The Curse of the Luxor Hotel (Part 9)

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, part 7, part 8

Alright, I've danced around various aspects of the Luxor. Now I want to explore the ghost stories.

It’s said that there are five different ghosts at the Luxor. A woman supposedly walks through the halls of the 12th, 13th, and 14th floors, breathing down guests necks and pushing them. Some people say that the construction workers who died appear in quiet parts of the hotel.

A number of trip advisor reviews mentioned that the hotel feels creepy and haunted, and many have said that it’s very run down and crappy. Many people complained of bad smells and flickering lights. That could be paranormal—or it could just be a maintenance issue.
One reviewer said:

And if you believe in spirits/ghosts, the Luxor is rumored to be haunted. be careful looking down over the railing, stories have it that people who have died at the hotel make you feel like jumping when looking over the railing!

Another said:

Here is the best part My fiance screamed for me to come here when I was brushing my teeth. I came out and asked whats wrong? the man was stunned and couldn’t speak. He said a little girl from the across the room asked help me … Wow now we have a ghost in our room, he woke me later to ask if I could hear singing.

In a long review from December 2016, someone describes a series of frightening events, including being woken by a spider crawling down her face and neck, and maybe a hand grabbing her. Then she climbed out of bed, and her husband saw a pretty blonde woman in a hat–maybe a beret–standing at their bedside, who then disappeared.

After that, they went to sleep in the other bed in the room, but during the night, she felt someone wrapping the covers tight around her and leaning against her back, which I found very interesting, because that’s similar to what happened to a friend of mine when we stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel, as we talk about in those episodes of the podcast.

The next day, they went to the concierge, and the woman there was very nice but didn’t seem surprised by the experience. She said they’d move them to a different room, out of the pyramid (where they’d been staying on the 12th floor) and into one of the newer towers. That seemed to help, though the guest said that she experienced electric shocks throughout the hotel, even after their rooms moved.

A ghost hunter on trip advisor saw orbs and their friend felt a hand at the bottom of the comforter. They also said the hotel gave them a sense of vertigo, as if the hallways were all at an angle and they were walking at a slant. The disorientation makes sense, because of the hotel’s strange shape.

Another reviewer said:

running the risk of sounding insane, I swear my room was haunted. I always felt like there was a shadowy figure just at the edge of my vision and this creeped me out like nothing before.

Becksghosthunters.com said that they experienced someone going through their luggage during the night. Hopefully that was a ghost.

One urban legend theorizes that after a few coincidental deaths started happening at the Luxor, the mob started using it as a place to kill victims, since people believed there was a curse. I have found no concrete (or even hazy) evidence of this.

I get the sense that many Vegas hotels have their own stories of hauntings. Circus Circus is said to be haunted; supposedly a number of murders and suicides have happened there. Visitors have claimed to hear screams or whispers crying for help, or the words “Help Me” materializing on bathroom mirrors.

Excalibur is also supposedly haunted. Folks have reported strange technology issues, like alarm clocks going off when they aren’t supposed too, static coming from TVs that are off, etc. also furniture supposedly has moved on its own, etc. Though I suppose it's worth mentioning that folks online (including many YouTube commenters have claimed that Circus Circus (and MGM Resorts International, who own the Luxor now) poorly maintains their properties. So it's always possible that supposedly paranormal phenomena could just be the result of maintenance issues and cut corners.)

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
• Part 7: Some real bad stuff
• Part 8: Some odd theories

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.