Blog

The Curse of the Luxor Hotel (Part 5)

Chris Amandier

Jun 6, 2023 • 3 min read

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

Content note: this post contains mention of suicide and guns.

Over the last week or so, I’ve talked about the Luxor Hotel’s history and shifting identity, but I haven’t talked at all about the strange, tragic, and potentially paranormal elements of the hotel’s history.

So let’s get into the more urban legends parts of this story, which means of course that it’s time to talk about some rumored suicides (so content warning for that).

While I love urban legends and stories of hauntings, I find most of them, including these, very suspect

Why are some hotels haunted?

To talk about a different haunted hotel that I've stayed at: in early 2020, I stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem. In the podcast episodes I did about that experience, I talked about how so much stuff had happened there.

It wasn’t just one story: it seemed like the hotel, or the site that the hotel was on, had attracted an unusually large number of strange things, and maybe the collective energy of all of that had something to do with hauntings.

I feel similarly about the Luxor—there’s no single thing that really makes me feel that it’s definitely haunted, but more like a bunch of different details that seem to weirdly converge at the Luxor.

So many souls

The intersection that Excalibur and Luxor sit, where Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard meet, apparently has the most hotel rooms of any intersection in the world. That’s a lot of lives and souls moving through there, and in a place like Vegas, where people travel to party and often lose huge sums of money, it seems like there could be an awful lot of psychic upset and human pain there.

They say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and maybe that saying applies to ghosts, too.

Dying in Vegas

I know that suicides are pretty common in Vegas, and a lot of desperate people go there to try to win something with their last dollars. They’re so common that there’s supposedly a widespread policy that if you shoot yourself in your hotel room and cause damage to the room or furniture, your estate will be billed for the damage.

Also, some websites claimed that every time someone dies in a Vegas hotel room, that room has to be quarantined for 2 weeks, which hotels don’t want to have to do. Because of that many hotels allegedly move bodies to other areas of the hotel before calling the cops, so they don’t have to go through the trouble of closing up the room for 2 weeks.

But, hey, the good news is that if you die in a Vegas hotel and it’s not a suicide, the standard practice is to comp the room.

Death and the Luxor

Here's what VitalVegas.com had to say about Vegas deaths; they called out the Luxor specifically:

Some of the most gruesome suicides happen off of hotel balconies and parking garages, but the absolute winner in the area of ghastly suicides has to be the Luxor. Why’s that? Well, because if you jump from a balcony or parking garage, you land outside. At Luxor, because of its pyramid design, jumpers jump inside the building, into the casino and reception area.

And as if that wasn't enough, supposedly the Luxor was built on the site of a burial ground for mob victims. Bestofvegas.com claims:

Another possible reason for ghost sightings at the Luxor have to do with the much talked about “holes” in Las Vegas. The term “holes on the Strip” refers to the fact that years ago the town was laced with mobsters who supposedly buried bodies all along the south end of the Strip because at the time there were no buildings there. The Luxor is said to have been built on top of a popular burial site.

Who knows how accurate these urban legends are. But true or not, they certainly add to the general vibe and narrative of the Luxor being "cursed."

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

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.