Jost Adventures

Jost Adventures: Goldfield Hotel (Background)

From its countless documentation, articles, and media attention, the stands in a class of its own among haunted locations, and is notorious as one of the most haunted locations in the world. Psychics all over the world claim that the seventh portal or gateway to Hell is located in the basement of this building because of its geographic ley lines.

There have been several attempts to renovate it, but the that occupy it won't let that happen, so it sits abandoned in Goldfield, Nevada.

The Goldfield Hotel is an historic four-story building (three-floors and a basement) located at the southeast corner of Crook Avenue (U.S. 95) and Columbia Avenue in Goldfield, Esmeralda County, Nevada. Designed in the style of architecture by architects Morrill J. Curtis (1848–1921) and George E. Holesworth (born 1854) of the firm of Curtis and Morrill, it was built between 1907 and 1908 on the site of two earlier hotels of the same name which had burnt down.

It is built in a U-shape in order to ensure outside windows for each guest room, the building has its west or main facade extending 180 feet (54.9 m) along Columbia Street with the north wing fronting 100 feet (30.5 m) on Crook Avenue and the south wing fronting 100 feet (30.5 m) along an alleyway.

The ground floor exterior facades were built of grey stones from while the interior first floor facade and all upper story facades were built of redbrick. The top floor exterior facades were crowned with a white cornice.

On March 4, 1981, it was added to the Nevada State Register of Historic Places. It is a contributing property  in the Goldfield Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 14, 1982.

Built at a cost of between $300,000 and $400,000, it was reported to be the most spectacular hotel in Nevada at the time of its completion in 1908. Champagne is said to have flowed down the front steps in the opening ceremony. Its 150 rooms were fitted with pile carpets, many with private baths, and the lobby was trimmed in mahogany, with black leather upholstery and gilded columns. It also featured an elevator and crystal chandeliers.

The hotel was in use as such until the end of World War II, its last occupants being officers and their families from the Tonopah Air Field. Despite several renovation attempts over the years, it has remained unoccupied.

In the 1980s, California developer Lester O'Shea spent $4 million trying to turn the hotel into an Edwardian-style tourist retreat, but that project eventually collapsed in bankruptcy proceedings.

The Goldfield Hotel was the subject of a 2001 documentary named "Scariest Places on Earth". One particular incident that happened during filming: a camera operator had her camera lift out of her hands by an invisible force, leaving marks on her arms and leaving her with emotional trauma. Orbs often appear in the hotel in photographs and other venues; a son that was killed in an unrelated accident, and at the sites of both the accident and the monument, similar orbs can be seen in photographs in those areas.

There are lots of other credible information from many individuals that live in the area.

In the past, various officials have gone through the hotel, including a camera nut that would end up becoming the governor of the state later, and that official reported his camera wouldn't work in Room 109 in particular.

At the 2003 Goldfield Days auction, the hotel was sold to Edgar S. "Red" Roberts, a rancher and engineer from Carson City, for about $360,000. Roberts told The Wall Street Journal in 2004 that he had plans to refurbish the bottom two floors of the four-story hotel and open them to the public by 2006.

He also told the newspaper: "It's a challenge. I may regret it."

In 2004, the Ghost Adventures crew, consisting of Zak Bagans and Nick Groff visited the location for an investigation. It was a full moon on the night of their investigation, which was a boon to them in that it may cause more spirits to manifest.

As of 2010, work remained uncompleted.

Goldfield resident Virginia Ridgway spent three decades as caretaker and "keeper of the keys" to the hotel, granting visitors access to the building and accompanying them as they toured its floors.

Over the seventeen years she had been custodian, she had experienced countless episodes of paranormal activity, including hearing voices, seeing apparitions, and experiencing poltergeists.

The last paying guest at the hotel was in World War II. At Room 109, everyone notes particularly strong cold chills, and Ridgeway explains that she has had psychics from all over the world come in here, and they have always reported the same thing without Ridgeway telling them about the room's history in advance.

Long ago, before the room was remodeled, a prostitute Elizabeth met her fate. It is said that the original builder of the Goldfield Hotel in 1908, George Wingfield, got Elizabeth pregnant in the 1930's. He had then chained Elizabeth to the radiator in the room and left her with food and water up until she gave birth. Upon this, Wingfield reportedly threw the baby down the mine shaft at the north end of the hotel basement and left Elizabeth to starve to death.

In a different room with windows, in response to there being so much paranormal disturbance, Ridgeway had brought two of her friends to perform a ritual in an attempt to get rid of the ghosts - the sort of procession where one uses sea salt and holy water to draw a pentagram on the ground - and while standing near a wall, she was picked up under the arms by an invisible force and slammed against that wall roughly an amazing five feet off the ground.

Connecting this basement level is an underground tunnel that leads under and across the street outside the Goldfield Hotel to a small, nondescript building a fair distance away from the property. This was a house of prostitution, and in the past, the men who were the only ones allowed down in the basement of the hotel - men using the showers, as well as the managers of a barbershop situated down there - would use this tunnel to go to the house of prostitution and then come back to their unwitting wives in the hotel itself.

Previously, Ridgeway had brought two other men who were paranormal investigators to the basement tunnel during the night, all three of the flashlights held by Ridgeway and the two investigators went dead, and they were left in the cold, pitch darkness of the tunnel without even so much as a match.

Ridgeway had to have the two men hold onto her as they retraced their way through the darkness back to the hotel basement and then the hotel's front entrance at its first floor. Ridgeway offered to go to the nearby Glory Hole to purchase some new batteries so that they could resume their investigation, but the two investigators turned her down, left Goldfield Hotel, and never returned.

There is also a set of stairwells up a floor, during which Ridgeway explains that more often than not, people exploring this property on psychic tours and going down these stairs would be pushed down the stairs by an invisible force - Ridgeway herself had once been pushed from behind her right shoulder.

In 2013, the Ghost Adventures crew returns to the hotel to capture more evidence, after a live event that featured the hotel in 2007.

In January 2016, Ridgway announced that she was giving up that role and turned the keys of the hotel over to Malek DaVarpanah, who owns an antique shop in Goldfield.

In September 2017, the Pahrump (Nev.) Valley Times reported that renovation work on the Goldfield Hotel had resumed.

But not for long...