The Curse of the Luxor Hotel (Part 7)

Check out the rest of my look at the legends surrounding the Luxor Hotel: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6

Content note: this post contains mentions of death, suicide (including the methods in which people died), mass shooting, domestic violence, and a bombing.

There are plenty of reasons why the Luxor has gained a reputation for being haunted. Chief among them: the amount of death and violence that have occurred at or near the hotel.

To start us off on tragedies related to the Luxor: Tupac Shakur was staying at the Luxor on the night he was killed in 1996 (though he didn't die at the Luxor).

Death in the atrium

Supposedly two guests have killed themselves by jumping into the Luxor's atrium. Like I mentioned earlier in this series, the rooms open out around the 30-story-tall atrium.

In 1996, the first guest who apparently died this way. A woman, who some people claimed was a sex worker, jumped from the 26th floor and died. She landed right where the buffet was then; the food court stands where she landed.

Some ghost tours have apparently claimed that they tore out the old buffet because of fear of contamination, but my guess is that they prob just wanted to freshen up the place–it’s too gruesome to eat at the buffet where someone died.

The Las Vegas Sun called it a suicide. To read from the September 1996 article about the woman’s death:

Police have “no idea who she is,” Keeton said. She appeared to be a Hispanic or Asian woman in her 30s. She did not have a purse or identification with her, he said.

The coroner’s office is using fingerprints and dental records to attempt to identify her, a spokeswoman said today.

Plenty of (probably false) rumors have sprung up around her death. Some people claim that she’d just gotten an HIV diagnosis so killed herself, though I don’t know how people would know that if they couldn’t identify her—that sounds made up.

Another guest supposedly died falling from the 10th floor of the Luxor. It didn’t sound like it was a . . . voluntary . . . death. He supposedly landed on the express check out counter, which has since been moved

The bombing

In May 2007, a homemade pipe bomb went off in the parking garage of the Luxor. One 24-year-old man died; he’d been a worker at the Nathan’s hot dog stand in the Luxor’s food court.

The bomb was underneath an upside-down plastic cup; when the worker picked up the cup, it exploded.

It seems that this man was intentionally targeted, though it’s unclear why. Two men were arrested for the bombing and put in prison for life with no chance of parole.

After the bombing, the hotel wasn’t evacuated and operations didn’t stop at all–it doesn’t seem like the explosion had an impact outside of the garage, and it didn’t damage the building at all.

An altercation

In 2010, a former football player from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas tried to intervene in a physical altercation between another guest—a friend of his who happened to be an MMA fighter—and the fighter’s girlfriend. The MMA fighter was drunk and angry, and grabbed his girlfriend by the neck and hit her.

The football player intervened, trying to restrain the MMA fighter, who ended up brutally assaulting and killing him. He never work up again, but later a court claimed that the football player died of an overdose, not from the fight. Which is . . . weird. But at any rate, it's another tragedy associated with the Luxor.

Deaths in 2012

In 2012, a casino employee was murdered by her boyfriend in the hotel’s lobby.

Also in 2012, a hotel guest died of Legionnaires disease. This was the third case of the disease, apparently, but wasn’t caught because water tests came back negative. After the guest died, the tests came back positive.

Again, in 2012, an airman visiting from a nearby Air Force base fell 25 feet down an elevator shaft. He’d gotten into a fight with a colleague in the lobby of the west tower, and was pushed against the elevator door. For some reason, the doors opened onto the empty elevator shaft. He fell to his death.

A tiny sidenote: The next year, in 2013, lightning struck the Luxor Hotel and Mandalay Bay, during a storm that made 33,000 people lose power and that saw 740 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in 3 hours.

The Mandalay Bay Hotel mass shooting

You might remember the shooting that killed 60 people and injured 411 people at the Mandalay Bay Hotel back in 2017, during a concert.

That happened so close to the Luxor that during the shooting, authorities couldn’t tell if the shots were coming from the Mandalay Bay or Luxor

By the way, there are (predictably) plenty of conspiracy theories about the shooting, seeking to link it to the illuminati, government programs like MKULTRA. I don't put any stock in these theories, but it's interesting to see the ways in which the hotel's appearance attracts speculation and conspiracy thinking.

From illuminatiwatcher.com:

The Luxor is known as the Egyptian themed casino with the pyramid that has the illuminated apex and obelisk nearby. These symbols are of great usage to the “Illuminati” who subscribe to many of the magickal and esoteric concepts of ancient Egypt and its mystery schools that shared these ideas only to the initiates deemed worthy.

Check out the rest of this series about the history and hauntings of the Luxor hotel:

• Part 1: creative vision and Xanadu
• Part 2: the glory days and the legendary (according to me when I was a child) Nile River ride
• Part 3: De-theming sucks
• Part 4: The skeletons aren't even in the closet
• Part 5: Death and hauntings
• Part 6: Construction woes

This article doesn’t link to sources as comprehensively as usual, because I wrote it based on my original episode notes, which I penned when I was worse at adding specific in-line citations. But all of the sources I used are linked at the bottom of the episode shownotes page. And I’m not proud of it, but I can tell you that a ton of this info is from Wikipedia.