Parkersburg’s Blennerhassett Hotel and the Ghost Called Helen

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated July 27, 2026 · How we verify

The Blennerhassett Hotel has been standing at the corner of a Parkersburg street since 1889, back when West Virginia oil and gas money was pouring into Wood County faster than the town could spend it. It is a red brick Queen Anne pile with a four story guest block, a central staircase and a name borrowed from one of the strangest episodes in early American history. It is also, according to a story repeated by staff and guests for decades, the home of a woman named Helen who never quite checked out.

The Blennerhassett at a Glance

• Opened: 1889, in the Queen Anne style
• Built by: William Chancellor, a prominent Parkersburg businessman
• Original size: roughly 50 guest rooms on four guest floors, with the kitchen on the fifth
• Listed on the National Register of Historic Places: 1982
• Fully restored: 1986
• Status: operating hotel, open to overnight guests

William Chancellor’s Showplace, Not a Blennerhassett House

One correction is worth making up front, because it circulates widely. The hotel was not built by a family called Blennerhassett. It was designed and built by William Chancellor, a Parkersburg businessman who saw what the oil and natural gas boom was doing to his town and decided it needed somewhere for out of state money to sleep. In the late 1800s the industry drew businessmen and visitors from across the country, and Parkersburg turned from a river town into a busy small city almost overnight. Chancellor’s hotel opened in 1889 and immediately became a showplace for what would later be called the Gaslight Era.

The original layout says a lot about 1889 expectations of luxury. Around 50 guest rooms were arranged around a central staircase. Bathrooms were shared, one set to a floor, across all four guest floors. The kitchen sat at the top of the building on the fifth floor. The room that now serves as the hotel’s game room was not part of the hotel at all: it housed the First National Bank of Parkersburg, and it had the considerable novelty of electricity.

The hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. The hotel’s own website has described the property as a national historic landmark, which is almost certainly a slip of terminology, since only around three percent of Register listings carry that separate designation. A full restoration followed in 1986, and that is essentially the building visitors walk into now.

Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett and the Burr Affair

The name came from an island in the Ohio River just downstream. Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett settled there in 1798 and built a Palladian mansion at the centre of a European style estate that locals openly envied. What made them nationally famous was not the architecture. It was their decision to let former Vice President Aaron Burr use the island as the base of operations for his controversial military expedition.

Some labelled the Blennerhassetts conspirators. When militia moved onto the island, the couple fled down the Ohio River. The place is now known as Blennerhassett Island. Naming a grand new hotel after a family who left the region under a cloud of treason allegations was a bold piece of civic branding, and it stuck.

Helen, the Hotel’s Best Known Ghost Story

The ghost most often attached to the Blennerhassett is a woman remembered as Helen, said to have been a guest in the early 1900s who died suddenly and in circumstances the story leaves deliberately vague. This is legend rather than record. No documented account of her death has been produced alongside the story, and the details shift depending on who is telling it. What can be said is that the story has been repeated at the hotel long enough to become part of how the building presents itself.

What guests describe tends to be modest rather than cinematic: the impression of a woman’s figure in a corridor or a guest room, footsteps and knocking with no obvious source, doors and fittings behaving oddly, and voices in parts of the building that should be empty. These are reported experiences, offered here as what people say happens rather than as anything established. A building of this age, with a stairwell running up its spine and a hundred and thirty years of settling timber, produces a good deal of noise on its own.

The hotel is also frequently credited locally as a filming location, most often for the 1975 picture Capone and for period scenes associated with the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Those credits are widely repeated in Parkersburg but are not part of the hotel’s documented historical record, so treat them as local claim rather than confirmed fact.

Staying at the Blennerhassett in Parkersburg

This is the easiest kind of haunted location to visit, because it is a functioning hotel that would very much like your business. You can book a room, eat in the restaurant, drink in the bar and walk the public spaces without asking anyone’s permission. There is no separate ghost attraction and no need for one.

Go for the building first. The 1986 restoration kept the Queen Anne detailing and the central stair, and the ground floor rooms carry the weight of the oil boom that paid for them. If you want the Helen story, ask at the front desk rather than hunting for her: staff at hotels like this one usually have their own versions, and those firsthand accounts are more interesting than anything written down. Be a guest, not an investigator, and expect nothing. The history is guaranteed. The rest is what people say.

See Blennerhassett Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• National Park Service
• theblennerhassett.com
• geohack.toolforge.org
• Wikipedia: Blennerhassett Hotel

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