Staying in a haunted hotel was never part of the deal Michael Young agreed to when he joined Major League Baseball.
Michael started playing professionally in the minor leagues in 1997 and by 2000 had worked his way up into the majors. His first team was the Texas Rangers, and then later the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Part of the life of many professional athletes is travelling. Out of the total number of games scheduled for a season in In Major League Baseball, they can expect to spend about half of that on the road.
During a regular season, the various teams pay top dollar for the very best hotel rooms for their players to stay in. The hotels are decided upon before the season starts and the selections submitted to the MLB Players Association.
For away teams coming to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to play the Brewers, those accommodations are in the Pfister Hotel.
The Pfister is largely regarded as one of the best historical hotels in the entire country. For over 130 years, it’s strived to provide top notch service to all its clientele.
Located just three blocks away from Lake Michigan, the hotel boasts magnificent views of downtown Milwaukee and the lake. It comes equipped with an indoor swimming pool, a gym, a spa, and four different dining venues all within the confines of the hotel.
I can only imagine what it’s like to move from city to city, staying at the very best hotels that each of them have to offer. I’m sure that, after a while, it just becomes routine. For me, staying in places like this would be reserved for an anniversary or birthday, a special treat because well, we deserve it.
But for these athletes, it’s part of the business. Their mind is on the game that they want to win. They appreciate the hotels, but, like so many of us normal folks who occasionally have to travel for business, it’s a place to sleep and grab a quick bite to eat if we’re too tired to go find something.
As Young checked in and walked up to his room, the ornate plaster work and beautiful painted ceiling in the lobby might have just blended into the background as he thought about the upcoming game.
One night he returned to his room from a night game, locked the door, crawled into bed, and promptly passed out.
Later that night, something woke him up.
Half-opening his eyes, he felt his mind slip back into wakefulness. Something was bothering him, but he was still too sleepy to figure out what it was. Then it hit him.
Someone was walking around his room.
Young sat up in bed, wide awake. He stared into the darkness, trying to see who it could be. He knew that it wasn’t a roommate; all the players were given their own individual hotel rooms on the road. He also knew that he had locked the door, and a quick glance showed him that it was still firmly shut.
Even after his eyes gradually adjusted, he didn’t see a thing.
As Young sat there, trying to figure out what was going on, he started remembering all the stories that he had heard from other players. Stories of lights turning off and on by themselves, and objects moving on their own in the Pfister Hotel.
Thump…Thump…Thump….
The footsteps came again, moving heavily across the floor. This time Young knew that there wasn’t anything there. At least, nothing that he could see.
“Hey!” he shouted into the darkness. “Make yourself at home. Hang out, have a seat, but do not wake me up, okay?”
Young waited a moment, then laid back down. Gradually, he was able to relax and somehow, fell asleep. Young didn’t have any other trouble the rest of his stay, his unseen visitor apparently content to let him sleep.
While he probably forgot some of the other hotels that he stayed in over his career, Young didn’t forget the Pfister. It’s hard to forget a hotel where you shared a room with a ghost.
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When Guido Pfister dreamed of the hotel that would one day bear his name, he didn’t think of top-notch athletes staying there for away games. What he saw were growing numbers of people coming into Milwaukee.
Some were there on business, while others were visiting family and friends. Some were among the first in the Milwaukee tourist trade, coming to see what magnificent cultural delights the rapidly growing city had to offer. Whatever reason they were there, all of them were there for just a little while before returning home.
Guido saw them all, and he dreamed of a magnificent place where they could all stay while they did whatever they did in Milwaukee. And when Guido dreamed, he dreamed big. He always had.
Born in Germany in 1818, Pfister learned the tanning and leather goods trade. Wanting bigger and better things than what his native country could offer him, Guido immigrated to America.
After a few years on the East Coast, Guido moved to Milwaukee and opened a leather goods store. But dreamers got to dream, and he grew his business from a local shop into one of the biggest leather goods companies in the entire Midwest.
Now Guido was a man of considerable wealth and influence. That’s a fancy scholar way of saying that Guido was loaded, uber-successful, and a lot of people listened to what he had to say.
He began to put his money back into the city. One of the bigger projects he invested in was the construction of a canal system in the Menomonee River Valley. The freshly dug waterways made for improved trading routes in the area.
Guido also did what a lot of rich people did back then – he became a leader in several different successful companies. He was one of the directors of the Milwaukee and Northern Railroad Company, as well as two separate insurance companies. He was also the president of the German Exchange Bank.
It was about then, in what might have been what little spare time he did have, that he noticed all those people visiting Milwaukee and he had his idea of a grand hotel.
A “grand hotel” is an easier way of saying a really, really fancy hotel where potential guests are willing to spend a lot of money to stay there. Personally, I’m a fan of grand hotels.
For rich people – and apparently some professional athletes – they’re probably just another place to stay. For me, it’s kind of a treat. I get to stay in a place where feel just a little bit more special. I get to make believe that maybe I’m a little fancier than I actually am, if only for a night.
My guess is that’s the exact kind of feeling that Guido was looking to give to all those people visiting Milwaukee. Sure, he knew that he was going to get the rich businessman like himself, but he also knew that Joe Average people like me would want a night in his hotel, too.
In his imagination, Guido’s hotel would stand equal to all the other buildings in Milwaukee’s downtown, a shining gem in the very heart of the city. When you visited Milwaukee, it would be the place that you would want to stay.
Guido quickly enlisted the help of his son, Charles, to help him with the project.
Charles was an uber-successful chip off the uber-successful block. He already held a lofty position in Guido’s company, and he also held other high positions with various other companies.
To build the city’s grandest hotel was going to take the city’s grandest designer, so the Pfister’s went to renowned architect Henry C. Koch. The German-born Koch designed several of Milwaukee’s iconic buildings from that time, including Milwaukee’s city hall.
Koch designed the dream hotel in the Romanesque Revival style, a style of architecture that was inspired by medieval European buildings that were originally influenced by Roman buildings.
This style was primarily used for public buildings that were looking to make a statement, like courthouses, churches, and schools. Everything about it screamed to people, “You can do important things here.” It was a perfect design for Guido’s dream hotel.
Sadly, Guido died in 1889 and would never see the project finished. Charles kept the dream alive, completing the Pfister Hotel in 1893, very modestly named after Guido and himself. The final price tag was around $1,000,000, which would be just shy of $35,000,000 in 2024. If I had just spent that much money on a hotel, you can damn well bet I’d name it after myself, too.
The Pfister Hotel had electric lighting throughout, still a relatively new invention in 1893. The Pfister also had a thermostat in every guest room, which meant that guests could control the temperature to fit their liking.
The hotel was covered in rich woodwork and ornate plasters. Charles Pfister’s extensive collection of Victorian-era artwork lined the walls. It had not just one billiards room but two – one for men, one for women. It also had an enormous formal dining room and a gentleman’s lounge, which was basically a fancy place where men could drink expensive booze and smoke equally expensive cigars while trying to solve all the problems of the world.
Like many hotels of that era, the Pfister boasted of being fireproof. That meant that it was made of things like brick, steel, and stone. The hotels weren’t really fireproof; they just didn’t catch fire as easily as wooden structures could.
The Pfister was the very picture of what a grand hotel should look like, which might be why everyone was surprised when it didn’t do so hot when it opened its doors. As a matter of fact, the hotel actually lost money the first few years it was open, which was definitely not part of Charles Pfister’s plan.
Regardless, he kept at it, and, after a few years, things began to turn around for the Pfister. Before Charles knew it, the hotel was a resounding success and became the hotel to stay if you came to Milwaukee.
Charles oversaw the operation of the Pfister for several years, until a massive stroke forced him to sell it to a friend, Ray Smith.
Over the decades, the Pfister continued its grand traditions, with each successive owner making their own particular mark on the building. Today it stands as one of the most beautiful and grandest historic hotels not only in Milwaukee, but in the entire United States.
Some might argue that the hotel is so grand that some of its guests have decided to never leave.
Michael Young is far from the only athlete to experience strange things at the Pfister. Another professional baseball player, Bryce Harper, also had a memorable brush with the unexplained there.
Before going to bed one night, he carefully laid out a shirt and a pair of jeans on a table at the end of his bed. The next morning not only were the clothes on the floor, but the entire table had been moved to the other side of his room.
Harper’s first thought was that someone had come into his room. Walking over to the door, he saw that it was still latched shut, just as he had left it when he went to bed. A quick look around of the room showed him that he was the only one there.
Later he asked a few of his teammates to see if they had played a practical joke on him. Had they snuck into his room and moved the table? All of them told him that they hadn’t.
Unnerved, Harper asked for a different room on a different floor.
In 2023, Brent Rooker, an outfielder for the Oakland A’s, noticed that the television in his room kept switching channels on its own. He thought that it was strange but didn’t really put any more thought into it.
On another night, he fell asleep with the television running. When he woke up several hours later, the television had been turned off. Rooker assumed that it must have been an automatic function of the set to turn off after being on for too long, and quickly fell back to sleep. When he woke up a few hours later, the television was not only turned back on but had been switched to an entirely different channel than what he had been watching the night before.
According to Clint Hurdle, a longtime professional baseball manager, he had never seen a ghost, but one of his players did.
The player called Hurdle one night, saying that the television in his room had turned on by itself not once, but twice earlier that night. It had really kind of freaked him out.
Hurdle told him to come to his room. The two men talked about what had happened, and Hurdle eventually calmed the player down enough to talk him into going back to his own room. They went back together and sat and talked some more, probably taking a few glances at the television, waiting for something to happen.
When nothing did, the player felt comfortable enough to sleep there again.
Athletes aren’t the only ones affected by the haunted happenings at the Pfister. Other guests have shared stories of objects in their rooms being moved and the electronics in their room being turned on and off by themselves. Others have reported hearing strange sounds, like knocking or pounding.
As many people who have claimed to have experienced something supernatural during their stay at the Pfister, no one seems to be able to figure who, what, is behind it all. But that doesn’t keep them from speculating.
According to research done by Anna Lardinois, a Milwaukee historian, an early settler in the region had claimed that a private cemetery had once been on the land the Pfister was built on. Allegedly, he had even come to the site when the hotel was being built to see if any bones would turn up. None did.
If there were people buried there at one time, then maybe they got upset when their graves were disturbed. Personally, I wonder if they just hang out at the ultra-luxurious hotel, enjoying all the great amenities the Pfister has to offer like any other guest.
Others say that the ghost is none other than Charles Pfister himself.
Some people claim to have seen Charles Pfister on the hotel’s staircase, apparently still making sure that the hotel is still operating at the high standards that he set for it over 130 years before.
So many athletes staying at the Pfister have had strange experiences that the hotel has become almost legendary in the sporting community.
It’s become a running joke that the ghosts of the Pfister are keeping the opposing team staying there from getting a good night’s sleep so that they don’t play well against the home Milwaukee teams. With stories still coming in from these athletes year after year, it’s becoming harder and harder to argue against that point.
So, is Charles Pfister haunting his hotel? Or could it be people who were buried on the property who had their eternal rest disturbed when the Pfister was built? Or is it someone, or maybe even several someones, who loved staying at the grand hotel so much that they decided to never leave?
I’m not a professional baseball player, but maybe one day I’ll get to stay at the Pfister myself and maybe, just maybe, get to answer that question for myself.
Sources
Pfister, Guido 1818 – 1889. Wisconsinhistory.org
History. Thevalleymke.org
The Pfister Hotel. Historichotels.org
Milwaukee’s Boutique Hotel. Thephisterhotel.com
Romanesque Revival. Architectural Styles of America and Europe, architecturestyles.org
Michael Young. Wikipedia.
Regular Season. Howbaseballworks.com
Rodriguez, Jessica. About the legend of the Phister Hotel ghost. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 5/23/2024
Gallegos, Martin. Rooker’s haunted weekend in Milwaukee. Mlb.com
Jenkins, Scott. How Do MLB Teams Travel and Who Pays for Hotel Rooms? Sportscasting.com
Mortensen, Becky. The legend of the Pfister Hotel ghost. Wuwm.com, 10/31/2022
Snell, Luke M. History of the Fireproof Hotel. Arizona Contractor & Community, 2/16/2021
C.F. Phister is Taken by Death in Milwaukee. Chicago Tribune, 11/12/1927
Architect Koch Dead. The Journal Times, 5/20/1910