HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Literary landmark open since 1902, home of the Round Table lunches Dorothy Parker attended from 1919 to 1929; Parker's ashes were kept in the building for decades, and guests reported her ghost until her remains were finally buried in the Bronx in August 2020.
59 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$$
Overnight rooms available; bar and Round Table restaurant open to non-guests for drinks and dining.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Urban hotel; elevator access throughout
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1902 · Home of the Algonquin Round Table 1919–1929 · Dorothy Parker's residential hotel and site of her 1932 suicide attempt · Harold Ross co-founded The New Yorker from meetings here, 1925 · Parker's ashes finally interred in August 2020, ending a 53-year odyssey
The Algonquin opened in 1902 at 59 West 44th Street, a mid-block Midtown location near the theater district. The hotel developed a literary reputation from its early years, cultivated in part by owner Frank Case who offered favorable rates to writers and theatrical people.
In 1919 a group of writers, critics, and journalists began meeting for lunch daily at a round table in the hotel's Rose Room. The group — which called itself the Vicious Circle — included Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and others. They gathered almost daily until roughly 1929, trading witticisms and commentary that were widely reported in the press. Harold Ross, a regular, co-founded The New Yorker with his wife Jane Grant during this period, in 1925.
Dorothy Parker moved into a furnished suite on the hotel's second floor after separating from her second husband in 1924. She made a suicide attempt in the suite in 1932, using sleeping pills. Parker left New York later in life, moved to Los Angeles, and died in 1967. Her will left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and after King's assassination in 1968, her estate passed to the NAACP.
Parker had no immediate family to claim her remains after her death. Her ashes passed through several custodians: they were held by her lawyer's office for 17 years, reportedly stored in a filing cabinet; they then came to the NAACP's Maryland headquarters where they were kept in a garden shed. After decades of advocacy by the Dorothy Parker Society, her ashes were interred in a dedicated memorial garden at the NAACP's Baltimore office in 1988. In August 2020, her remains were moved a final time — interred in the Bronx, New York, beside the family she had grown up in.
Sources
The Algonquin's haunting reputation is built on a plausible structural foundation: Dorothy Parker's ashes spent decades unburied, passing through a lawyer's filing cabinet, a garden shed, and an NAACP grounds before receiving proper interment. Several writers and historians covering the case have noted that the restless-spirit narrative and the logistical disrespect paid to Parker's remains tracked together in a way that is unusual even for celebrity ghost stories.
Accounts of Parker's ghost at the Algonquin span more than five decades, from the years after her death in 1967 through approximately 2020. The reported phenomena are mild and personality-consistent: a female figure that hushed children making noise in the lobby, glimpsed movement in the Round Table Room corridors during quiet hours, and a sense of presence described by multiple guests as distinctly female and somewhat impatient. One account, reported in Fox News and the Dorothy Parker Society, described a gang of children being 'shushed' by what appeared to be an older woman — who was then not found in the building.
Alexander Woollcott, the Round Table's most operatically theatrical member, is also reported in the room where the group met, though his accounts are less frequent and less specific than Parker's.
NY Ghosts notes that the haunting reports at the Algonquin went quiet after Parker's remains were interred in the Bronx in August 2020. The Dorothy Parker Society, which campaigned for decades for the proper burial of her remains, has documented this alignment.
The 1932 suicide attempt is part of the hotel's documented history. It is included here because it is a matter of public record — Parker wrote about it — and because it is the basis for one thread of the ghost lore. The method involved sleeping pills; Parker survived.
Notable Entities
Guest rooms are available for overnight booking through algonquinhotel.com. Parker's former second-floor suite and the Round Table Room are the most frequently mentioned locations in haunting accounts.
Non-guests can visit the hotel's Blue Bar and the Round Table restaurant — the room where Parker, Woollcott, Benchley, and other Round Table members lunched daily from 1919 to roughly 1929. The hotel maintains literary memorabilia throughout the lobby.
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