Free-State Cornerstone, Quantrill Ash, and Room 506
701 Massachusetts St, Lawrence, KS 66044
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Standard rooms typically range $150-300/night. Halloween-season ghost hunt tickets have been listed at $30/person via Ghost Tours of Kansas.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved urban downtown
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1925 · Bleeding Kansas · Quantrill's Raid · Free State Movement · Historic Hotels of America
The corner of 7th and Massachusetts Street is one of the most documented blocks of antebellum violence in American history. In 1855, settlers from the New England Emigrant Aid Society built the Free State Hotel as a fortified anchor for Lawrence, the capital of Kansas's anti-slavery movement. On May 21, 1856, a pro-slavery posse rolled a cannon into the street, leveled it at the hotel, and shelled the building before setting it on fire.
Colonel Shalor Eldridge leased the property and rebuilt it for $80,000 the following year, adding a clause to his lease vowing to rebuild again if it were destroyed. He kept that promise. On August 21, 1863, William Quantrill led roughly 400 Confederate guerrillas into Lawrence at dawn. They killed approximately 180 men and boys in four hours and burned the hotel a second time. The raid remains one of the deadliest civilian massacres of the Civil War.
Eldridge salvaged the original cornerstone and rebuilt again, reopening as the Hotel Eldridge in 1865. The current six-story brick building dates to 1925, constructed on the same footprint and incorporating that same salvaged cornerstone, which is set into the wall of an upper-floor guest room. The hotel is a member of Historic Hotels of America.
Sources
Room 506 sits on the building's fifth floor, near the wall that contains the salvaged cornerstone from the original 1856 hotel. According to staff and guests interviewed by the Lawrence Journal-World and the University of Kansas student paper, the cornerstone is regarded as the room's animating feature, and most reported phenomena cluster there.
The assistant general manager told the Journal-World in 2016 that calls about 506 reach him roughly every other month. Reported activity includes covers pulled off beds while guests sleep, flickering lights, voices with no traceable source, and breath fog appearing on mirrors that have just been wiped. A photograph taken in the building's elevator in the 1980s is circulated among staff as the hotel's earliest documented anomaly.
Local lore associates the activity with Colonel Shalor Eldridge himself, although several sources note that no death is documented in the room. During the Halloween season, Ghost Tours of Kansas partners with the hotel for guided investigations of 506, with tickets typically priced at $30. The room can be requested at booking, though the hotel does not actively market its haunted reputation.
Notable Entities
Reserve the hotel's most-discussed room, where one of the original cornerstones from the 1856 Free-State Hotel is set into the wall. Guests have reported flickering lights, breath marks appearing on freshly cleaned mirrors, and bedcovers pulled away during the night.
Dinner at the hotel's downtown restaurant, in a building twice burned during Bleeding Kansas and rebuilt around the original 1856 cornerstone.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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