Est. 1898 · 1898 Connor Hotel saloon · Jerome mining-town commerce · Jerome live-music venue
Jerome was built on the steep south face of Cleopatra Hill in Yavapai County, a copper town that at its peak held thousands of miners and the saloons, hotels, and card rooms that followed the payroll. David Connor opened his hotel on Main Street in 1898, with rooms upstairs and a barroom, card rooms, and billiard tables on the ground floor. The building burned twice in Jerome's crowded early years, and Connor was one of the few owners carrying insurance both times.
The hotel closed in 1931 as copper prices fell and Jerome's population dropped from thousands toward a few dozen. The town was effectively a ghost town for a stretch of the mid-20th century before reviving as an arts and tourism community. The Connor was restored and reopened as a boutique hotel, and its ground-floor bar took the name the Spirit Room.
Today the Spirit Room functions as one of Jerome's main music venues, with a stage, live acts several nights a week, and an open-mic night. The room retains period detailing from the saloon era and is the most public part of the Connor Hotel, open to non-guests. It is a fixture on self-guided haunted walking routes through town, which is how most visitors first encounter its reputation.
The Spirit Room and the upstairs Connor Hotel share a building and a history; the hotel rooms are documented separately, while the bar carries its own distinct story tied to the saloon floor.
Sources
- https://spiritroom.com/spirits/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_in_Red_(ghost)
- https://usghostadventures.com/haunted-cities/the-top-10-haunted-places-in-jerome/
- https://thecreativeadventurer.com/a-self-guided-walking-tour-of-the-haunted-streets-of-jerome-az-once-the-wildest-town-in-the-west/
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spirit_Room_Jerome_3.jpg
ApparitionsTouch sensationsPhantom voices
The bar's best-known story is the 'Lady in Red,' a figure in a red dress that patrons and tour guides associate with the Spirit Room. Accounts describe a woman who appears in the bar and, in some tellings, touches visitors lightly on the hands, face, or neck before the impression fades. The same figure turns up in stories of Room 1 upstairs in the Connor Hotel, where overnight guests report whispering, which has led tellers to treat the bar and the room as parts of one story.
The Lady in Red is named directly in connection with the Spirit Room in general reference material on the folklore figure, and the bar is a standard stop on Jerome's self-guided haunted walking tours. Beyond the central apparition, the building carries the broader Connor reputation: small electrical and object-movement reports of the kind common to the hotel's accounts.
The Spirit Room does not run an investigation program or a paranormal event of its own; the lore travels with the walking tours and the bar's own atmosphere. Visitors come mainly for the live music and inherit the story as part of the room, which is the most public and accessible of Jerome's reputed haunted spaces.
Notable Entities
The Lady in Red