1929 Conrad Hilton Hotel, Restored as Apartments
212 Beech St, Plainview, TX 79072
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Now an apartment building. Exterior viewing only.
Access
Limited Access
Downtown sidewalk
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1929 · Conrad Hilton's Sixth Hotel · National Register of Historic Places · Plainview Commercial Historic District
The eight-story building at the corner of Beech and Eighth in downtown Plainview opened on July 3, 1929 as the Hale County Hotel — the sixth hotel that a young Conrad Hilton would build for the chain that bears his name. It offered 125 guest rooms, a ballroom, a lounge, and private dining, configured to serve a West Texas market then expanding rapidly on cotton.
Hilton dropped the property from his portfolio in 1946. The building continued to operate as a hotel through the 1970s and was used as apartments in its later years before closing in 1983. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, and it is a contributing property to the Plainview Commercial Historic District.
For more than three decades the Old Hilton stood vacant downtown. It became one of the most-photographed abandoned buildings in West Texas, a focal point of preservation conversations and the subject of local ghost lore that took shape during the empty years.
A Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs tax-credit-funded redevelopment converted the building into Conrad Lofts, an affordable housing complex of 29 units ranging from studios to three-bedroom apartments. The project reopened in 2020. The exterior remains substantially intact; the interior has been gutted and rebuilt for residential use.
Sources
The folklore of the Old Hilton was built almost entirely during the abandonment. From the early 1980s through the late 2010s, the eight-story shell loomed over Plainview's downtown with curtains still hanging in many of its windows, creating a regular set of optical conditions — wind through broken glazing, light through thin fabric — that produced sightings of curtains moving in upper-floor rooms with no one inside.
The most-repeated story attaches to Room 529. A Bible was said to lie open on the floor; entering the room was said to lower the temperature sharply, and the Bible's pages were said to turn on their own. Forgotten Winds, a regional Texas folklore blog, has documented the way these accounts circulated locally, and the story of Satanists having broken into the hotel and called something forth was a recurring element of the lore.
With the 2020 redevelopment, that chapter has effectively ended. The building is now occupied as apartments. The interior described in the ghost stories — abandoned rooms, peeling paper, untouched fixtures — no longer exists. The Old Hilton's haunted reputation is now part of Plainview's local memory rather than a current site condition.
View the eight-story 1929 Hilton Hotel — the sixth hotel Conrad Hilton built — from the sidewalks of downtown Plainview. The building was abandoned for more than thirty years before reopening in 2020 as the Conrad Lofts apartment building. Interior is private residential space.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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