Healing Springs to Hotel Hell: The Maribel Caves Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 4, 2026 · How we verify

The Maribel Caves Hotel sits above the Devil’s River in Maribel, Wisconsin, a three-story stone shell that locals and ghost hunters long ago renamed Hotel Hell. It began life as a spa for people who believed the springs beneath it could cure them. It ended as a burned, boarded, storm-battered ruin with a reputation that has outlasted every business that ever operated inside it. Almost nothing about the place is neutral anymore: the building is either a tragic piece of Wisconsin resort history or the most actively haunted structure in Manitowoc County, depending on who is telling you about it.

Quick Orientation

• What it is: the ruin of a former mineral spring resort hotel, built of local stone
• Built: 1900, by the family of Austrian immigrant Charles Steinbrecker
• Known as: Maribel Caves Hotel, Hotel Hell
• Condition: gutted by fire in 1985, partially restored in 1986, closed again after windstorm damage
• Access: not open to the public

The Spring Water That Built the Place

The hotel was constructed in 1900 and modeled on the grand European spa houses, the sort of establishment where guests came specifically for the water. The springs at Maribel were advertised as curative, and the building was designed to give paying visitors a comfortable place to take them. Its earliest clientele leaned respectable and quiet: clergymen in particular are said to have favored it as a retreat, which makes the building’s eventual nickname all the more jarring.

The man usually credited with the vision was Charles Steinbrecker, an Austrian immigrant. Here is where the standard account tangles itself. Steinbrecker is reported to have died in 1892, eight years before the hotel opened, with the project carried forward by his sons and by local Masons. Whether the founding date, the death date, or both have drifted over a century of retelling is not something the popular accounts resolve. It is worth knowing, because the same casual approach to dates and details runs through much of what is written about this building.

Prohibition Rumors and the Capone Claim

By the Prohibition years the hotel’s reputation had shifted. Stories circulated of mobster meetings and unsavory business conducted behind its stone walls, and the most persistent of those stories places Al Capone here as a regular, using the hotel’s isolation as a staging point for illegal liquor moving through the region. The argument offered in favor is geographic: the site sits conveniently between other locations associated with Capone’s network.

Treat it as folklore unless better evidence turns up. Capone is attached to an extraordinary number of rural hotels, roadhouses and tunnels across the upper Midwest, and the claim is almost never accompanied by documentation. It is a good story, it is told locally with conviction, and it is not the same thing as a record.

The 1985 Fire and the Short-Lived Second Life

A fire in 1985 gutted much of the structure and came close to finishing it off entirely. The cause has never been settled in the popular accounts, which is part of why the hotel’s darker reputation hardened after it. Bob Lyman took on the building in 1986 and restored it, but the restoration did not reverse the hotel’s fortunes so much as give the legend a working stage. The haunted reputation grew through the following decades rather than fading, fed by investigators, trespassers and a steady supply of secondhand stories.

More recent windstorm damage closed the building again. What happens to it next is genuinely unclear: it may be stabilized, or it may be left to the weather.

What People Report Inside Hotel Hell

None of what follows is verified. These are the experiences reported by visitors, investigators and people who have worked on the building, and they are remarkably consistent in which parts of the hotel they involve.

• Footsteps and voices in empty rooms: unseen steps in the corridors, whispers that cannot be traced to a source, and what witnesses describe as distant screaming.
• The smell: a sudden stench of sewer gas, reported most often in the bathrooms, arriving and leaving without an obvious cause.
• The basement: the single most consistently described location. Visitors report a heavy, pressing atmosphere, a sense of dread, and the feeling of being watched.
• Apparitions and marks: figures that appear and vanish within seconds, and unexplained stains on the walls that witnesses interpret as blood.
• Physical contact and movement: objects shifting on their own, and the sensation of cold hands touching people who can see no one near them.
• Fire: the strangest claim attached to the site, that books have ignited spontaneously inside the building.

Some of this has ordinary candidates. A damp, decaying stone basement in a building with failed plumbing will produce bad air, temperature swings and sounds that carry oddly. A ruin with a nickname like Hotel Hell also primes everyone who walks in. That does not make the reports dishonest, and the volume of them over decades is the reason the hotel keeps appearing on Wisconsin’s haunted lists.

Visiting the Maribel Caves Hotel

You cannot go inside. The hotel is closed following windstorm damage, the structure is unsound, and the property is not open to casual visitors. People do trespass here, regularly, and that is the single reason most of the modern stories exist. It is also illegal and, given the state of a fire-damaged building with a century-old basement, dangerous.

What you can reasonably do is view the exterior from the public road and spend your time on the surrounding Maribel Caves area instead, where the springs that justified the hotel’s existence are the actual attraction. If you want inside access, wait for an organized event with permission from the owner rather than inventing your own. The building has survived fire and storm. It will not survive many more people falling through its floors.

See Hotel Hell for Yourself

Sources

• Discography of Eagles
• Why Hotel California marked a watershed for rock
• Hotel California
• Don Felder Reveals the Roots of "Hotel California" and Shows You How to Play It
• 500 Greatest Songs of All Time
• Wikipedia: Hotel California

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