HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
1914 downtown Rock Springs hotel locals call the most haunted place in town, with an annual haunted house in its flood-scoured basement.
19 Elk Street, Rock Springs, WY 82901
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
The Park Lounge is a free-to-enter bar and restaurant. The October haunted house in the basement charges roughly $15 adults / $10 kids under 10; confirm dates and pricing for the current season.
Access
Limited Access
Downtown sidewalks; the haunted house is in a basement reached by stairs and is not accessible
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1914 · Largest and most modern hotel in Rock Springs (1914-1950s) · Lincoln Highway-era travelers' hotel · Surviving downtown Rock Springs historic building
The Park Hotel opened in 1914 in downtown Rock Springs, built by John Park, one of the city's early pioneers. The three-story brick building was the largest and most modern hotel in Rock Springs and the hub of western Wyoming for decades. It offered 38 rooms with hot and cold running water, twenty of them with private baths, along with the Park Grill restaurant, a tap room, a barber shop, and a coffee shop.
The hotel catered to commercial travelers and to automobile tourists driving the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental auto route, which ran through Rock Springs. A fourth floor was added during the 1920s, and the upper level later held the Tumbleweed Bar, renamed the Sage Room, a dancing and drinking spot for the town.
The Park remained a center of Rock Springs social life into the late 1950s. As newer motels along the highway pulled away the lodging trade, the building's role narrowed, but it stayed in use rather than being lost, and the ground floor today operates as the Park Lounge, a bar and restaurant. Local preservation coverage in the Rocket Miner has highlighted the building as part of the surviving historic fabric of downtown Rock Springs.
The building's lower level was damaged in a 2015 flood that left hundreds of pounds of dirt in the basement. That scoured-out basement is what now hosts the October haunted house, an attraction layered onto a building locals already talked about as haunted.
Sources
The Park Hotel's haunted reputation is older than its haunted house. When Rock Springs resident Lindsay Soderlund set up the first basement attraction, the Rocket Miner noted that people around town already commonly called the Park 'the most haunted place ever.' The newspaper feature and the Sweetwater County tourism listing both place the building among the county's haunted sites.
The documented lore is general rather than specific. The published sources describe a building with a long-standing local reputation for activity, not a roster of named apparitions or a particular tragedy. The county tourism page folds the Park Hotel into a roundup of Sweetwater County ghost stories without attaching a detailed account to it.
The basement itself carries the most atmosphere. A 2015 flood filled the lower level with hundreds of pounds of dirt, and the cleared-out space, with its old dumbwaiter still in place as a prop, became the setting for the annual walk-through. The haunted house is a staged Halloween attraction built on top of the building's reputation, not a paranormal investigation, and the operators present it that way.
For visitors, the Park works on two levels: a 1914 hotel that locals have talked about for generations, and a seasonal scare attraction that leans into that talk each October.
Visit the bar and restaurant on the ground floor of the historic Park Hotel building. The lounge keeps the 1914 hotel in active use and is the easiest way to see the building any time of year.
Each October the flood-scoured hotel basement is built out as a walk-through haunted house. Early-evening windows are toned down for younger visitors; later windows add jump scares. Started in 2022 by Rock Springs resident Lindsay Soderlund and now in its third-plus year.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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