Room 1015 and the Visiting Teams: The Haunted Skirvin Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 16, 2026 · How we verify

Few American hotels have had their reputation shaped quite so publicly by professional athletes. The haunted Skirvin Hotel, properly the Skirvin Hilton Oklahoma City, has been blamed on the record by NBA players for bad sleep and worse basketball, and it sits in downtown Oklahoma City as the state’s most famous overnight ghost story. What separates it from most is that the building itself is thoroughly documented, while the ghost at the center of it is not.

Quick orientation: the Skirvin is a 13-story, 225-room hotel, the oldest hotel in Oklahoma City, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is managed by Marcus Hotels & Resorts under the Hilton brand and belongs to Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

From a Ten-Story Tower in 1911 to Nineteen Years Empty

The Skirvin Hotel opened on September 26, 1911, with 224 rooms in a ten-story, two-winged tower. A third wing of 12 stories went up in 1925, and between 1929 and 1930 all three wings were raised to 13 floors, bringing the total to 525 rooms. The hotel carries the name of its founder, William Balser “Bill” Skirvin, whose daughter Perle Mesta later served as ambassador to Luxembourg under Harry Truman.

The building was a stage early on. Former President Theodore Roosevelt spoke to a large crowd of supporters from a Skirvin balcony on September 24, 1912, during his tour through Oklahoma as a Bull Moose Party candidate.

In 1945 the Skirvin Hotel and the Skirvin Tower were sold to local hotelier Dan James, who worked through several rounds of renovation to pull tourists back in, adding air conditioning, a new swimming pool and new furniture. It was not enough in the long run. The hotel closed in 1988 because of low occupancy and then sat abandoned for 19 years, a dark 13-story shell in the middle of downtown.

How Oklahoma City Got Its Oldest Hotel Back

The recovery was slow and deliberately engineered. In 1999 Mayor Kirk Humphreys appointed a Skirvin Solutions Committee to decide whether the building could be saved at all. The committee toured other restored historic hotels, studied how those projects had been financed, and in October 2000 recommended that the city explore a public-private partnership to reopen the Skirvin.

Oklahoma City bought the building in May 2002 for $2.875 million and issued a request for proposals from developers later that year. Partners in Development, a firm assembled by principal John Weeman, proposed a $42.1 million renovation and a reopening as a full-service Hilton-branded hotel run by Marcus Hotels and Resorts. The Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority selected the firm in January 2004, Weeman bought the building from the city in 2005, and the finished job came in at about $51 million, paid for with his own investment plus tax increment financing, grants, Empowerment Zone credits, historic tax credits and New Markets tax credits.

The Skirvin Hilton reopened in 2007 with the original exterior finish restored, historically accurate windows, reconfigured guest rooms and new guest elevators. Larger rooms dropped the count from 525 to 225, alongside 22,000 square feet of meeting rooms and common areas. In 2022 the hotel sold again, to a joint venture of Ortus Hotel Investments, LLC, a group of local investors, and the Chickasaw Nation’s Sovereign Properties Holdco, LLC. A further $22 million renovation was completed in 2025.

The Effie Story, and What Reporters Found Instead

Room 1015 is rumored to be the most haunted room in the building. The story attached to it runs like this: W. B. Skirvin had an affair with a maid named Effie, she became pregnant, and to avoid a scandal he locked her in room 1015, from which she eventually jumped, killing herself and the baby. In the telling, the death was written off as the suicide of a saleswoman to keep the press away.

That is legend, and it is worth saying so clearly. Steve Lackmeyer, who co-wrote a book about the hotel, and Jason Kersey, both reporters from The Oklahoman, have described Skirvin as “a notorious womanizer and drinker” and noted that the 10th floor was known for gambling and other vices. But they found no real-life evidence corresponding to the Effie story. Skirvin’s family did believe he had a mistress among his employees, his assistant and bookkeeper Mabel Luty, and she outlived him.

What Guests and Staff Say Happens

The reports that circulate are modest in scale and consistent in kind. Over the years hotel staff have said they have seen objects moving by themselves and heard strange noises at night. There is no verified incident behind any of it, only accumulated accounts.

What has kept the story national is sports. In 2010 the New York Knicks famously blamed a loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on the haunting, and the Chicago Bulls reported doors slamming shut on their own and strange sounds outside their rooms. The subject returned to the headlines in June 2012, when the Miami Heat stayed at the Skirvin during the NBA Finals. The Baylor Lady Bears, defending NCAA Division I women’s champions, were put up at the hotel and then lost 82 to 81 to Louisville in the regional semifinals of the 2013 tournament, one of the biggest upsets in the tournament’s history. In January 2019, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving announced that he was producing a feature film about the purported paranormal activity in the building.

Booking a Night at the Skirvin Hilton

This is a working downtown hotel, not a tour site, so access is straightforward: book a room. The property offers 225 guest rooms plus 22,000 square feet of meeting and common space, and it trades on both its Hilton service and its Historic Hotels of America membership. Room 1015 is the one people ask for, though the hotel’s own history gives you plenty to look at without it: a 1911 lobby-era building that spent nearly two decades abandoned and came back for roughly $51 million.

Address: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Sources

• Hotel Overview
• Skirvin Hilton, a Historic Hotels of America member
• Effie and Skirvin Hotel's Haunted Room 1015
• Gibson's close encounter
• NPGallery Asset Detail (National Park Service)
• Wikipedia: Skirvin Hilton Hotel

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