and announces room service to an empty hallway. John Wayne reportedly met him and was not bothered in the least.