Congress Plaza Hotel

The story

When the Auditorium Annex opened on Michigan Avenue in 1893 to handle the onslaught of visitors arriving for the World's Columbian Exposition, it was designed as a palace of Gilded Age grandeur, complete with subterranean marble tunnels connecting it across the street. But as the venue expanded into an 871-room complex—eventually renamed the Congress Plaza Hotel—its sprawling, labyrinthine footprint began accumulating a far darker reputation. It hosted U.S. presidents and high-society galas in grand spaces like the Gold Room, but Prohibition brought mobsters into the fold, including Al Capone, whose associates notoriously placed phone calls to him from a lobby house phone around the time of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Over a century of renovations, expansion towers, and internal reconfigurations turned the building's interior into a bizarre maze where corridors shift in width and doorways don't always align. Legend holds that parts of the structure—including odd closets on upper floors and entire storage areas—have been permanently walled shut. Guests and staff have long reported unexplained cold spots, footsteps in empty hallways, and electronics turning on without human intervention. The fourth and twelfth floors remain the epicenter of the hotel's uncanny reputation, with Room 441 in particular earning local legend status for a shadowy female spirit said to kick or shake sleeping guests awake from the foot of the bed.