The Millionaires’ Staircase: Inside Virginia City’s Washoe Club

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 12, 2026 · How we verify

Halfway down C Street in Virginia City, behind a saloon front that still does business every day, the Washoe Club keeps three floors of Comstock-era rooms that draw as many ghost hunters as history buffs. It is one of the most talked-about haunted buildings in Nevada, and unlike many places with that reputation, it makes no secret of the fact: the same address operates as a museum, a bar, and a venue for overnight paranormal investigations.

Getting Your Bearings on C Street

• What it is: part museum, part saloon, inside Virginia City’s historic district
• Built: 1875, during the Comstock Lode silver boom
• Hours: open daily, typically 11 a.m. to midnight, with museum tours during the day and the bar running into the evening
• Contact: thewashoeclubmuseum.com, (775) 847-4467
• Access: ground floor bar open to walk-ins, upper floors by guided tour only

The Millionaires’ Club of the Comstock Lode

Gold turned up in the vicinity of Virginia City in 1850, but it was the discovery of silver in 1859 at the Comstock Lode that set off the rush and filled the hills above the Truckee Meadows with people chasing a fortune. For decades afterward, political and business power in Nevada sat not in Reno or Carson City but in the mining towns, and Virginia City was the first among them.

The Washoe Club was built in 1875 to serve the men at the top of that economy. Wealthy mine owners, politicians, and socialites belonged to what was known as the Millionaires’ Club, and the building was fitted out accordingly: lavish architecture, an opulent bar, and private rooms where business could be conducted away from the street. It was a members’ clubhouse in a town where membership meant proximity to silver money.

That kind of prosperity does not outlast the ore. As Comstock fortunes rose and fell, the club declined with them, and by the early twentieth century the building had shuttered and reopened more than once. What survives today is a structure that has been repurposed repeatedly, which is part of why its upper floors feel less restored than simply left alone. The current operation leans into both halves of its identity, selling drinks downstairs and history upstairs.

The Freestanding Spiral Staircase

The single most photographed feature of the building is the spiral staircase, known as the Millionaires’ Staircase, which once carried club members to the upper floors. It is freestanding, with no central support, and it is the spot visitors most often name when they describe something unusual. Reports cluster there: apparitions glimpsed on or beside the steps, and sudden cold spots at the base. None of this is verified, and a freestanding stair in an unheated nineteenth-century building has obvious mundane explanations for a temperature drop. It is worth noting all the same that people keep singling out the same twenty feet of the place.

The Lady in Blue and Other Reported Residents

The best known of the Washoe Club’s alleged spirits is the Lady in Blue, said to be a woman who died on the property. Accounts place her on the third floor, seen wandering, and her story circulates as tradition rather than documented fact. No verified record is offered by the club or by local tourism material to confirm who she was, so treat her as the building’s resident legend.

Other reported phenomena are more diffuse. Guests describe hearing children laughing in rooms where no children are present. Footsteps, whispers, and knocking come up repeatedly on after-hours tours, when the building is quiet and the group is small. Several paranormal groups working in the building say they have captured shadowy figures moving through the hallways, though photographic and video evidence of that kind is notoriously easy to produce by accident in a dark, uneven space.

What can be said plainly is that the reports are consistent in their locations and in their character, and that they have been consistent enough to attract television crews.

Television and the “Most Haunted Bar in America” Label

The Washoe Club has appeared on Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters, and it has been billed as the most haunted bar in America. That phrase is marketing rather than measurement, and it should be read as such, but the exposure has done what exposure does. A steady share of the building’s visitors now arrive already knowing the stories, which is worth keeping in mind when you are evaluating what anyone tells you they experienced upstairs.

Visiting the Washoe Club

The ground floor bar is open daily and requires nothing more than walking in. Guided tours are how you reach the historic upper levels, which is where nearly all of the reported activity is concentrated, and daytime museum tours cover the building’s Comstock history alongside the ghost stories. For anyone wanting serious time in the building, the club runs overnight lockdown investigations aimed at paranormal groups and enthusiasts.

Come for the mining history and you will still get your money’s worth: this is one of the few surviving interiors that shows what silver money bought in Virginia City in 1875. Come for the hauntings and you will be walking the same staircase everyone else names. Either way, the upper floors are old, dim, and uneven. Stick with your guide, do not wander into areas that are not part of the tour, and treat the building with the care an 1875 structure deserves.

Sources

• ArcGIS REST Services Directory (Census (official))
• City of Reno: Home (Reno (official))
• Census – Geography Profile: Reno city, Nevada (Census (official))
• QuickFacts, Reno city, Nevada (US Census Bureau)
• College Navigator – University of Nevada Reno (Ed (official))
• Wikipedia: Reno, Nevada

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