Last week, Susan and I took an overnight road trip to Kansas to pick up some props for our daughter’s high school’s band. The school had paid for the props, but needed someone with a truck to pick them up in Kansas and transport them back. When I rolled my eyes, Susan added, “Plus, I found a haunted hotel for us to stay in!”

I’m in.

The Elgin Hotel is located in Marion, Kansas, about an hour’s drive northeast of Wichita (roughly 250 miles from Oklahoma City). Half an hour before we reached Marion we had dinner at the Genova Italian Restaurant in Newton, Kansas. The food was absolutely fantastic, and we spent a few minutes talking to the owner before we hit the road. When she heard we were going to Marion she smiled and said, “get gas now.”

According to Wikipedia, Marion, Kansas has a population of 1,927, and was named in honor of Francis Marion, a General in the Revolutionary War. Marion’s nickname was the “Swamp Fox,” which is a way cooler name for a town if you ask me. After driving for five miles down a two-lane road surrounded by wheat fields, we arrived at the Elgin Hotel in Marion.

The Elgin Hotel has a pretty interesting history, which I will summarize briefly. In the 1880s, the citizens of Marion made several attempts to get investors to build a hotel designed to attract visitors and support the local railroad industry. When no one took them up on their offer, they decided to built it themselves. Construction costs was crowdsourced by selling shares to local residents. Over the years, the hotel has seen its ups and downs. The hotel was prosperous during the oil boom era, but by the 1970s, the building was in such poor shape that it was sold for $3,000 and scheduled for demolition (fortunately, that didn’t happen). In 1976, a new owner put $400k into restoring the hotel, ultimately converting it into apartments. The hotel was sold again in 2006, when new owners put another $2 million into refurbishing the building and turning it into a boutique hotel. The three-story hotel now contains only twelves rooms (four per floor) with many additional sitting rooms and nooks and crannies to explore. You can read a more detailed version of this story on the hotel’s website.

The hotel is filled with tall pillars, ornate woodwork, and vintage furniture. The hotel was restored to look how it may have appeared in the 1880s. In the lobby at the base of the stairs sits an old piano. Whether it was for the guests or the ghosts, I’m not sure.

Best we could tell the hotel only had a few other guests, probably due to the fact that we stayed on a weeknight. In fact, the only place we saw other people was in the small bar and restaurant on the first floor. We spent an hour wandering the hotel’s halls, exploring the different sitting rooms, kitchenettes, and outdoor sitting areas. After buying a couple of drinks from the bar, we ended up watching television in one of the upstairs sitting rooms for a bit.

Eventually we retired to our room for the night, where we found a small tray of snacks, a bottle of champagne, and a king-size poster bed. I stayed awake as long as I could, waiting for a visit from the hotel’s purported ghastly spirits, but if there are any ghosts lounging around the hotel, they did not visit us. Instead, all I found there was a good night’s sleep and a delicious breakfast.

I don’t believe the Elgin Hotel is haunted, but I do believe it’s a nice and affordable place to stay if you happen to find yourself in or near Marion, Kansas.