HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Ashland's 1925 tower, renamed twice, restored as the city's flagship historic hotel
212 East Main Street, Ashland, OR 97520
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Boutique hotel room rates; 70-room historic property with an on-site restaurant, bar, and spa
Access
Wheelchair OK
Restored nine-story historic hotel in downtown Ashland; public spaces and grounds are flat and paved
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1925 · National Register of Historic Places · Ashland Downtown Historic District · Tourtellotte and Hummel Architecture · Oregon Shakespeare Festival Era
The hotel at 212 East Main Street opened on July 1, 1925, with a dinner for 500 guests. Architects Tourtellotte and Hummel of Portland, the firm behind the Idaho State Capitol, the Boise Hotel, and the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla, designed a nine-story reinforced-concrete tower with two shorter wings, combining Romanesque, English Tudor Gothic, and Neo-Classical Revival detailing. Contemporaries described the nine-story tower as the tallest building between Portland and San Francisco.
The hotel opened as the Lithia Springs Hotel, named for the mineral springs that Ashland's civic boosters believed would turn the town into a health-resort destination. Hotel lessee R.W. Price and the Lithian Hotel Company, with Kiwanis president Henry Enders driving the project, built the property to capture the tourist wave they expected the springs to bring.
That wave never arrived. In 1927 Southern Pacific rerouted most of its passenger rail traffic through Klamath Falls instead of Ashland, cutting into the hotel's tourist trade, and the Great Depression that followed strained its finances further. The hotel survived through the middle of the century, went through a renovation in 1978, and by 1997 had closed and sat vacant.
A public naming contest, covered by the Medford Mail Tribune on April 18, 1960, renamed the property the Mark Antony Motor Hotel, a name meant to draw on the rising profile of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It carried that name until 1998, when Doug and Becky Neuman bought the derelict building and restored it under the National Park Service's Certified Rehabilitation program, using historic tax credits and reducing the room count to 70. It reopened in December 2000 as the Ashland Springs Hotel and now operates as the flagship property of the Neumans' Neuman Hotel Group.
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 14, 1978, as the Lithia Springs Hotel, reference number 78002289. A February 2002 amendment corrected the record to reflect the building's full name history: Lithia Springs Hotel, then Mark Antony Motor Hotel from 1960 to 1998, then Ashland Springs Hotel. The building is also a contributing property in the Ashland Downtown Historic District, listed separately in 2000.
Sources
The only citable reference to a haunting at Ashland Springs Hotel appears in 1859 Oregon's Magazine. A November 2025 feature on Ashland, describing the hotel's lobby, garden, spa, and restaurant, closes the paragraph with a single line: a ghost might chill on the fifth floor. The magazine gives no name, no witness, no date, and no account of any specific incident tied to that floor.
The hotel's own website and its published history page make no mention of a haunting. Ashland Springs Hotel promotes its architecture, its restoration, and its place in the town's history, not a ghost story.
Because the only citable haunting reference is a single unelaborated line, this entry is held for further review rather than published as a documented haunting. The building's height and visibility as downtown Ashland's most prominent historic tower may account for a general local reputation, separate from any specific documented event.
Media Appearances
Stay overnight at Ashland Springs Hotel, a nine-story 1925 tower restored to 70 rooms in downtown Ashland. The property opened as the Lithia Springs Hotel, spent decades as the Mark Antony Motor Hotel, and reopened under its current name in 2000 after a full historic rehabilitation. The hotel operates an on-site restaurant, bar, and spa.
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