The Jay Gould Room at Jefferson’s Excelsior House Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 1, 2026 · How we verify

The Excelsior House Hotel has outlasted almost everything that made it necessary. It opened in a boomtown port, watched that boom evaporate inside a single decade, and is still taking bookings on West Austin Street in Jefferson, a town of 1,875 people in Northeast Texas that once ran steamboats to New Orleans. Along the way it collected a guest register full of famous names and a reputation, repeated by staff and guests for decades, that a couple of its rooms are not entirely empty when no one has checked in.

Quick Facts for the Excelsior House

• Where: Jefferson, the county seat of Marion County, in Northeast Texas.
• Built: the late 1850s, by Captain William Perry, and first known as the Irving House.
• Restored: in the 1960s by the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club, which took on the building when the town’s fortunes were long gone.
• Listed: on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
• Access: a working hotel. You can book a room, including the two most talked about.
• The rooms people ask for: the Jay Gould Room and the Diamond Bessie Room.

The Log Jam That Made Jefferson Rich

To understand why a hotel of this size exists in a small town, you have to understand the Great Red River Raft. North of present Natchitoches, Louisiana, a log jam more than 100 miles long sat in the Red River, and the Caddo people who ceded the land Jefferson was founded on around 1841 said it had always been there. The raft acted as a dam. It raised Caddo Lake and Big Cypress Bayou by several feet, which was just enough to let commercial riverboats reach Jefferson from ports as distant as St. Louis and New Orleans by way of the Mississippi and Red Rivers.

Between 1845 and 1872, Jefferson was one of the most important ports in Texas. Captain Perry built his hotel into the middle of that traffic in the late 1850s, and for a while the Irving House sat in one of the busiest towns in the state.

Then the engineering caught up. In 1873, using newly available nitroglycerin, the Army Corps of Engineers finally cleared the raft that earlier attempts had failed to shift. The water dropped, the riverboats stopped coming, and the population that had stood at over 7,000 at the peak of river traffic fell to a little over 3,000 within a few years. Jefferson never recovered its commercial position, which is precisely why so much of it survives: today almost every commercial building and house on the main arterial road carries a historic marker.

Grant, Wilde, and a Garden Club

The hotel’s long guest list is the reason its name still travels. Ulysses S. Grant, Oscar Wilde, and Lady Bird Johnson are all cited among those who stayed, and the building traded on that pedigree even as the town around it shrank.

Its survival through the twentieth century was not inevitable. The Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club restored the property in the 1960s, and in 1971 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. That sequence matters for anyone weighing up a visit: what you are walking into is a genuinely old East Texas hotel that was rescued by local volunteers, not a reproduction built for tourists.

The Jay Gould Room, and the Legend Behind the Name

Jay Gould, the railroad magnate, is woven into Jefferson’s identity, though the version most often told is closer to folklore than to record. The legend runs that Gould wanted his railroad routed through Jefferson, that the town leaders turned him down because they still had their river traffic, and that Gould snapped that “grass would grow in the streets” without the railroad. He is also credited locally with backing the removal of the Red River Raft and so with the town’s decline as a port. Much of this tale is fiction. What is real is Gould’s railcar, which townspeople obtained and which is displayed as a tourist attraction in downtown Jefferson.

The hotel room bearing his name is the one guests bring up most often. The reported activity there has nothing to do with Gould himself: the room is said to be haunted by the apparitions of a woman and a child. No verified death or incident is attached to those figures in the accounts that circulate, and they should be read as a persistent guest tradition rather than documented history.

Diamond Bessie’s Room

The other room people request is named for Diamond Bessie, who lived from 1854 to 1877 and is remembered in Jefferson as the victim of the town’s most notorious nineteenth century murder. Her name is fixed permanently to local memory, and the hotel room that carries it has attracted its own set of reports: guests describe visions and objects that appear to move without explanation.

It is worth being blunt here. The historical Bessie is a documented person and a documented crime victim. Everything reported in the room named after her is anecdote, gathered from guests over many years, with no evidence tying any of it to her death.

What Actually Gets Reported at the Excelsior House

The pattern of accounts is narrow and consistent, which is a point in its favor as folklore even if it proves nothing. Guests and staff describe:

• The figures of a woman and a child in the Jay Gould Room.
• Visions reported in the Diamond Bessie Room.
• Small objects found moved or displaced with no obvious cause.

That reputation now draws both casual visitors and organized paranormal investigators, and the hotel has become one of the fixtures of any list of haunted Texas lodgings. None of it has been verified, and there is no reason to expect anything to happen on a given night. The reports are what people say they have experienced.

Staying at the Excelsior House

This is a functioning hotel rather than a tour site, so the way to see it is to book a night. Guests who care about the ghost stories tend to ask for the Jay Gould Room or the Diamond Bessie Room specifically, and those two go early, so request them well in advance. Rates, room availability, and any organized ghost-related events change from season to season, so confirm directly with the hotel before you plan a trip around a particular room.

Give yourself time for the town as well. Jefferson is small, walkable, and dense with markers on nearly every building along the main street, and Gould’s railcar sits downtown as a monument to a story that is mostly untrue but never going away. If you come for the hauntings and leave with the history of a river port that died when the log jam went, the trip has still worked.

Sources

• 2019 U.S. Gazetteer Files (Census (official))
• U.S. Census website (US Census Bureau)
• History of Texas From Its Discovery and Settlement
• 2020 Race and Population Totals (Census (official))
• Find a County
• Wikipedia: Jefferson, Texas

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