HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
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1924 Stoddart-Designed Hotel Tied to the 1936 Clevenger Case
1 Battle Square, Asheville, NC 28801
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
The exterior is publicly visible from Battle Square in downtown Asheville. The interior is closed to the public as the building now operates as senior apartments.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved downtown sidewalks
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1924 · Downtown Asheville Historic District · Edwin W. Grove Property · 1936 Helen Clevenger Murder Site · William Lee Stoddart Design
The first Battery Park Hotel opened on July 12, 1886, built by Colonel Frank Coxe and designed by Philadelphia architect Edward Hazlehurst in the Queen Anne style. It stood on Battery Porter Hill, the highest ground in Asheville and the site of a Confederate battery during the Civil War. With 270 rooms, steam heat, electric lights, and the first electric elevator in a Southern hotel, it anchored the resort boom that followed the railroad's arrival in 1880, and guests included George Vanderbilt and members of the Rockefeller family. In 1921 Edwin W. Grove, the patent-medicine magnate behind the Grove Park Inn, bought the property, demolished the wooden hotel, and had steam shovels remove about 250,000 cubic yards of earth to level the hill for downtown development.
The current 14-story Battery Park Hotel opened on September 18, 1924, after eleven months of construction. New York architect William Lee Stoddart designed the 220-room building of reinforced concrete faced in brick, limestone, and terra cotta, with penthouse rooms and a rooftop dining room. Thomas Wolfe compared it to a biscuit cutter. Grove died at the hotel in 1927. F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed there in the 1930s.
On July 16, 1936, Helen Clevenger, an 18-year-old New York University student visiting with her uncle William Clevenger, a North Carolina State College professor, was found shot to death in room 224. The case drew national press. Police arrested Martin Moore, a 22-year-old Black hotel employee with nearly three years of service, who signed a confession he later said had been beaten out of him. After a three-day trial, an all-white jury deliberated under an hour; Moore was executed in the state gas chamber at Raleigh on December 11, 1936. The Asheville Museum of History and Anne Chesky Smith's 2021 book Murder at Asheville's Battery Park Hotel document fabricated evidence, a corroborated alibi, and political pressure on the sheriff, and treat the conviction as a likely miscarriage of justice.
The hotel closed on October 30, 1972, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 14, 1977, and reopened as senior apartments in 1979. National Church Residences operates Battery Park Senior Apartments in the building today.
Sources
Ghost lore at the Battery Park is inseparable from the 1936 Clevenger case, and most of it has been carried by Asheville's walking tours rather than by earlier print tradition. Tadd McDivitt, a longtime guide with Haunted Asheville, told WLOS in October 2022 that the most repeated claim concerns the window of the former room 224: around the mid-July anniversary of Helen Clevenger's death, residents and passersby have described a red glow inside the room, and guides say management has left the unit unleased. No contemporary news report or museum account records the phenomenon, and the building's operator has not commented publicly.
The second account involves a service elevator that residents have reported running between floors at night with no one aboard, with maintenance finding nothing wrong. Tour narration ties the car to Martin Moore, who as a hotel employee worked the building's elevators and halls. Explore Asheville, the county tourism authority, lists the building among the city's ten best-known haunted sites and frames the story as Clevenger "looking for answers about her own death," a framing that reflects the widespread modern belief, documented by the Asheville Museum of History, that Moore was wrongly executed.
Less specific reports of shadowed figures in the lobby and voices in the upper floors circulate on downtown tours. The building is a private senior residence, and the apartments and elevators are not open to visitors; the lore is experienced from the sidewalk on Battle Square and on guided walks. Historians at the Asheville Museum of History, whose director wrote the standard book on the case, present the hotel through the documented crime and its contested prosecution, not as a confirmed haunting.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
View the 14-story 1924 hotel from the public sidewalk along Battle Square in downtown Asheville. The building is now Battery Park Apartments, a private senior housing complex, and the interior is not open to visitors.
Several operators include the Battery Park Hotel in evening walking tours of downtown Asheville, where guides discuss the 1936 Helen Clevenger murder and the controversial conviction of Martin Moore.
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