The Lady in Red at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver

In the old classic Fairmont Hotel Vancouver a certain Lady in Red is said to haunt the upper floors of the place she used to go ballroom dancing in the 1940s. Still to this day guests report seeing her in the lobby as well as their rooms and she has even been seen passing through walls and locked doors.

The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver is located in downtown Vancouver, and this haunted hotel is not to be mixed up with the haunted hotel in Ottawa bearing the same name. The place on West Georgia Street opened in May 1939 after being delayed for many years because of the Great Depression.

Once a Japanese family called up the front desk and asked if they had double booked the room. When they had entered their room on the 14th floor. The front desk said they had not, probably well knowing that the woman dressed in a red dress was not a living guest at the hotel.

The hotel is known as the Castle in the City because of the modern fairy tale-like tower and is also the home of the Lady in Red said to haunt the hotel.

The Legend of the Lady in Red

The story of the ghost of The Lady in Red is that a woman dressed in a long and fancy red dress is supposedly haunting the 14th floor of the hotel, although she has also been seen in other places of the hotel.

Today, most of the staff at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver know of her and in the hotel bar they even have named a drink after her, at least around Halloween season.

The Dancing Socialite with a Tragic Death

In life she went by the name Jennie Pearl Cox and she stayed at the hotel many times with her husband Harold according to the stories. She was a Vancouver socialite that attended hotel events and dances in the 1940s when the hotel was new and fresh.

Her stay at the hotel ended abruptly though when she was 25 years old and she got into a car accident in 1944 at the corner of Burrard and Georgia and died, but never really checked out from her favorite hotel.

The Haunted Hotel

Soon after her death the ghost of the Lady in Red started appearing in the lobby in the stairway and dancing in the ballrooms, especially on the 14th floor as many guests learned of the hard way according to the stories.

She can be seen walking through walls and locked doors as well and has become a well known ghost in residence at the hotel.

Not everyone is as used to seeing her as the senior staff at the hotel and when the tv-series X-Files were filming in Vancouver, one of the crew even claimed to have seen the ghost of a woman wearing a red dress.

The Ghost Captured on Camera

A couple of years ago, the legend got another boost when one of the upper floors’ windows got covered in red, but it was perhaps not the most convincing evidence, even if it made the news.

But was she even real like Jennie Cox? Or was she as real as the red dress that turned out to just be a tarp covering the window?

Some say she is just a figment of the hotel’s imagination, imagined to help promote the hotel and it is just an urban myth as there are no grave stones, birth certificate or even pictures from this socialite to claim she actually existed.