Buffalo Hotel With Haunted Past Will Reopen as a Hilton

A luxury Buffalo hotel with a haunted history is closing for a while, but when it reopens, it'll be under a new operator.

The Hotel Henry Urban Resort Conference Center's management announced this week it will be closed for good, effective February 27.

Hours afterward, Hilton hotels listed the property as one of their own, on their website.

Despite its rich history brimming with ghost stories and hauntings, the hotel says there's a very earthly reason for closing -- the pandemic.

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"Hotel Henry is a casualty of a pandemic that unfortunately has put us and many United States hotels out of business,” said Dennis Murphy, co-owner.

WIVB reports:

With the ongoing restrictions, businesses face during the pandemic, Sublessor, Richardson Center Development Corporation (RCDC), and Sublessee, Hotel Henry, agreed to terminate the initial 10-year lease term in advance of the expiration of the agreement.

The hotel was named one of Time Magazine’s World’s Greatest Places in 2018.

The building where Hotel Henry operated is otherwise known as the H.H. Richardson complex. According for the Center for Inquiry, construction begun in 1871. The complex opened in 1880 as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, later called the Buffalo Asylum Psychiatric Center.

“Not surprisingly, rumors abound that the castlelike structure is haunted by the ghosts of former patients who died there. They are said to roam the grounds frequently and to love most of all the tunnels that lay beneath the buildings, connecting them.”
-Center for Inquiry

The Richardson complex has long been a place of lore after the psychiatric hospital closed in the 1970s. It had remained abandoned until a preservationist group stepped in in 2008 to help save the building, which has great architectural significance.

Hotel Henry started operating in 2017.

WKBW is reporting the hotel will now be operated by Hilton.