Usually death is a sad thing where people mourn the deaths of loved ones…but in the hotel world if a celebrity has died in your hotel you can take this as a chance to earn some money. Here are hotels you can visit where celebs have died..just in case you were into that kind of stuff.
Chelsea Hotel, New York
Sid Vicious, bass guitarist of the Sex Pistols, stabbed his 20-year-old girlfriend Nancy Laura Spungen to death in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City on October 12, 1978. Less than a year later, Sid was dead as well, at the age of 21 from a deliberate heroin overdose. The Chelsea has had many other rock n’ roll appearances including featuring in a classic Leonard Cohen song. Dylan Thomas would also have died at the Chelsea Hotel, after his famous ’18 straight whiskeys’ binge, but he was taken to hospital in time to die there, rather than at the hotel.
Ritz-Carlton, Sydney
Michael Hutchence, the lead singer from Australian rock band INXS, hanged himself with a leather belt in Room 524 of Sydney’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel on November 22, 1997. The room cleaner found the body of the 37-year-old hanging behind the door the next morning. Hutchence is remembered for singing INXS classics that became anthems of the late ’80s and ’90s, such as ‘Need You Tonight’, ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Suicide Blonde’ – and for highly publicized relationships with celebrities including Kylie Minogue, Helena Christensen and Paula Yates.
St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
Prohibition or not, there was plenty of alcohol at the party that silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle put on in Room 1220 of the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco. At some point in the proceedings on September 5, 1921, starlet Virginia Rappe suffered a ruptured bladder, which led to her death a day later; a friend subsequently alleged that Fatty had raped her. Fatty really was fat, tipping the scales at around 300kbs; was the starlet’s death the result of his weight when he raped her? Did he rape her at all? Although Arbuckle was tried for murder, he was subsequently acquitted. However, the scandal wrecked his career.
Hotel d’Alsace, Paris
On November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde died in Room 16 of the Hôtel d’Alsace on Paris’ rue des Beaux Arts. Gazing at the awful wallpaper, Wilde supposedly uttered his last words, ‘well one of us had to go’. He was reputed to have left a large bill at the hotel and the comment that ‘I’m dying as I have lived… beyond my means’. Wilde was 46 years old, his health broken after a spell in Reading jail; his death was caused by cerebral meningitis, after an operation for an ear infection. Today, now renamed as L’Hôtel, this luxurious establishment is a much more up-scale place than it was in the time of the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lady Windermere’s Fan.
Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles
Soon after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert F Kennedy was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan as he left the Ambassador Hotel’s Embassy Ballroom via the kitchen area; he died a day later in hospital. Located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, the Ambassador was a true Hollywood hotel, used for Academy Award presentations in the 1930s and 1940s and the backdrop for many movies, most notably The Graduate where it appeared as the Taft. The hotel closed in 1989, but even as an empty building it made many movie appearances; scenes from “Pretty Woman”, “Forrest Gump”, “LA Story” and “Apollo 13” were all filmed here.
Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles
Hard-living film star John Belushi was 33 years old when he died of a heroin and cocaine overdose on March 5, 1982 at the Chateau Marmont. He was staying in Bungalow 3 at the extremely fashionable Sunset Strip hotel in Los Angeles. Robin Williams and Robert De Niro are both said to have visited him at the bungalow on the night he died, when the star had been partying hard. Another of the Marmont’s celebrity deaths was Helmut Newton, who was driving out of the hotel in 2004 when he died.
The Lorraine Motel, Memphis
Memphis’ Lorraine Motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum. No question about it, the museum is a powerfully moving experience. It winds its way through a series of exhibits in the gutted and rebuilt old motel to finally emerge in Room 306, from which Martin Luther King Jr stepped to his death, shot by a racist sniper on April 4, 1968. Four years earlier, King won the Nobel Peace Prize; in 1977, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi
The Palazzo Vendramin is the hotel in Venice where the German composer Richard Wagner died in 1883, an event which inspired Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice”.
Hotel Ritz, Paris
Fashion designer Coco Chanel was 87 years old when she died at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on January 10, 1971; she had been living at the hotel for 30 years. Born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, the designer was raised by aunts after her mother died when she was 12 (some sources suggest she was aged 6) and her father abandoned her. Coco, who never married or had children, started a fashion house that became one of the largest in the world. Another style icon linked to the Ritz was Princess Diana, who left the hotel by car for her appointment with death in 1997.
Hotel New Yorker, New York City
Nikola Tesla, the forgotten “mad scientist” who almost single-handedly developed the A/C electric system including generation, transmission and utilization still used today as well as the true inventor of radio communications.
