Figueroa Hotel

Rising thirteen stories above South Figueroa Street in the South Park district of Downtown Los Angeles, Hotel Figueroa occupies a building that was never meant to simply house travelers. It was built as a statement—the largest commercial structure in the United States financed, owned, and operated by women at the time of its completion in 1926. Its origins belong to the YWCA of Los Angeles, and its paranormal reputation belongs to nearly a century of human drama that unfolded within walls designed to shelter women at a time when most hotels in America would not admit them without a male escort.

The project was spearheaded by the Los Angeles YWCA under the leadership of Mrs. Chester C. Ashley, who recognized that the growing number of women entering the white-collar workforce needed safe, respectable accommodations while traveling on business. The organization purchased the land at 939 South Figueroa Street and financed the 409-room concrete and steel structure through supporter donations and two mortgage bonds. The architecture firm Stanton, Reed and Hibbard designed the building in a Spanish Colonial Revival style, and construction began in 1925. The hotel was finished ahead of schedule and dedicated on August 14, 1926, with a night of dancing and entertainment attended by more than three hundred guests, including representatives of nearly every women's club in Los Angeles. The interior was appointed with wrought iron finishes, goldenrod satin draperies with black patent leather trim, Spanish tapestries on loan from prominent local women, and public spaces given Spanish names—the lobby was the sala de recepcion, the main corridor the el corredor. Maude Bouldin, a motorcycle-riding, plane-flying feminist, served as the hotel's first managing director, believed to be the first woman in the country to hold such a position at a major hotel.

For its first two years, the hotel served women exclusively, with men granted only limited access. By 1928, the policy was relaxed to include men in order to sustain business. Through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the Figueroa functioned as a hub for political organizations, social clubs, and the creative community of downtown Los Angeles. The hotel held press conferences and rallies against sexism and racism, cultivating a reputation as a progressive gathering place. By the late 1950s and 1960s, as downtown Los Angeles experienced a westward migration of offices and residents, the Figueroa declined into a semi-permanent residential hotel with guests paying by the week. In 1976, Swedish entrepreneur Uno Thimansson purchased the property and converted it into a Moroccan-themed budget hotel, introducing the Tangier Room and Club Fes. For decades the Figueroa operated in this eclectic incarnation, known for its affordability and its distinctive coffin-shaped swimming pool but increasingly criticized for aging infrastructure and the absence of modern amenities. In 2014, a joint venture purchased the hotel for sixty-five million dollars and undertook a three-year restoration that stripped away the Moroccan layers and returned the building to its original Spanish Colonial splendor. The hotel reopened in 2018 with 268 rooms and 63 suites, an art program featuring works exclusively by women, and multiple dining and bar concepts.

The darker chapters of the Figueroa's history provide the framework for its haunting claims. In 1929, radio operator William L. Tallman murdered his girlfriend Virginia Patty in the hotel and was never captured. A separate killing involved a woman named Cecilia Oswald, whose body was discovered in one of the rooms after her partner confessed, claiming he killed her because he loved her. At least one suicide has also been documented on the premises. These violent deaths, layered over decades of dense human occupancy—hundreds of rooms filled night after night with transient guests, long-term residents, and the steady churn of a building that has never stopped operating—have given the Figueroa a paranormal reputation that persists through its various renovations.

Guests over the years have reported televisions and lights turning on in the middle of the night without explanation, air conditioning and heating systems cycling on and off in patterns that suggest deliberate manipulation, and elevator doors opening on empty floors unprompted. Some visitors have described an oppressive or unsettling energy in certain hallways, particularly near the old elevator shafts. The apparition of a former maid who was murdered in the hotel has been reported by multiple sources, and at least one valet parking attendant has acknowledged off the record that staff are aware of the haunting but are discouraged from discussing it with guests. Some visitors have described experiences intense enough to cause them to leave in the middle of the night. Others have noted that the energy in the building, while unmistakable, does not feel uniformly hostile—more restless than aggressive, as though the spirits occupying the Figueroa are as varied in temperament as the living guests who have passed through its doors over the past century.

Today Hotel Figueroa operates as part of the Unbound Collection by Hyatt, fully restored and positioned as a boutique luxury destination steps from Crypto.com Arena, the Los Angeles Convention Center, and the LA Live entertainment complex. The Gran Sala lobby displays a black-and-white photograph of the founding women in their flapper dresses, and a large-scale painting of Maude Bouldin greets visitors near the entrance. The coffin-shaped pool remains. The art on the walls is still by women. And the building itself, approaching its centennial, continues to hold whatever it has accumulated across a hundred years of sheltering the living—and, perhaps, some who no longer are.