Room 812: The Lady in White at the Hotel Alex Johnson

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

Eight stories of dark brick rise above Rapid City’s downtown, and for nearly a century the Hotel Alex Johnson has been the tallest thing in it. The hotel opened in 1928, a product of railroad money and the tourist boom that Mount Rushmore was about to bring to western South Dakota. It is still a working hotel, still on the National Register, and still the sort of place where the front desk once kept a notebook for guests who wanted to write down what happened to them upstairs.

A Railroad Man’s Hotel, Begun One Day Before Mount Rushmore

Alex Carlton Johnson was vice president of the Chicago & North Western Railroad, and the hotel that carries his name was his project. Construction began on August 19, 1927. Work on the carving at Mount Rushmore began the following day. The timing was not coincidence so much as commercial instinct: a monument in the Black Hills meant visitors, and visitors would need beds.

The building was designed by the Chicago firm of Oldefest & Williams and was originally to be called Hay Camp, an old nickname for the settlement that became Rapid City. It opened to guests on July 1, 1928, and was formally dedicated on August 11 of that year.

Ownership changed hands more than once. Johnson’s hotel was sold to the Eppley Hotel Company in 1947. Eppley was absorbed by Sheraton in 1956, and for the next twelve years the building traded its founder’s name for a corporate one, operating as the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel. Sheraton sold the property in 1965 but kept running it under a franchise agreement until 1968, when the original name came back. In 1974 the hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing property to the Rapid City Historic Commercial District. Today it is part of Hilton’s Curio Collection and is managed by Liv Hospitality, which announced a roughly seven million dollar restoration in 2016 to overhaul the infrastructure and refurbish the interior.

Tudor Brick, a Teepee Chandelier, and Carved Chiefs

The architecture is the first thing most visitors notice, because it does not resolve into a single style. The exterior is Tudor Revival with vernacular touches, decorative masonry and a flat roof, unusual for a building that reads as half English manor house. Inside, the decorative program is Western and Native American: hand-drawn motifs across the ceilings, wooden sculptures of Native American chiefs, and a chandelier built in the shape of a teepee. Those original features are still in place.

Retellings of the hotel’s founding often describe Johnson as intending the interiors as a tribute to Plains Indian culture and to the Lakota in particular. Whatever the motive, the result was one of the earliest tall buildings in South Dakota and a lobby that has aged into something genuinely unusual rather than merely themed.

Hitchcock, Cary Grant, and the Man Who Never Checked In

Film buffs come for a different reason. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest, the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel is named repeatedly in dialogue as the place where the elusive George Kaplan is supposedly staying. Hitchcock, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint stayed at the hotel themselves while shooting the Mount Rushmore sequences nearby. The hotel has hosted a long list of dignitaries and public figures over the decades, but the Hitchcock connection is the one still visible on screen.

Room 812 and the Lady in White

The best known ghost story attached to the hotel belongs to a single room. The figure guests call the Lady in White is said to haunt room 812, where, according to the accounts passed around the hotel, she died. The most widely repeated version dates the death to the 1970s and describes a young bride whose death was officially ruled a suicide but whom people close to her believed had met with foul play. That version circulates as folklore rather than documented history, and no verified record of the case is offered alongside it. Treat the narrative as legend and the reports of activity in the room as reported experience, not proof of either.

What guests describe in and around 812 includes a window found open again and again after being closed, and a dresser discovered upended with its drawers pulled out. Elsewhere in the building, reports include objects moving on their own, figures glimpsed in mirrors, and disembodied footsteps and voices in corridors and empty rooms. Some guests and staff have also reported seeing a man they take to be Alex Johnson himself.

None of this is unique to old hotels, and an eight-story 1928 building with original windows and a century of settling has plenty of ordinary explanations available. What sets this one apart is the volume of accounts and the fact that the hotel collected them. For years, notebooks at the front desk held guests’ written descriptions of what they had experienced. As of December 2024, the book kept on the desk had been stolen.

The hotel’s reputation reached a wider audience in 2011, when the television series Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here for its seventh season.

Booking a Night at the Hotel Alex Johnson

This is an operating hotel in downtown Rapid City, so access is straightforward: book a room. The lobby is worth walking through even if you are not staying, and the chandelier and carvings are the reason to linger.

For visitors who want the ghost angle directly, the hotel sells a Ghost Adventure Package that places guests in the rooms with the heaviest reputations and supplies an EMF reader. Room 812 is a real, bookable room and demand for it tends to reflect that. Guests staying on other floors should remember that the corridors are shared with people who came for Mount Rushmore and nothing else, and behave accordingly.

See Hotel Alex Johnson for Yourself

Sources

• Uh (official site)
• kotatv.com
• National Park Service
• Wikipedia: Hotel Alex Johnson

Address: 523 6th Street

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