Does Marilyn Monroe Haunt This Hollywood Hotel? We Spent an Eerie Night There to Find Out

I’ve always been a sucker for old Hollywood. And I just happen to have a passion for the paranormal. Lucky for me, some of the best ghost stories in L.A. revolve around the famed Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

For four years, I’ve been traveling around the country along with two of my closest mom friends, sisters Liz Beedle and Emily Penke, to check out locations that are known to be haunted. Now known as the Ghost Moms on social media, we were already making a quick trip to L.A. to stay on The Queen Mary in Long Beach. What’s one more sleep-deprived night at another hotel where guests might have never checked out?

Located on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (right across the street from the theater commonly known as Grauman’s Chinese), the 12-story hotel first opened its doors in May 1927 and quickly became a hotspot for stars, even hosting the very first Oscars ceremony two years later.

Stepping inside its massive lobby feels like going back in time. While the hotel has been renovated, the decor is still distinctly vintage and lends to an eerie energy. We had requested room 928, reportedly haunted by four-time Academy Award nominee Montgomery Clift, who booked the room for several months while preparing for his role as a bugle-playing soldier in the classic film From Here to Eternity.

Guests believe the spirit of Clift, who battled his own demons including alcohol, drugs and depression and had a disfiguring car accident, still roams the hotel and the sounds of a bugle have been heard echoing through the hallways.

Liz had actually stayed at the hotel in 2014 on a girls’ trip, coincidentally in the room right next to 928. Early one morning, they all heard a loud male voice through that wall clearly saying, “Put it down! Put it down! I’ll call the police!” They even went downstairs and talked to a security guard who checked with the front desk, but 928 was empty.

After we got settled in the room, we went to the hotel’s ’60s-style Tropicana pool, which was bustling for a Sunday afternoon. We sought out the second-floor suite named after Marilyn Monroe with its wrap-around balcony overlooking the pool. When her career first began, the star stayed at the hotel during the 1940s and posed for her first print ad on the pool’s diving board.

As the story goes, hotel staff gave Monroe an ornate, full-length mirror for her room. After her death, the mirror was moved to a manager’s office. One day a housekeeper, who was dusting the mirror, saw the reflection of a somber blonde woman behind her. She turned around to ask the lady if she could help, but no one was there.

The mirror has since been moved to a mezzanine hallway in the hotel and guests still report seeing a vision of Monroe standing behind them in photos.

We went back to our room before dinner and broke out some paranormal gear. We placed a call bell that rings whenever it detects a fluctuation in electromagnetic energy on the desk. We started asking questions out loud to both Clift and Monroe. And then the bell rang.

Even in daylight, it’s really spooky when something triggers a piece of equipment and there’s no obvious reason. We’ve definitely gotten braver the more we do this, but it’s still an unsettling feeling. It’s also a little bit addictive. Once something happens that you can’t explain, you really want to experience it again.

Reading about the haunted history of the hotel, we also learned of a spirit called Caroline, who might have drowned in the pool. Guests have been asked by a young girl if they have seen her mother or father only to have her run around a corner and disappear.

We turned on an app that scans radio frequencies (it is believed spirits can speak through the white noise) and tried to talk to her. I asked if there was anything she wanted and we heard a clear little girl’s voice say, “a story.”

After midnight, we ventured around the hotel and met up with an amazingly generous security manager who took us into areas usually not accessible to visitors, including the Blossom Ballroom, the nightclub, the Gable & Lombard Penthouse and the rooftop under the hotel’s iconic sign.

In the ballroom, where an apparition of Monroe has been spotted dancing, we put a double-sided motion detector in the middle of the floor. Within minutes, both sides flashed, picking up movement that we couldn’t see with our own eyes.

It was a little before 3 a.m. when we finally made it back to our room. Though there were no sounds of a bugle, we did hear male voices that didn’t seem to be coming from the hallway or any adjacent rooms. As we called it a night, we decided it just might be more of all that’s still lingering at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel.