Hank Williams and the Haunted Redmont Hotel in Birmingham

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

The haunted Redmont Hotel sits in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, a 1925 building that has kept its doors open longer than any other hotel in the state. It trades on two things at once: a genuine claim to being Alabama’s oldest continuously operating hotel, and a set of ghost stories that guests and staff have passed along for decades. The first is a matter of record. The second is a matter of what people say they have seen on the upper floors.

Quick Facts on the Redmont

• Opened: 1925, in the middle of Birmingham’s Roaring Twenties building boom
• Claim to fame: Alabama’s oldest continuously operating hotel
• Original selling points: among the first hotels in the city with air conditioning and an automated elevator system
• Reportedly haunted areas: the ninth floor, the upper guest floors, and one former owner’s suite
• Status: operating hotel, open to paying guests

A Hotel Built for the Birmingham of 1925

The Redmont opened in 1925, when Birmingham was still expanding on the back of iron and steel and wanted a hotel to match. What set it apart at the time was not decoration but plumbing and wiring: it was one of the first hotels in the city to offer air conditioning and an automated elevator system, both of which read as ordinary now and read as extravagance then.

What matters more to the building’s reputation is what happened next, which is very little in the way of interruption. The Redmont has stayed in business, in one form or another, for close to a century. That continuity is the reason it can call itself Alabama’s oldest continuously operational hotel, and it is also the practical reason the ghost stories accumulate. A building that never sits empty never stops collecting employees, night auditors, housekeepers and guests, and each one adds to the file.

Hank Williams and the Ninth Floor

The story that draws the most visitors concerns country music legend Hank Williams, who is said to have spent his last living day at the Redmont in 1952. It is worth being precise about the status of that claim: it circulates as hotel lore rather than as settled biography, and the details of Williams’s final hours have been argued over for decades. Treat it as the hotel’s story, not as a documented fact.

The haunting that grew out of it is reported on the ninth floor. Guests and staff have described seeing a figure they identify as Williams, sometimes alongside the faint sound of a guitar playing somewhere further down the corridor. No recording, photograph or investigation has ever established anything of the sort. What exists is a consistent body of accounts pointing at the same floor, which is the most that can honestly be said.

The Woman in White and Clifford Stiles

Two other figures turn up regularly in accounts from the Redmont. The first is a woman in white, reported on the upper floors and never firmly attached to any named person in the hotel’s history. She is described the way such figures usually are: glimpsed at the end of a hallway, gone by the time anyone looks properly.

The second has a name. Clifford Stiles, a former owner of the hotel, is said to still occupy his old suite. Staff accounts have him moving about the rooms he once ran the building from, which makes him the most domestic of the Redmont’s reported spirits and the one most often invoked when something small goes wrong in that part of the hotel.

What Guests and Staff Report

Beyond the three named figures, the reported phenomena at the Redmont are the quiet, cumulative kind rather than anything dramatic:

• Lights that flicker without an obvious electrical cause
• Sudden cold drafts in corridors and guest rooms
• Doors that close softly on their own
• Faint guitar music associated with the ninth floor
• Apparitions on the upper floors, most often described as a woman in white

None of this is unusual in a hotel of this age, and a century-old building with original bones will produce drafts, noises and settling doors on its own. The Redmont’s reputation rests on the fact that so many people have chosen to interpret those ordinary events as something else, and that the interpretations keep landing on the same floors.

Staying at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham

The Redmont is a working hotel, not a museum or a ticketed attraction, so the way to visit is simply to book a room. It operates as a full-service downtown property with restored period character, guest rooms, dining and a rooftop, and the ghost stories are part of how it presents itself rather than something the staff hide from. Guests curious about the lore should ask at the desk; requests for the ninth floor are common enough that employees are used to fielding them.

Anyone coming purely for the paranormal should set expectations accordingly. Most people who stay at the Redmont experience nothing more unusual than an old building being old. The appeal is the combination: a genuinely historic hotel that has been continuously open since 1925, with a story attached to one of the most famous names in American music, and a handful of quiet reports that nobody has ever managed to explain or disprove.

Sources

• The New Pacific magazine
• Wikipedia: List of hotels in the United States

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