Jerome Grand Hotel

By the early twentieth century Jerome was a booming copper camp, and the United Verde Copper Company built the hospital of 1926 to replace an older one threatened by the ground shifting under years of mining. It was designed to be as safe as money could make it, with thick fireproof concrete walls, and it carried the most modern medical equipment of its day up the mountain to serve the town.

For nearly a quarter century it treated miners hurt in the shafts, mothers, and townsfolk, until the copper played out and the population that had once numbered in the thousands drained away to a few hundred. The hospital closed, the doors were locked, and the great concrete building stood silent above a town that had turned into one of the largest ghost towns in the West before its artists and shopkeepers slowly brought it back.

Jerome clings to the flank of Cleopatra Hill in tiers, its streets switchbacking so steeply that one building's roof can sit level with another's front door. In its heyday it was a raucous mining town with a reputation to match, and after the mines closed it reinvented itself as an artists' colony, filling the old storefronts with galleries, studios, wineries, and antique shops.

From the hotel you can walk down into all of it, past century-old buildings that have survived fires and landslides. The town's mining past is never far away, with the great open scar of the old workings and the museums that tell the story of the copper that built this place and the fortunes it made and lost.

Because the hotel sits so high, its windows and balconies look out over one of the widest views in central Arizona. The Verde Valley opens below, patched green along the river and tan across the desert flats, with the towns of Cottonwood and Clarkdale small in the distance.

Beyond the valley the land rises again toward the red rocks near Sedona and the pine-topped bulk of the Mogollon Rim and the San Francisco Peaks far to the north. Sunset here turns the whole basin gold and then violet, and after dark the valley lights scatter below while the sky above the mountain stays deep and full of stars.

Any building that served for decades as a hospital gathers stories, and the Jerome Grand has more than most. Guests and staff have long traded accounts of footsteps in empty halls, of the old elevator moving on its own, of lights and voices in rooms that were once wards. The hotel leans into that reputation rather than hiding it, and Jerome as a whole has embraced its billing as one of the most haunted towns in the country.

Whether or not you go looking for the supernatural, the pull of the past is real here. To stay in the building is to sleep inside a piece of the copper boom, in rooms where the town was born and mended and where its whole rise and near-death played out. The quiet of the halls at night, high above a valley that once roared with industry, is its own kind of memorable.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.