A Skirvin Hilton Hotel Haunting
An Unforgettable Encounter with the Unseen
Who’s ready for an October ghost story? What follows is a true paranormal accounting of a real-life encounter.
Location: One Park Avenue, Oklahoma City, OK 73102
The Year: 2011
Historical Context: The Skirvin Hotel – Where Legends and Nightmares Collide
Our story begins with a legend about Effie. Effie was a chambermaid in the prohibition era. Her story, whether true, is both tragic and captivating.
Halloween Trigger Warning: Don’t read any further if you are sensitive to graphic content and spooky tales.
As legend holds, our ghost story begins some 30-40 years after the hotel founder, William Balser Skirvin, established the finest hotel in the land in 1911. A hotel that would serve as a major landmark and destination spot for many prominent figures of our time.
The original structure consisted of two wings. Each wing was originally 10 stories tall, with a combined 224 rooms. This structure hosted opulent accommodations for travelers and dignitaries, and even to this day stands as a grand Art Deco landmark. The interior of this place offered, and still does, a ‘timeless’ charm.
A short time after the expansion of the hotel to three wings, now over 500 rooms, in 1930, the Skirvin was solidified as a major landmark in Oklahoma City.
Legends, being legends, tell the story this way…
WB Skirvin succumbed to his desires and fathered a child with Effie. Mr. Skirvin sought to protect his reputation by locking Effie away in one of the ‘upper rooms’ of the hotel, where she spent her pregnancy isolated from the world.
Distraught and with no hope of escape, Effie ultimately lost her mind. She is said to have taken her own life, throwing herself and her newborn baby from a window. Since then, her restless spirit is said to haunt the hotel.
Now that we have some historical foundations in place, I welcome you to my nightmares below.
The Legend of Effie Aside, This is A True Story.
The elevator doors slid open with an eerie quietness. The hotel floor before us was deserted, its silence broken only by a distant, chilling sound. The energy was static and constricting, and it really did feel like a horror flick. But this was no movie. This was real.
An empty hotel floor. Nobody to be seen or heard save the sound of a crying baby.
My wife and I exchanged intense eye contact. We'd heard stories about the Skirvin over the years, but we never anticipated this. The historical accounts we had heard were echoing in our minds. We had laughed them off before, but as we stood there on that night, the line between fiction and reality blurred.
The crying grew louder as we neared the door, which was opened just enough to let a little sliver of light, and that sound through.
We froze!
Something was off, but neither of us could muster the courage to knock, to cross the threshold. Clutching her purse with our small puppy inside, my wife led the way down the long hallway. I was contending with an ‘unreasonable fear.’
And we were breaking the rules of bringing a dog along in the first place. In our defense, we had only just recently acquired said dog, and we drove her home before settling in at the Skrivin for the night. We lived less than 20 minutes away.
The emptiness was oppressive as if the hotel itself was watching and asking us to leave. We reached our corner room on a higher floor than I can recall, obviously rattled by the unsettling cries we had just heard.
If it wasn’t for what took place many hours later, I could have convinced myself that this was staged. A trick played on guests with ‘gift certificates’ in hand. My best man had gifted us with a free night at the Skirvin as a wedding present, and we were cashing in on our prize about 6 months later.
We met friends for drinks at the hotel bar, and then we took the puppy home for the night. Upon arrival back to the hotel, about an hour later, our footsteps echoed in the silent corridors.
To our astonishment, we came to the same room with the exact same cry. The door remained slightly open. The space felt like it was on a looping and repeating playback.
The scene was identical to what we had encountered many hours before. The emptiness was suffocating. No one else was around. No one except for the unseen presence that seemed to stalk these halls and the crying sound overflowing from the room.
We are not typically the type to buy into this sort of supernatural evil vibe, but neither one of us could shake the disturbance. Something about this felt different than anything we had ever encountered before.
We tried to shake off the unease as we settled into bed. The room was quaint, well-styled, and modernized, but sleep offered little respite.
The dreams came swiftly, like a storm.
Dark, twisted visions of blood, bondage, and slavery flooded into my dreamscape.
Flames engulfed the room as I wandered through the chaos, lost in the madness.
I was not alone.
Trapped souls and bodies bound and tortured, writhed in agony around me. The darkness reached out, clawing at my mind, trying to pull me into its depths.
When I woke the next morning, the memories of those dreams clung to me like a second skin. I didn’t mention them to my wife. I didn’t need to. As we checked out and headed home, I finally broke the silence.
Upon mentioning that I suffered from nightmares the whole night, my wife looked shocked and said that she, too, had the most awful dreams. As we each shared further, I was speechless because we had the same dream. Every detail, every aspect of the nightmare was shared. We had slept through the same hell together.
We were on our way home, long after waking up that day, before I said anything about my nocturnal encounters.
We shared visions of the most horrific kind. The room was engulfed in flames, bodies tied up, and we were walking around ourselves in confusion. The oppressive darkness and evil tried their best to grip us and drive us mad. The diabolical energies we encountered that night were on a whole other level than I’ve ever experienced before or since.
With slippery floors, ropes, blades, and a stench of metallic decay and writhing bodies, the memory is an unfortunate one that continues to remind me that there were unseen forces at work in our room that night.
Years passed, but the memory of that night at the Skirvin never faded. Then, a twist of fate brought it all back. My friend offered me concert tickets to see The Smashing Pumpkins, a band I’d loved for years. Midway through the set, James Iha stepped forward and shared something that made my blood run cold.
“Last night, we were haunted by ghosts,” he said.
Listen for yourself here: The very moment from the ‘Shiny and Oh So Bright’ tour that brought this experience back to life for me. My son’s first concert experience was definitely a memorable one for me.
The band had stayed at the Skirvin the night before, and they, too, had experienced the unexplainable. NBA players and rock stars have often reported strange occurrences at the hotel. Hearing this from a band I admired after living through my own ordeal was a final, undeniable confirmation in my mind. Not that I even needed it.
I needed answers. I called the Skirvin repeatedly, asking to book the same room for our anniversary, hoping to face whatever haunted us that night. Each time, my requests were met with silence. No callback, no acknowledgment. It was as if the hotel itself was keeping a secret it didn’t want to share.
I’ve never returned to the Skirvin, nor do I plan to. What happened to us there was a glimpse into something dark, something evil that lingers in the spaces between the living and the dead. I share this story not to entertain but to warn. The Skirvin Hotel is not just a place to stay; it’s a place where nightmares come to life and where the past refuses to rest.
As I reflected on my own experience at the Skirvin, I couldn’t help but feel a connection to this piece of Oklahoma City’s haunted history. Like the NBA players and countless guests before me, I, too, heard the unexplained sounds—the eerie cry of a baby, the unmistakable presence of something watching from the shadows. But unlike the legends, my encounter was far more personal. The shared nightmare that my wife and I experienced that night—the visions of blood, bondage, and flames—felt as though they were pulled from a place darker than Effie’s own tragic tale. Perhaps it was her spirit reaching out to us, or maybe something else entirely. Whatever it was, it left a permanent mark on our lives.
Effie’s ghost is said to roam the halls, and perhaps it was her baby we heard that night. But if she truly lingers at the Skirvin, I fear that something even darker accompanies her. It left us shaken, reminding me that some places hold more than memories. They hold confusion, suffering, and unresolved pain.
What began as a Prohibition-era scandal, a love affair gone tragically wrong, has evolved into one of the most notorious ghost stories in the U.S. Effie’s legacy, real or imagined, has woven itself into the very fabric of the Skirvin, ensuring that anyone who stays there carries a piece of her story with them when they leave.
As we drove away that morning, neither of us spoke for a long time. The hotel loomed in the rearview mirror, a silent witness to the nightmares it had bestowed upon us. We left the Skirvin, but its hold on us has never quite disappeared. And while I may never return, the memory of that night remains a haunting reminder that some stories are more than just legends. They are living nightmares.
If you dare to visit, remember this: some doors, once opened, can never be closed.