HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
+ 2 further entries on record
1913 Asheville Resort with the Pink Lady of Room 545
290 Macon Ave, Asheville, NC 28804
Research updated October 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$$
Luxury resort rates. Day-use options include spa, dining, and grounds access for non-guests at varying tiers.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Sprawling resort with elevators, accessible rooms, and paved grounds; some original 1913 stone interior surfaces are uneven
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1913 · Edwin Wiley Grove · Arts and Crafts Resort Architecture · Presidential and Literary Guest History
The Grove Park Inn opened on July 12, 1913, built in eleven months and twenty-seven days by Edwin Wiley Grove, the St. Louis pharmaceutical magnate who had made his fortune selling Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic. The tonic was a malaria treatment that masked quinine's bitter taste with iron, sugar, lemon flavoring, and alcohol, and Grove's later years were oriented toward Asheville real-estate development. Grove and his son-in-law Fred Loring Seely bought roughly 400 acres on Sunset Mountain in 1909. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan gave the opening address, calling the hotel one built for the ages.
Seely designed the inn in an Arts and Crafts idiom and faced it with native granite quarried from Sunset Mountain, with up to four hundred men and twenty Italian stonemasons working ten-hour shifts six days a week to complete the 156-room building. Seely leased and managed the inn from 1914 until Grove's death in 1927, after which he lost a court fight for ownership. The Great Hall's twin granite fireplaces and the inn's boulder walls, some five feet thick, remain the building's signature.
During World War II the inn held Axis diplomats awaiting deportation in 1942, then served as a Navy rest center and, in 1944 and 1945, an Army redistribution station; Philippine president Manuel Quezon ran his government in exile from a cottage on the grounds in 1944. Texas businessman Charles A. Sammons bought the property in 1955. His wife Elaine led a $65 million restoration and expansion between 1982 and 1988 that added two wings and tripled the room count. The inn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 3, 1973, and Omni Hotels acquired it in 2013.
Ten US presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, have stayed at the Grove Park, alongside Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald rented rooms 441 and 443 on and off during 1935 and 1936 while his wife Zelda was treated at Asheville's Highland Hospital.
Sources
The Grove Park Inn's most-told story is the Pink Lady. In the inn's tradition, around 1920 a young woman in a pink gown fell from a fifth-floor balcony to the Palm Court floor and died; the hotel's own account holds that no official death record survives. The figure is most often associated with the fifth-floor corridor near room 545 and with the Palm Court atrium. Staff describe her as a pink mist or orb of pink light rather than a solid figure, and as gentle: encountered by children, fond of pranks, and occasionally tickling the feet of sleeping guests. Front-desk thank-you notes from parents whose children mention a lady in pink are part of the inn's documented lore.
The story entered print in a sustained way in the mid-1990s. Hotel management hired Asheville investigator Joshua P. Warren in December 1995 after staff reported unusual activity, and the Asheville Citizen-Times covered the project when Warren's book Haunted Asheville appeared in October 1996. Warren interviewed roughly fifty employees and guests, about twenty of whom described direct encounters. Tracey Johnston-Crum, then the inn's public relations director, restated the hotel's version to Mountain Xpress in 2016, and brand communications manager Isabel Miller told WLOS in 2022 that questions about the Pink Lady arrive year-round, with room 545 requests peaking at Halloween.
Inn historian Bruce Johnson, author of Built for the Ages, proposed in 2014 that the figure might be Annie E. Williams, a visitor killed by a train near Asheville on the inn's opening day in 1913. Some regional writers have tied the figure to Zelda Fitzgerald. Both connections are speculative and unconfirmed.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Book a room at the 1913 stone-faced resort built by Edwin Wiley Grove. Room 545 and the surrounding fifth-floor corridor are most often tied to the Pink Lady tradition. Ten US presidents — from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama — and figures including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have stayed at the inn.
Eat in the historic Great Hall with its massive granite fireplaces, or in one of the resort's restaurants. The hall is open to the public outside private events.
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