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Heavily Investigated

The sixth floor of the Cavalier has a reputation — and it earned it. On June 5, 1929, Adolph Coors, founder of the Coors Brewing Company, fell from a window up there, his death ruled a suicide. Guests who linger on that floor still report cold spots blooming from nowhere, windows drifting open on their own, and something like a disembodied impact sound rising from the pavement below. During renovations, phantom calls rang into the front desk from the closed, uninhabited sixth floor. Elsewhere, a self-playing piano fills the empty ballroom, and a phantom cat scratches at doors in halls where nothing walks.

Designed by Neff and Thompson and completed in 1927, the Cavalier was Virginia Beach's crown jewel of the Roaring Twenties — a seven-story brick landmark that hosted ten U.S. presidents, F. Scott Fitzgerald (said to have drafted The Great Gatsby here), Frank Sinatra, and Al Capone. During WWII the Navy commandeered it as a training center; it limped back to hotel life in 1945 and spent decades in slow decline before a sweeping restoration reopened it in 2017. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. A grand résumé for a building that, apparently, some of its guests simply never felt the need to vacate.