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Reported phenomena — as catalogued
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1901 resort rebuilt by boss Thomas Taggart; staff attribute cigar smoke and ballroom music to his lingering presence.
8670 State Road 56, French Lick, IN 47432
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Operating resort hotel; room rates vary by season. Historic guided tours are $18 for adults, $8 for children ages 6-15, free under 5.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Indoor hotel and grounds; paved walkways throughout the resort.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1901 · Rebuilt 1901-1925 under Democratic Party boss Thomas Taggart · Site of Pluto Water, a nationally distributed mineral-water brand · 1924 PGA Championship venue (Donald Ross course) · Unofficial Democratic National Committee headquarters, early 1900s-1930s · 2005-2006 $382 million restoration by Cook Group
The French Lick Springs Hotel traces to 1845, when Dr. William A. Bowles built a wooden hotel around a mineral spring that later owners named Pluto's Well after its laxative-strength water. The property changed hands several times over the following decades and grew into a health resort, until a fire destroyed most of the original building in 1897.
In 1901, Indianapolis political boss Thomas Taggart — a former three-term Indianapolis mayor who would go on to chair the Democratic National Committee and briefly serve as a U.S. Senator — bought the ruins with a group of investors and rebuilt the hotel on a much larger scale, adding wings through 1925 that gave the building its buff-brick, six-story profile. Taggart brought in the Monon Railroad, built a dedicated bottling plant for Pluto Water, and commissioned Thomas Bendelow's Valley golf course in 1907, followed by a Donald Ross-designed course in 1920 that hosted the 1924 PGA Championship. French Lick became the unofficial headquarters of the national Democratic Party under Taggart, hosting party gatherings including a 1931 governors' conference where Franklin Roosevelt built support for his 1932 presidential run.
Taggart died in 1929; his son Thomas D. Taggart ran the hotel until selling it in 1946. Ownership passed through a series of corporations and investors over the following decades — Sheraton, Cox Hotel Corporation, Kenwood Financial, and others — with the property falling into disrepair by the 1990s. Cook Group founders Bill and Gayle Cook purchased French Lick Springs Hotel along with the neighboring West Baden Springs Hotel in 2005 and completed a $382 million restoration that added a casino and reopened the resort on November 3, 2006. Pluto Water production had already ended in 1971 after regulators restricted the naturally occurring lithium in the spring water.
Sources
The hotel's best-known legend centers on Thomas Taggart, the political boss who rebuilt French Lick Springs into a national resort between 1901 and his death in 1929. Staff and ghost-tour operators describe the smell of cigar smoke — Taggart's habitual accessory — turning up in non-smoking areas and near the original elevator, along with occasional sightings of a well-dressed man matching his description. Some tellings frame the activity as protective, as though Taggart continues looking after the property he spent three decades building.
A second cluster of reports comes from the sixth and seventh floors of the hotel's original wing, where staff and guests describe cold spots, shadowy figures at the foot of beds, and disembodied voices. Overnight staff have reported phones ringing in unoccupied rooms. In the ballroom, several accounts describe hearing music and the sound of dancing with no source found on inspection.
A separate story concerns a stain that periodically reappears in a guest-room bathtub, which ghost-tour lore attributes to a bride's suicide at the hotel; no contemporary newspaper account of the incident has surfaced; it circulates strictly as hotel folklore. None of these accounts are corroborated by independent investigation beyond guest and staff testimony collected by paranormal writers and local tour operators.
Notable Entities
Book a room at the operating resort. Guest and staff reports of cigar smoke and cold spots cluster on the sixth and seventh floors of the original wing, which lore attributes to Thomas Taggart, the hotel's early-1900s owner.
Indiana Landmarks-led walking tour of the hotel's restored public rooms, covering the Taggart family's ownership, the Pluto Water bottling operation, and the building's Democratic-party history.
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