Coeur d'Alene, ID

My wife and I love the Travel Channel. One of our favorite types of shows to watch are the Haunted Places shows. We aren’t sure exactly why, but we just can’t seem to watch enough of these shows. Around Halloween we were watching The World’s Scariest Places. They always show the Stanley Hotel (where The Shining was filmed) and we always say how we are

going to stay there one night.

As we were watching the show a hotel in a town that I have been to many times popped up. A town that wasn’t all that far away - La Grande Oregon. They were showing the Hot Lake Springs Hotel. It looked like it was a pretty grand hotel at one point. My wife had sort of joked that we should go see that place one time and I, with head in my laptop, sort of just grunted. The story was more and more intrigueing with each minute we listened.

We had not been out for a while and I was just about to spend two weeks on a business trip, so I started to look up online how long it would take to get there from Coeur d’Alene. Only 4.5 hours! It was about 10 in the morning and that would put us there around 2pm. Enough time to have some fun before my flight the next day. So I said “honey, if you can get us ready by 11, let’s go.” Her face lit up and she couldn’t believe that we were about to pack up, throw our little baby in the car and drive to La Grande to visit a haunted hotel. But that is exactly what we did.

While she got her stuff together I learned a little more about the Haunted Hotel. My first stop was the hotel’s website. It said that it was actually open, so there was nothing really stopping us. I won’t go through the whole story, but the hotel was a hospital, a sanitorium and lots more. But the one thing that intrigued me was that people have said that you can hear a piano playing but there is no piano in the building. Apparently a piano that was once owned by Gershwin was the centerpiece of the hotel. I mention this because, well, I’ll tell you more later.

You can read more about the hotel at these places: StrangeUSA HauntedPlacedOregon Are you thinking right now that we are crazy? We had so much fun.

We mapped it out on Google maps and decided to take the road less traveled. You can travel through Lewiston or Kennewick. Since we have been that way before, we decided to head through Lewiston Oregon. We like the drive through Moscow and it seemed like a nicer drive. And it was.

The first place on the trip was passing the Coeur d’Alene Casino. If you have time give it a stop, although it’s not a big destination if you are ghost hunting with your kids

If you are traveling with a pregnant wife, like I was, you’ll want to know that about 15 miles south of the casino is a very nice rest stop. When you get to it, be sure to stop, there aren’t any other rest stops that we could find.

The drive was spectacular, until it started to take more than 4 hours. Since we had a baby with us, we had to take a few breaks and chill out. So that added to the time. But the thing that took the longest was the route we chose. It is incredibly windy and through many ups and downs. So this made the 4.5 hour drive into a 6 hour drive, add the time for the baby and it is about an 8 hour drive. It was also at night. So we didn’t get to see the incredible sights we had hoped to. By the time we got to La Grande, it was late and we were a bit tired. I highly recommend the Lewiston route if you have time, leave early in the morning and enjoy driving. If you have small kids, I recommend the Spokane route. We stayed at a Best Western in La Grande. It wasn’t the best hotel, but we had a hot tub in the room and it was clean.

Oh, one thing - along the way there are a host of haunted places to visit. Check them out here. You can make a really cool trip out of it. We didn’t find out about these other areas until we got to La Grande, but man we wish we could have seen all of them!

We woke up the next morning and headed out to the hotel. It wasn’t far at all. Here are the directions. As we drove down the La Grande Baker Highway, we could see the hotel from a distance. It looked so awesome. It was really big and you could see how it was a really amazing hotel in it’s time. The hot springs next to the hotel are so hot that you cannot go swimming in them. That seemed to add to the whole spookiness of the whole trip.

As you can see in the pictures below, the hotel looks like the entrance is done very nice, and there is a place on the right that looks finished.

But when we pulled up, the gates were close. And we saw this sign:

Oh No! It was Sunday morning! We traveled all that way and we can only get within 3oo feet of the hotel! We were a bit heartbroken. But what a hotel. We had actually heard on the TV show that the place was up for sale for very little. Hey, wouldn’t you like to own a cool hotel like this?

But remember when I said that people claimed they heard piano music? As the wind blew hard, every once in a while it would blow at us from the hotel and we heard… piano playing. Check out the video below and see if you hear them too!

It’s hard to hear but I swear we heard a piano playing. Now, if I was the owner of the hotel, I would be sure there was piano music playing to create an atmosphere of haunted-ness. But it freaked us out and made us want to visit the hotel even more.It was an awesome experience. It would have been made better with some better planning and actual tour of the hotel. But no fear, we are putting together a summer trip with a possible stay at the hotel. I wonder if rooms will be ready by then?