1914 Birmingham landmark — once the Ridgely Apartments — where staff still greet the spirit nicknamed 'The Knocker' to keep the halls quiet at night.
2021 Park Place, Birmingham, AL 35203
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Operates as a Hampton Inn & Suites Curio Collection hotel; nightly room rates apply. Public lobby is generally accessible to non-guests.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Downtown urban hotel with elevators; sidewalk parking and curb access at Park Place.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1914 · National Register of Historic Places · 1914 Ridgely Apartments — Major Tutwiler / Robert Jemison Jr. development · Adaptive reuse case study (apartments to hotel, 1986)
Major Edward Magruder Tutwiler, a coal and coke industrialist who founded the Tutwiler Coal & Coke Company, agreed in the early 1910s to sell his interest in that firm to underwrite the first mortgage bonds for a new luxury apartment building in downtown Birmingham. The eight-story brick-and-terra-cotta structure at Park Place and 20th Street, designed in a restrained Beaux-Arts vocabulary, opened in 1914 as the Ridgely Apartments. It was developed by Robert Jemison Jr., one of Birmingham's principal early-20th-century real-estate developers.
Throughout the early 20th century the Ridgely housed prominent Birmingham residents and a mix of professional offices. Major Tutwiler himself died in 1925. The original Tutwiler Hotel, a separate building two blocks away, was demolished in 1974, and the Tutwiler name was transferred to the Ridgely when developers converted the apartment block into a hotel in 1986. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and received a Tutwiler-Ridgely Rebirth historical marker documenting the conversion.
The property has since cycled through several hotel brands, including independent operation as the Tutwiler Hotel and a period as a Hampton Inn property under Hilton's Curio Collection. Renovations through the 2010s preserved the original lobby, marble staircase, and chandeliers while updating the guest rooms to current Hampton Inn standards.
The building anchors the northeastern edge of Birmingham's downtown core, two blocks from Linn Park and within walking distance of the city's historic theater district. Its survival is treated by Birmingham preservationists as a model case of adaptive reuse — an early-20th-century apartment building converted twice over the course of a century without losing its original architectural character.
Sources
The most frequently retold Tutwiler ghost story centers on a spirit nicknamed 'The Knocker.' According to Haunted Rooms America and US Ghost Adventures, guests are awakened at night by loud, urgent knocking on their guest-room doors; opening the door reveals an empty hallway. Some accounts identify the knocker as the ghost of Colonel Edward Tutwiler himself, whose name the building has carried since 1986, and staff are said to have adopted a tradition of greeting the colonel each evening to keep him from making messes.
A secondary tradition, recorded by paranormal investigator Kim Johnston and repeated by Haunted Rooms America, identifies one of the knockers as a young girl's spirit reportedly captured on audio saying 'knock, knock' in a child's voice. Reports also describe lights and electrical appliances turning on and off without intervention and items rearranged in guest rooms when guests return.
The Tutwiler appears on virtually every published Birmingham haunted-hotel list and is described by Haunted Rooms America as 'the most haunted hotel in Alabama,' a claim repeated by multiple regional tour operators. Reports across decades have been consistent in two specific phenomena — the door-knocking and the self-operating lights — which is the pattern most often cited as evidence the haunting predates the 1986 hotel conversion.
Notable Entities
Book an overnight stay in the 1914 building. Local lore singles out upper-floor rooms as the most active sites for door-knock reports and self-operating lights and appliances.
The Tutwiler is a stop on multiple Birmingham ghost-walk itineraries; visitors can pause at the historical marker on Park Place to read the building's history and the Tutwiler-Ridgely rebirth story.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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