1910 Beaux-Arts grand hotel and National Historic Landmark in downtown Nashville, long associated with the 19th Amendment ratification and reports of paranormal activity centered on its upper floors.
231 6th Avenue North, Nashville, TN 37219
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$$
Operating five-star luxury hotel; overnight stay required for full access. Public restaurants and bar open to non-guests.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Multi-story historic hotel with full ADA accommodations and elevators
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1910 · National Historic Landmark (2020) · Beaux-Arts commercial architecture · 19th Amendment ratification headquarters · Nashville's third downtown skyscraper
Two hundred fifty Nashville residents formed a syndicate in 1908 to commission a grand hotel directly across from the Tennessee State Capitol. Architect James Edwin Ruthven Carpenter — trained at the University of Tennessee, MIT, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris — designed the building in the Beaux-Arts style. Construction reached completion in 1910 and the Nashville Banner advertised the new hotel as the city's $1,000,000 hostelry. The Hermitage opened to the public on Saturday, September 17, 1910.
The hotel's central lobby features a painted glass ceiling, ornamental plasterwork, and Italian marble surfaces. It is identified by the National Park Service as the only surviving example of Beaux-Arts commercial architecture in Tennessee. The downstairs men's restroom, completed in green and black art-nouveau tile, has been preserved largely unchanged and is regularly cited as one of the most distinctive interior spaces in the country.
In August 1920, the Hermitage was the operational headquarters for both pro- and anti-suffrage activists during the Tennessee General Assembly's vote on ratification of the 19th Amendment. Tennessee's ratification on August 18, 1920 — by a single vote — made the amendment law. Suffragists wore yellow roses, opponents wore red roses, and the lobby became the most-watched political space in the country for days.
The hotel declined through the mid-twentieth century and closed at the end of 1977. It reopened in 1981 after a major restoration as a Park Suite Hotel. A second comprehensive restoration in the early 2000s returned the Beaux-Arts public spaces to their 1910 character. On August 28, 2020 the Hermitage was designated a National Historic Landmark for its role in the 19th Amendment ratification fight.
Sources
According to Ghost City Tours and US Ghost Adventures, the most-reported room in the Hermitage Hotel is the former Room 912 on the ninth floor, where guests have described being woken in the small hours by what sounds like a crying infant. Local oral tradition holds that a baby fell or was dropped from a ninth-floor window in the hotel's early decades, although no period newspaper account confirming such a death has surfaced and US Ghost Adventures explicitly notes that 'the baby's death cannot be confirmed officially.' US Ghost Adventures also notes that the original Room 912 no longer exists as a discrete unit — it has been absorbed into a larger suite during one of the hotel's renovations.
A second recurring report involves a woman in Edwardian-period dress, sometimes described as red-haired, seen briefly in hallways before disappearing. US Ghost Adventures characterizes her as a 'woman in white' associated with the hotel's 1910s residential clientele. Staff and guests have also described unexplained footsteps in empty corridors and self-opening doors in the older portions of the building.
The Hermitage Hotel itself does not actively market a paranormal program; the stories circulate primarily through third-party ghost-tour operators and travel media. There is no published parapsychological investigation of the property. Read alongside the verified violence and political tension that played out in the hotel's public rooms during the 1920 suffrage fight, the lore reads as residual-haunting folklore rather than evidentiary claim.
Notable Entities
Stay overnight at Nashville's only five-star hotel and a National Historic Landmark, with elaborately restored Beaux-Arts public rooms and a historic men's-room downstairs known for its green and black art-nouveau tilework.
Dine in the hotel's restaurants under the painted glass ceiling of the original 1910 lobby — a Beaux-Arts space considered the finest commercial interior of its kind in Tennessee.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Louisville, KY
The Seelbach Hotel opened in 1905 in downtown Louisville, built by Bavarian-born brothers Otto and Louis Seelbach as a Beaux-Arts Baroque luxury establishment. It has hosted nine U.S. presidents and was a favorite of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who set Tom and Daisy Buchanan's wedding there in The Great Gatsby. The hotel is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates today as part of the Hilton portfolio.
Dallas, TX
The Adolphus opened October 5, 1912, on Commerce Street as the flagship Dallas hotel of St. Louis beer magnate Adolphus Busch, founder of Anheuser-Busch. Designed in Beaux Arts style by Thomas P. Barnett of Barnett, Haynes & Barnett, the 22-story tower stood as the tallest building in Texas for a decade. The hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains an operating luxury hotel under the Marriott Autograph Collection.
Richmond, VA
The Jefferson Hotel was built by Richmond tobacco magnate Lewis Ginter and opened October 31, 1895. Designed by Carrère and Hastings in the Beaux-Arts style, the hotel was conceived as the most luxurious in the American South. The property has been a National Historic Landmark since 1969 and remains a AAA Five Diamond hotel.