In this story, I interviewed my mother’s friend about an experience she had at this haunted hotel/casino in Tahoe. The following is her story told in first-person.
Interviewee: “Several years ago, 2018, I saw something on Facebook that they were going to have a paranormal investigation at the Biltmore Hotel in Lake Tahoe. [My husband] and I have gone on lots of haunted tours and stuff while we’re on vacation, (the Jack the Ripper tour, London, things like that.) So I’m like, that might be kind of fun for his birthday because it’s right around the fall time and it might be an interesting adventure. So we’ve never done anything like that before. I had no idea what to expect.
If you would have asked me, if I thought ghosts were real, I’d tell you no. I’d never experienced anything unusual; nothing major. So, we secured our spots and got a room there. It’s one of the older hotels, the interesting feature of this hotel is that it’s right across the street from another old casino, (Hotel Calnivas) which has since been demolished. There’s a tunnel underneath that connected the two casinos because they’re across the street from each other and the tunnel wasn’t for public use – It was for the mob, and for the people running the casinos and for the criminal elements to go back and forth between the two.
We headed up [to the hotel] and they were like, okay, everything fires off at 8:00 PM. So we got there and checked in and they were kind of having like a vendor fair and some seminars. Our group/investigation started at 8 p.m, and there’s about 120 people because we had 12 people in our group and there were 10 different groups because they didn’t want everybody walking around in a big blob. There were different parts of the hotel that were said to be haunted, so because there had been a lot of bad activity there (murders and things of that,) they made sure you stick with the mob.
We started off the evening, and to me it was very amusing. We had a psychic medium in our group, and we had a professional Paranormal investigator in the group, and he had all the equipment (like light boxes that react to the energy, the little metal rods that moved when you asked the ghost questions,) he had all that stuff. So this all was really entertaining to me, and I’m a very social person. So I was asking him a million questions and I became his little sidekick. So really fast, it became that I was running the equipment. I’m walking around with the light box, and they’re like, okay this ghost haunts these stairways, this is what happened to her, there’s a child ghost that walks around the hallways, etc. So we’re going from station to station and the little light boxes are responding.
When we got to the hallway, I was given the metal rods and the child ghost kind of started being playful with me and the rod started moving. I’m like, how are these things moving, because my hands aren’t moving? We go to the downstairs part of the hotel and there is the casino, the lobby, a restaurant, and then a wedding chapel and the service area which is where the tunnel goes underneath the street. We go into the chapel and we’re told about the ghost that lives there, and she was a lady who had died on her wedding day, and so she haunted the chapel.
We were in there and my eyes just kept going to one corner of a room where there was a closet with supplies. The door was shut. There wasn’t anything like moving over there, but I just kept looking at it. It just was a little odd, but still nothing major. Our guide was like, okay we’re going to go into the service area. We went down into the service area and this is where the evening got crazy. We’re walking into the tunnel that goes underneath the street and the man leading the paranormal investigation is talking about how that was where they took people to murder them, so it was very haunted. If you cross the mob, that’s where you took your final walk.
We’re walking down the corridor and.. I am not an emotional person, but my throat closes up and I cannot breathe. Tears start pouring down my face, and I’m like, oh my God. It was such a weird physical reaction as he’s telling the story of our group, and it happened to myself and one other woman in the group out of 12. I pat [my husband] on the arm and say I got to go back up. The other woman and I backed up out of the corridor and back into the service area where the hotel staff would be making food and things like that. I instantly feel better. My throat opens up and I can breathe all the way and I’m not crying anymore.
When they all come out, the investigator that’s leading our group walks by me and my throat closes up again. I can’t breathe and tears start running down my face again. I looked at him and yelled you need to get away from me right now. We’ve been buddies all night – laughing together, having a great time. There was nothing about him that upset me and I’m like, get away from me. You need to go, get away from me right now. He’s just looking at me and [my husband is] like, what are you doing?
So we go out. Everybody’s a little rattled. We walk down the hall, and go back into the chapel. Everybody’s kind of calming down because the energy was a lot. The other woman that was with me also had a very adverse reaction to him. We’re in the chapel and I keep looking at that corner in the room, and Mike [my husband] is sitting next to me.
We’re sitting on these chairs that outline the chapel and [my husband] says this isn’t right. I’m like, what do you mean? He says we need to get out of here. The person leading the investigation is like where are you going? We don’t want you walking around by yourself. [My husband’s] like, no there’s something bad in here. He’s like, what are you talking about? I said I feel it too. Something’s not right, there’s something over in that corner and whatever is in that corner, I feel scared. We didn’t feel that way here before.
The guy leading our group leaves for a second and he goes and he gets the person who’s in charge of the whole event. She comes in and she’s like what’s going on in here? She goes, this feels bad in here and again I yell, he needs to get away from me right now. I don’t want him anywhere near me. She’s like, You all need to come with me. So, we had to go have a spiritual cleansing, because whatever evil entity that was down in the service area corridor, latched onto him and came out with him.
So after answering some questions and having a conversation, we had to go outside. We had to be grounded. There was sage going on. After all of that, I was fine with him. He didn’t bother me at all. As a matter of fact, I apologized, but when we were going into areas, they weren’t really telling us the story of the ghosts and they were waiting to see what we felt and what we experienced.
The ghost in the chapel who was a woman and had died on her wedding day was a very well known and friendly spirit. What followed her, and what followed us out of the service area was one of the hitmen for the mob who took his last walk down there too. He was the guy who murdered most of the prostitutes and the gamblers who got in trouble and then they had him murdered. What followed us pitched onto the investigator in our group, who was the furthest down the corridor and talking about things. I guess they labeled me an empath that spirits seek me out for comfort, and so the reason why my throat closed up was because most of the prostitutes were strangled when they took them down there.
It was all a very unnerving experience. I walked away from there fully believing. We spent the night in the cabin, which I then dubbed the murder cabins because we did not get any sleep. We were awake all night. Our investigation wrapped up around midnight and then [my husband] and I literally laid awake in bed until the sun came up at 6 and we left exactly at 6 to get out of there. I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. It was wild.
[My husband], because the first part of the evening was a lot of fun and the light boxes and I was so involved in it, took a ton of videos, lots and lots of videos on his cell phone. None of them turned out. Every single one of them was scrambled, And no other videos on his phone were scrambled before or after. There was never any glitch in his cell phone being able to record before, and he had that cell phone for several years after and video worked fine, but none of the videos of that night worked.
I found out later that apparently there’s a spirit that kind of roams the grounds out there that’s like screaming in the middle of the night that people will hear screams. We didn’t hear screaming, but I read up on it afterwards and I was like, oh my God. We would have driven away at 2 AM if I had heard screaming. We would have left right then. Goodbye! I’m going right back [home], I don’t care that we paid for this room, we are not sleeping. That didn’t happen, thankfully. I don’t think I could have handled it.
Then, a couple years later they were going to demolish it and they were kind of wondering what was going to happen to the energy there, you know, the spirits, because they got to go somewhere, right? They’re just there. So a few years ago we were at [my friend’s] cabin on a girls’ trip and I had told them all that story. They wanted to go to the Biltmore because it was still open.
They weren’t having people stay there at the hotel, but the casino was still going and there were like a little bit of things in the gift shop, but not a lot of stuff and they had areas of the hotel roped off, like you couldn’t go upstairs. So [my friends] were like, hey, can we go to some of the spots that you saw on the ghost tour? And I’m like, well we’ll see what we can get into. There are places I will not go. We were able to sneak back behind the tape that they had DO NOT ENTER written on, and of course we went around it, and we entered anyway.
We went to the chapel and I was talking about the ghost in that chapel, and my eye was not drawn to the service closet at that time. It wasn’t bothering me in there, but I was talking to [my friend T] and [P] about that. We were the only people there, and there’s no other entrances or exits out of the chapel because it’s really small – like the size of a master bedroom. It’s not a big area.
We’re sitting in the same chair [my husband] and I sat in, and we’re talking a little bit about the experience, and [my friend] was like, I want to see if I can sneak down into that service area. I’m like, no, and she goes, well, it’s just right around the corner and [she wanted] to just poke [her] head in. I’m like, you do you, but I’m not walking in there. Whatever is down there knows me, I’ve had a bad experience there and you cannot give me enough money to walk into that service area again. We don’t have anybody to help us too, so I’m not going.
We were kind of going back and forth about that. [My other friend] was like, well let’s just go back and find the other girls in the casino, and I’m like, great. We get up and [my friend] still kind of talking about going to peek her head in. [My other friend] and I are walking side by side, and [the first friend] elsewhere in the room not near us, and your mom gets shoved on the shoulder on the side I’m not on as we’re walking out. She jumps.
She’s like, what? What was that? I’m like, what do you mean? She goes, something just shoved my shoulder. I’m like, no way. That’s a warning. We are not to go down that service corridor. I’m like, you’re not going down there. And so we didn’t.”
My thoughts: This story was extremely interesting for me as a listener, because of all of the factors that make up this story. This experience has motifs such as an unwanted spirit that has potential unfinished business with whom had killed them in the mafia tunnels. Additionally, there’s a spirit possession that happens to our narrator, and physical elements like her friend being pushed by a spirit allegedly. I think its funny that she willingly went back to the place that traumatized her after only a few years and even brought her friends, but it’s good that they all god warnings and left before they experienced anything worse possibly.