Elms Hotel

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The Elms Hotel is a hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri where Harry S. Truman spent the night of his successful Presidential election in 1948.

The first hotel was built on a hill overlooking the town and its mineral springs in 1888. It burned in 1898. The next Elms opened in 1909 and in burned in 1910. The current Elms opened in 1912. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.

During this period the area around Kansas City, Missouri was a wide open town under Big City Tom Pendergast. The Elms prospered as a speakeasy. Al Capone was said to be a visitor.

On election night Truman predicted victory to his staffers at his headquarters at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City and then went to the Elms -- thus avoiding the attention drawn to his home in Independence, Missouri. He was awoken there with the news he had won the election.

Marketing of the hotel now centers on claims that it is haunted with a ghost in the lap pool area and ghost maid supervising the staff and grieving mother roaming the halls looking for a lost child.