Haunted Baker Hotel: Mineral Wells’ 14-Story Spa Ruin

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated July 29, 2026 · How we verify

Fourteen stories of Spanish Colonial Revival brick standing empty for nearly half a century will attract stories, and the haunted Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas has attracted more than most. Ghost hunting television crews have filmed inside it, a country album carries its name, and local reputation has done the rest. What the documented record actually contains is a remarkable business history: a boom town’s mineral water, a Depression era spa palace, an army camp, a slow collapse, and a restoration that has been delayed again and again.

Quick orientation: the hotel sits in downtown Mineral Wells in Palo Pinto County. It opened on November 9, 1929, closed for the final time in 1972, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It is currently a construction site rather than a working hotel, with reopening projected for 2028.

$150,000 Raised Because Outsiders Were Profiting From the Water

The project began in 1922, when citizens of Mineral Wells, worried that noncitizens were profiting from the growing fame of the town’s mineral water, raised $150,000 to build a large hotel owned by local shareholders. They brought in the Texas hotel magnate Theodore Brasher Baker, whose name was already attached to the Baker Hotel in Dallas and the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth.

Architect Wyatt C. Hedrick modelled the design on the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a property known for its water and baths. Construction began in 1926 and then stopped: Baker had visited a hotel in California with a swimming pool and decided his new hotel needed one at the front. The Olympic sized pool, to be filled with the curing mineral waters, was the first swimming pool built at a hotel in the state of Texas, and it was dropped onto an already completed basement that served as a work area and a changing room for guests.

Palo Pinto County historian John Winters described the finished building as a “Spanish Colonial Revival, Commercial Highrise.” It rose 14 stories over the town and held 450 guest rooms, two ballrooms, an in-house beauty shop, a bowling alley, a gymnasium and the outdoor pool. The final cost was $1.2 million, and it was the tallest building in the city when it was completed.

Ice Water in All 450 Rooms, and Lights Wired to the Door Locks

The Baker opened to the public on November 9, 1929, with a grand opening gala two weeks later on November 22. Guests found an advanced hydraulic system circulating ice water to all 450 rooms, lighting and fans controlled by the door locks so that they switched off and on as a guest came and went, and a valet compartment where laundry could be left for staff to collect without anyone entering the room.

It opened mere days after the 1929 stock market crash and still thrived through the 1930s, carried by the town’s reputation as a top tier health spa destination. The guest list included Glenn Miller, Lawrence Welk, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Roy Rogers, the future president Lyndon B. Johnson and The Three Stooges. Local historians have also passed along the claim that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow spent a night or two here, which the record treats as a rumour rather than a fact.

The money behind the building was less solid than the building itself. T. B. Baker ran into financial trouble in the early 1930s and declared bankruptcy in 1934, handing control to his nephew Earl Baker, who had managed the hotel. By the end of the decade the spa trade was fading: advances in modern medication and the arrival of antibiotics such as penicillin led local doctors to put their confidence in medicine rather than therapeutic water.

Camp Wolters Filled the Rooms the Spa Trade Had Emptied

What rescued the Baker was the Army. Camp Wolters, later Fort Wolters, opened nearby in October 1940, and during World War II the transient and permanent population of Mineral Wells hovered near 30,000, many of them lodging at the hotel. Air conditioning was installed throughout the building, turning the Baker into a convention destination with a meeting capacity of 2,500, a startling figure for a town of roughly 6,000 residents when the hotel opened.

Camp Wolters shut down in 1946 and business fell with it. A smaller revival came in 1951 when the base reopened as Fort Wolters, a helicopter training centre. The hotel hosted the Texas Republican Party conventions of 1952 and 1955 and the Texas Democratic Party convention of 1954, but the trend was downward. Earl Baker said he would close the hotel after his seventieth birthday, and he did: the doors were shuttered on April 30, 1963, ending 34 years of service.

Earl Baker on the Floor of the Baker Suite

A group of local investors leased the building from the Baker family and reopened it in 1965. That revival was brief and was marred by the death of Earl Baker on December 3, 1967. He suffered a massive heart attack at the hotel and was found unconscious on the floor of the Baker Suite. In 1972 the Baker closed for good and stood abandoned until June 2019, when a restoration was finally announced.

That death, in that room, is the one documented tragedy in the building’s history, and it is worth naming plainly because so much of the hotel’s ghost lore circulates without any equivalent anchor.

What the Record Says About Ghosts at the Baker

The Baker’s paranormal reputation is largely a media reputation. It appeared on the July 21, 2010 episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories, built around actor Eric Balfour’s alleged experiences in the building, again on the December 7, 2012 episode of Ghost Adventures, and once more on the September 10, 2016 episode of The Haunting of… Eric Balfour. In November 2023 the hotel featured in a segment of Mysteries of the Abandoned covering its history and its long vacancy. Ghost hunting events are held occasionally inside the hotel, and a 2025 novel by Angela Wilson, who lived at the Baker as a child before it closed, uses a fictional version of the place and references those events.

What the record does not contain is a catalogue of specific, verifiable phenomena. There is no documented roster of named spirits, no confirmed deaths beyond Earl Baker’s, and no evidence that any of the televised experiences amounted to more than personal accounts. Anyone weighing the stories should keep the sequence in mind: the building sat abandoned from 1972 until 2019, which is nearly five decades for a landmark ruin to accumulate folklore before the cameras ever arrived.

A Restoration That Keeps Slipping: 2019 to 2028

In May 2014 nearly 96 percent of Mineral Wells voters approved reallocating one eighth of the city sales tax toward the renovation, providing up to $4 million of a $65 million project. The money sat unused until June 20, 2019, when Dallas Fort Worth investor Laird Fairchild and partners were announced as buyers with the last of the funding secured. Plans called for enlarging the rooms and reducing the count from 450 to 165, with the second floor kept as a luxury mineral spa.

Work began in late 2019, was interrupted in March 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic, and did not fully resume until May 2021 after a 14 month delay. A projected fall 2024 opening slid to mid 2025 in October 2022, then to spring 2026 in September 2023. In July 2024 construction halted again while developers sought a loan of $20 million or $25 million, with sources differing on the figure. In November 2025, after a 16 month delay, it was announced that work would resume and the opening would move to 2028.

Visiting the Baker While the Scaffolding Is Still Up

This is not a hotel you can book a room in yet. The Baker remains an active restoration site, and public access is limited to the occasional organised events held inside, including ghost hunting nights. On May 17, 2026 the hotel hosted its first major event in more than 50 years, A Night for The Baker, a dinner with performances by local musicians that doubled as a progress report on the restoration and on the wider hope of revitalising Mineral Wells.

One other recent note matters for anyone planning a trip. On April 28, 2026 an EF3 tornado struck Mineral Wells and the surrounding area, with wind speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour for most of the storm, causing several injuries and major regional damage. The hotel’s own Instagram account reported that the tornado missed the building but left many people in the area without homes and necessities. Visitors should check what is actually open before travelling, and treat the town, not just the tower, as the reason to come.

Address: Mineral Wells, Texas

See Baker Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• Well, Well, Mineral Wells!
• History of Fort Wolters: From Military Base to Education Center
• A Brief History of the Baker Hotel.
• Inside the Massive Restoration of the Historic Baker Hotel
• Voters Approve Funds To Renovate Historic Hotel – CBS Texas
• Wikipedia: Baker Hotel (Mineral Wells, Texas)

More Haunted Hotels

Hotel GalvezDriskill HotelGrand GalvezJefferson HotelHotel Alex JohnsonThe Occidental Hotel