Ghostly Guests, Strange Sounds & Bad Vibes: Inside California’s Haunted Padre Hotel

A California hotel reminiscent of the lodge in the horror film The Shining has had a long history of paranormal activity and what are believed to be ghostly guests.

The Padre Hotel in downtown Bakersfield first opened its doors in 1928, and the Spanish colonial revival structure has been the setting for a series of deaths and related tragedies through the years. According to local archives, examples include a woman jumping off the building’s roof, a man killing himself in a bathtub and a love triangle resulting in a deadly shooting.

Watch "The Padre Hotel" episode on Season 2 of Portals To Hell, streaming on discovery+ now.

Legend has it that the Padre Hotel now hosts shadowy figures that roam the eight-story historic landmark’s hallways — possibly victims from a fire in the 1950s — and what looks like a little girl’s ghostly handprint on a pillar in the lobby won’t go away even when it has been cleaned or painted over, KGET reported.

The upper floors, particularly the seventh, are said to be a hotbed of unexplained activity.

Jennifer Johnson, the hotel's general manager, once had an especially bizarre experience while doing her rounds, she shared with Bakersfield.com.

"I opened a door to a closet [in the hallway] and had this overwhelming feeling of cold and immediate adrenaline,” Johnson recalled. “The hair was standing up on my arms, and the door slammed right on me. I ran down eight flights of stairs, terrified.”

"I told a couple of people because somebody noticed that I was clearly frightened,” she continued, noting, “I was really pale and out of breath after running down the stairs. It definitely terrified me.”

“That was the only time I felt scared,” added Johnson, who has worked at the property for almost 10 years.

Jack Osbourne, co-host of Portals to Hell, recently spent two days exploring the Padre Hotel.

While staying in the eighth-floor Oil Baron Suite, Osbourne was awoken during the night by what sounded like his door opening and closing. He thought a housekeeper had walked into the room, but when he said hello, nobody answered.

“A lot of times you go to locations that people say, ‘Oh, it's super scary,’ and you might have some experiences, but it might not live up to a lot of the hearsay,” Osbourne said, according to Bakersfield.com.

However, that’s not the case with the Padre Hotel.

“It’s been modernized, but there is a sense of a home abandoned. There is a vibe that is palpable, that is bad,” Osbourne explained.