Baseball’s Most Haunted Hotel: The Pfister’s Century of Terror

MLB Players Refuse to Sleep at This Haunted Milwaukee Hotel

Professional athletes would rather sleep in an Airbnb than risk another night in baseball’s most infamous haunted hotel.

Listen to “Baseball’s Most Haunted Hotel: The Pfister’s Century of Terror” on Spreaker.

There’s a luxury hotel in downtown Milwaukee where visiting baseball players check in with their luggage and sometimes leave with stories that keep them awake for weeks afterward. The kind of stories that make grown men who face 100-mph fastballs refuse to turn off the lights.

The Grand Hotel That Won’t Let Go

Charles Pfister opened his father’s dream hotel in 1893, a Romanesque Revival structure designed by architect Henry C. Koch that cost over a million dollars to build. The hotel featured groundbreaking amenities for its time, including fireproofing, electricity throughout, and individual thermostat controls in every guest room. Charles operated the hotel from opening day until his death, doing everything from greeting guests to personally hiring employees.

In April 1927, Charles suffered a paralytic stroke at his lake retreat called Camp Rest on Lake Five in Washington County, Wisconsin. Seven months later, he suffered a second stroke at the same location and died on November 12, 1927. Before his death, he sold the hotel to longtime employee Ray Smith, whom Pfister had mentored since Smith was a child.

Contrary to popular belief, Pfister did not die at the hotel. He passed away from pneumonia at his retreat. There are no official records of any death in Pfister Hotel over its 128 years of history. But that hasn’t stopped guests from reporting his presence wandering the grand staircase.

When Baseball Meets the Paranormal

In 2001, Adrian Beltre, then with the Los Angeles Dodgers, described several eerie happenings during his stay. First, he heard knocking in the hallway and on his door, but found no one there upon investigation. Later, he witnessed the air conditioning and TV repeatedly switch themselves off. When he went to bed, pounding noises from behind his headboard startled him awake again and again. Beltre took a bat to bed with him for protection and only slept two hours over his three-night stay.

In June 2008, Carlos Gomez, then of the Minnesota Twins, experienced something strange before a day game. Disembodied voices caused him to peek out from the shower. He found no one in his room but saw his iPod, which he had left on a table across the room, switch itself on. Loud static broke the quiet and the iPod began vibrating wildly, shimmying toward the edge of the table. Gomez ran over to catch it before it fell. Once he grabbed it, it switched to music and then back to static again. He turned it off and placed it back on the table, only to see the iPod repeat the same behavior.

In 2013, Bryce Harper described an incident where he laid a pair of jeans and a shirt on the table at the foot of his bed before going to sleep. When he woke up in the morning, the clothes were on the floor and the table was on the opposite side of the room against the wall. Harper thought there might be someone in his room.

Pablo Sandoval recalled taking a shower and putting his iPod next to a speaker. When he came out, it was playing music, and he had no idea why. Sandoval and teammate Edgar Renteria refused to stay with the rest of the team at the Pfister in 2010.

Giancarlo Stanton called the Pfister “creepy as s***” and compared it to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride. Michael Young declared his feelings about the place emphatically. He was lying in bed after a night game when he heard footsteps stomping around inside his locked room. Young made his position clear: he’s not someone who spreads ghost stories, so if he’s telling this story, it happened.

Brandon Phillips of the Cincinnati Reds came into his room and sat on the bed when the radio turned on by itself. He turned it off and got in the shower. When he was done, it had turned back on.

In May 2009, the Palm Beach Post revealed that whenever the Florida Marlins stayed at the Pfister, at least four players demanded to double up and share rooms for fear of the ghost.

The Player Who Welcomed the Spirits

Angels first baseman Ji-Man Choi felt a ghost on a Sunday night in May 2016 during his first trip to Milwaukee with the team. When asked how he slept, he shook his head and said it was not good.

Choi revealed he had seen ghosts plenty of times. The first time was shortly after back surgery in 2011. He felt a spirit on his chest that awoke him, and then felt the bed slump. He was scared at first and didn’t want to open his eyes, but dealt with it many more times after that.

Another time, Choi claimed to have been laying on his side when he felt a spirit crawling up behind him, then felt a hug and heard murmuring in his ear. Other South Korean Minor League players, the only ones he could communicate with at the time, claimed to have felt the same thing.

Choi always had a hard time sleeping in hotel beds. When he was comfortable, it meant there was a ghost, he said. That was the case at the Pfister. When asked what he thought about spending two more nights at the hotel where he felt that spirit, Choi burst into laughter and joked that he hoped it was a girl, then said he had dealt with it so many times that he didn’t care anymore.

Choi said he felt comfortable when ghosts were present. In 2018, he signed with the Brewers, solving his Pfister problem since the home team doesn’t stay at the hotel.

Recent Encounters

In 2018, St. Louis Cardinals players Carlos Martinez and Marcell Ozuna both claimed to have seen a ghost. Martinez posted an Instagram video in Spanish describing the experience, saying they saw ghosts and were all staying together in one room because if the ghost showed again, they were going to fight together.

In June 2023, Oakland Athletics outfielder Brent Rooker reported that his television would automatically turn on and off and change channels. He would have it on the Golf Channel while working on his laptop, look back up, and find it on QVC or some other channel that definitely wasn’t the Golf Channel. He fell asleep with it on one night and woke up at 4 a.m. to find it off, which he figured was a sleep timer. He woke up again at 7:30 or 8 and it was back on, on a different channel than he had fallen asleep watching. Rooker tweeted that he was more than happy to let the ghosts choose the channel as long as they were cool otherwise.

The Dodgers Draw the Line

In 2023, Los Angeles Dodgers star Mookie Betts declined a room at the hotel for a regular-season series and has on every road trip to Milwaukee since then. He opted instead to rent an Airbnb “just in case” the Pfister is actually haunted. Betts stayed at the Pfister previously and claimed he couldn’t sleep there because every noise made him wonder if it was something. Betts said he doesn’t believe in ghosts but doesn’t want to find out that he’s wrong.

During the 2025 National League Championship Series against the Milwaukee Brewers, Dodgers right fielder Teoscar Hernández addressed his alternative accommodations at a news conference on Tuesday, October 14, 2025. Hernández said he doesn’t believe in ghosts and has stayed at the Pfister before without seeing or hearing anything. But his wife was on this trip, and she said she didn’t want to stay there, so they had to find another hotel.

Hernández said he had been hearing from other players and other wives that something was happening during those couple of nights. His wife told him that in some rooms, the lights go off and on. The doors make noises. Footsteps. Things he couldn’t quite explain.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was not convinced, saying those stories went away when he was about 10 years old.

The Legend Continues

Staff and guests of the hotel claim that the second floor is completely haunted. They claim to have seen Charles Pfister himself haunting the grand staircase up to the second floor. People believe that Charles and his father Guido are always there to look over their hotel and to make sure it’s how they intended it to be, a “people’s place” where all could gather under one roof.

Local legend suggests that Charles’ ghost haunts visiting teams playing against the Brewers to shake them up before facing off against Milwaukee’s beloved home team.

There is an alternative theory about who haunts the Pfister. Charles Milwaukee Sivyer, a city native born in 1836, was interviewed in the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel shortly after the Pfister opened. A local historian and storyteller, Sivyer said he had previously lived in a cabin on the site where the hotel was built, right next to private burial grounds that had been there his entire life.

In 2018, Travel Channel ranked the Pfister Hotel as the creepiest place in Wisconsin. In the same year, Historic Hotels of America ranked the hotel 11th on the list for The Top 25 Most Haunted Historic Hotels.

In 2016, former MLB player Jonny Gomes became fascinated with the paranormal after he saw a ghost in his bedroom as a child and got to live out a dream by investigating the Pfister.

Shane Victorino of the Red Sox dismissed the stories, saying he didn’t believe in that stuff and that there was nothing wrong with the hotel. Some players remain skeptics. But enough have come forward with their experiences that the Pfister has earned its reputation as baseball’s most haunted hotel.

The Pfister still operates as a luxury destination in downtown Milwaukee. Teams still book rooms there for road trips. And every season, new players check in with their equipment bags, unaware that they might be sharing their rooms with something that’s been a guest far longer than any of them.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.