Haunted: Providence, Rhode Island's Biltmore Hotel

The Patriot Ledger newspaper in Quincy, Massachusetts runs a "Haunted New England" column, and I wanted to share this one about Providence, Rhode Island's Biltmore Hotel. It's reputed to be haunted, and even one man who was staying in a room watched his bathroom door slam shut (there was a wall behind the door) and he captured it on video (below). The Hotel has a giant neon sign on top that says “Biltmore.” Around 2019, the hotel purchased and it's name was changed to Graduate Providence... Here's the story and the video!

 Built in the early 1920’s, the hotel was financed by Johan Leisse Weisskopf, a man for whom it is impossible to find any other information except the facts that he was apparently 1. Very wealthy and 2. An open Satanist. Not passively Satanist, but open in the way that he allegedly wanted to use the hotel as a kind of recruiting device, creating hot springs in the basement and building chicken coops on the roof reportedly for a continuous supply of fresh sacrifices. Then, there were the Bacchante Girls, who worked in the Bacchante Dining Room serving as hostesses while wearing little to no clothing. In short, the opulent hotel was a testament to indulgence, and as such, attracted the kinds of characters that tend to gravitate toward such displays.

Quick - what do Satanists and the mob have in common? Turns out quite a bit and the two groups got along swimmingly when the hotel reportedly housed a speakeasy in the basement during Prohibition, bringing with them all sorts of unsavory activities. And while the animal sacrifice thing was definitely creepy, some believe that those sacrifices were actually helping to keep spirits off the property , and it was only after local authorities put a stop to them that the hotel started attracting ghosts like a white shirt attracts cat hair. In the first decade after it opened, it is reported that at least eight murders occurred in the hotel, some possibly committed by local law enforcement or local government officials. That is quite a lot of murder for only 10 years.

VIDEO: Ghost slams door at Biltmore Hotel in Providence: Jack Stevens said he stayed in room 1102 at the famously-haunted Biltmore Hotel in Providence, RI. He documented some freaky experiences
he had while staying in the room. Take a look. Has anyone else observed anything similar?
https://youtu.be/6v1GsAyEhDw

A few decades later, then-Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci helped save the hotel from demolition with historic landmark status, and a few decades after that, Cianci himself would call the hotel home while awaiting trial after his federal indictment. And a little less than a decade after that, the hotel’s new owners hung a portrait of Cianci in every room of the hotel, before very quickly deciding that was actually not a good idea.

Since then, the hotel has been named Rhode Island’s most haunted . Turns out the smallest state actually has some pretty stiff competition in that department, particularly with historic Newport. There’s plenty of reviews on TripAdvisor specifically mentioning haunted happenings, but if you prefer, you can also check out some Youtube videos of questionable quality that purportedly show some paranormal activity.