Twenty Dead in 1978: The Haunted Coates House Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 22, 2026 · How we verify

Six stories of brick and stone still hold the corner of 10th Street and Broadway in Kansas City, Missouri, and the reputation of the haunted Coates House Hotel rests almost entirely on one morning in January 1978, when twenty people died in the worst fire the city has ever recorded. The building is no longer a hotel. It is a former hotel at 1005 Broadway, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, restored after the fire and now an apartment building. The ghost stories attached to it are thinly documented. The disaster behind them is not.

A Foundation Used as a Cavalry Barracks

The site’s first building was designed in 1857 by John Johnson, an English architect who later became the third mayor of Kansas City, as part of the development of former farmland owned by Kersey Coates. That farmland became the neighborhood of Quality Hill, which at the time sat ten blocks south of downtown. The hotel was unfinished when the Civil War broke out, and Union forces put the foundations to work as a cavalry barracks, part of Camp Union.

Construction resumed after the war. Called the Broadway Hotel, it was owned and built in the late 1860s by anti-slavery Colonel Shalor Winchell Eldridge, a Massachusetts man who had been appointed U.S. Army Paymaster by President Lincoln, and it was then managed by his brother Thomas Bailey Eldridge. Eldridge was already known for another property, the Eldridge House, which he rebuilt three times in defiance of a local pro-slavery judge and sheriff who fired on it and then set it ablaze.

The Broadway was a five-story brick building with a mansard roof, and it did not prosper. In 1870 Coates acquired it and it was renamed the Coates House. He had already built an opera house diagonally across 10th Street in the 1860s, and the two buildings together catalyzed the development of a wealthy neighborhood. Beginning in 1886 Coates added a new wing at the south end; President Grover Cleveland and his wife Frances stayed there in October 1887.

Van Brunt and Howe’s “Hotel of the Presidents”

Coates had died in April 1887. Beginning in 1888 his widow and family demolished the original hotel and rebuilt on the same site as the New Coates House Hotel, enlarging the earlier addition as they went. President Benjamin Harrison stayed in that addition in 1890, before the rebuilding was finished. The new hotel opened on January 10, 1891.

Designed by Van Brunt and Howe, the replacement ran to six stories of brick with stone ornamentation, with balconies across both main facades. It originally carried a crenellated parapet inscribed with “Coates House” and turrets or belvederes at the corners; those are gone now, along with the chimneys. The building once enclosed a central courtyard, but the four-story east side, which held laundry, storage and employee rooms, was later mostly demolished, leaving the U shape visible today.

Inside, guests found a marble main staircase, a barber shop, a florist’s, a bonnet shop and Victorian Turkish baths. The register in those decades included Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the actor Edwin Booth, William Jennings Bryan and Oscar Wilde. The nickname stuck: the hotel of the presidents.

January 28, 1978: The Deadliest Fire in Kansas City

Prestige does not last forever. By the late 1970s the building was in disrepair and occupied primarily by transients and the elderly, largely as single-room occupancy housing. On January 28, 1978, a fire started at about 4 am in a room in the south wing and burned the hotel out.

There were roughly 140 residents in the building. More than 100 people were left homeless, and 20 were killed, most of them by jumping from upper floors to escape the flames. As of 2014 it remained the deadliest fire in Kansas City’s history.

The ruin was bought by the Historic Kansas City Foundation in July 1979. In 1984 the St Louis developer McCormack Baron Salazar acquired it and restored it as middle and high income housing, one of several Quality Hill projects the company has taken on. The exterior renovation was completed in 1987, and in 2009 the plaque commemorating Kersey Coates was returned to the building.

What the Record Actually Says About Ghosts Here

This is where a careful reader should slow down. The documented history of the site is unusually well recorded: the architects, the presidents, the fire, the restoration. The paranormal side is not. The available record amounts to the statement that there are reports that the building is haunted, with no named witnesses, no described apparition, no specific floor or room attached to it.

That absence is worth stating plainly rather than filling in. A building where twenty people died violently attracts stories the way a magnet attracts filings, and the 1978 fire supplies all the narrative pressure anyone needs. Anything more particular that circulates about the Coates House, figures at windows, sounds in the halls, should be treated as unsourced local lore until someone produces a witness willing to be named.

Seeing 1005 Broadway Without Trespassing

There is no tour and no front desk. The Coates House is private residential property, so the honest advice is to look at it from the sidewalk. The Broadway and 10th Street facades are the point anyway: the balconies, the stone courses on the upper floors, the white-painted stone at street level, and the Kersey Coates plaque reinstalled in 2009. Note the missing parapet and corner turrets, and the blunt eastern edge where the service wing was taken down, and you can read most of the building’s history from the curb. Residents live behind those windows. Treat the place accordingly.

Address: 1005 Broadway, Kansas City, Missouri

Sources

• NPGallery Asset Detail (National Park Service)
• historickansascity.org
• Loc (official)
• Home | Kansas City Public Library
• 1978 fire still deadliest in city history – Northeast News
• Wikipedia: Coates House Hotel

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