Ghosts rumored to haunt site
By Mark Fagan, J-W Business Editor
Wednesday, May 11, 2005

The ghost that has haunted the Eldridge Hotel for years has been shoved
out the door, along with the 80-year-old building's discarded elevator.
Or at least that's the theory.

"Some say it's Shalor Eldridge himself, but others say there were more
than one," said Kendra Hatfield, assistant general manager of the hotel.
"But, literally, the old elevator would go up to the fifth floor and
open two or three times before it would take you anywhere. It was the
ghosts getting on. They wanted to go down."
Apparently, she said, the apparitions entered the hotel through the old
cornerstone in Room 505.

But the latest renovation boxed the cornerstone in, leaving the ghost or
ghosts with only one real option: to check out.
"With the new elevator in, you can't see it," said Hatfield, who has
worked in the hotel for more than a decade and concedes that the ghost
stores are far from an open-and-shut case. "They can't get in, and the
elevator doesn't do that anymore.
"I think the ghosts left with the old elevator."

High-profile guests
The hotel's new owners are hoping to restore the luster of the Eldridge
Hotel's guest list, which in years past has included a number of
notables. Among guests who have stayed at the Eldridge or its
predecessors at the corner of Seventh and Massachusetts streets:
Political: Horace Greeley; Sen. William H. Seward, of New York; William
Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt, as presidential candidates; Martin
Luther King Jr.; Lord Clement Atlee, onetime prime minister of Great
Britain; and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
  
Photo special to the Journal-World
The Eldridge Hotel ballroom is shown from the 1940s. The downtown site
has a former guest list with names like Martin Luther King Jr., John
Wayne and Bobby McFerrin. It is believed to have a few otherworldly
guests, too.
Entertainment: Bobby McFerrin; Danny Glover; Steve Allen; Roma Downey,
of "Touched by an Angel"; Richard Simmons; Brooke Shields; John Wayne;
Gene Autry; Willie Nelson; Ice Cube; Ed Asner; James Cromwell; Hal
Holbrook; Joan Baez; and George Carlin.
Others: Wilt Chamberlain; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas;
Yolanda King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.; and Attallah Shabazz,
daughter of Malcolm X.

Back at Big Six
The Big Six Room lives on at the Eldridge, even if it's empty -- for
now.
The room, in the hotel basement, features pennants embedded in the
terrazzo floor of all six charter members of the Big Six Conference:
Kansas University and the universities of Oklahoma, Missouri and
Nebraska, and Iowa State and Kansas State universities.

The floor has played host to plenty of spirited events and evenings. The
place started as a meeting room but by the 1970s morphed into a series
of bars: the Big 8 Disco, Sheriff Sam Jones, G.P. Lloyd's, Moody's,
Baron's and the Kansas Sports Bar and Grill.
Susan Chaney, now an owner of the hotel, met her eventual husband,
Mitchell, while working at the hotel as a waitress in the early 1970s.
She's counting on the room making a comeback on the social scene,
starting as a meeting room or site for wedding receptions, birthday
parties or anything else.
The place has room for seating 80 people for dinner, or accommodating up
to 150 for a "standing" event, she said.
"It's a great space," she said. "You never know."
Col. Eldridge
So, just who is Col. Shalor Eldridge, namesake for the landmark hotel
downtown?

The Spencer Research Library at Kansas University offers the following
account:
Eldridge was active in the efforts to make Kansas Territory a free
state. Formerly a Democrat, Eldridge joined the Kansas delegation at the
Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, and in 1856 he attended
the National Convention of the Friends of Kansas in Buffalo, N.Y.
As a businessman, Eldridge bought the site of the Free State Hotel in
Lawrence following its destruction by a pro-slavery mob and built the
Eldridge House with his brothers.
After serving as a U.S. Army paymaster during the Civil War, Eldridge
became a building contractor, building hotels in other cities, and
Fraser Hall -- the first one -- at Kansas University.

The economic crisis of 1873 brought his construction work to a halt, but
he engaged in mining in Colorado and Arkansas, from which he made and
lost a fortune.