The Marlton Hotel - New York City, NY

Slip off 8th Street and into a narrow, glowing lobby where velvet chairs, dark wood, and a crackling fireplace feel more 1955 than 2025. At The Marlton Hotel, you’re sharing a roof with the ghosts of Greenwich Village’s bohemian past—Beat writers, radical artists, and one very infamous would-be assassin. If you love haunted hotels that trade jump scares for deep history and charged atmosphere, this petite “literary haunt” in the Village is exactly the kind of place where the past feels like it’s still pacing the halls.

Hotel History

• The building at 5 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village opened in 1900 as the Hotel Marlton, an eight-story residential hotel.

• For decades it was a single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel, cheap and slightly shabby, popular with struggling actors, writers and artists drawn to the Village’s bohemian scene.

• The guest list reads like a ghost-tour roster of 20th-century culture: Jack Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans and Tristessa while living here; poets like Gregory Corso and Edna St. Vincent Millay stayed; comedian Lenny Bruce, jazz singer Carmen McRae, and many others passed through.

• Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who later shot Andy Warhol, lived in Room 214 in 1968; silent-film star Lillian Gish once squeezed into tiny Room 408, cooking from tins over a sterno stove to save money.

• In 1987 The New School leased the building as a student dorm (Marlton House). In 2012 hotelier Sean MacPherson bought and gut-renovated it, reopening in 2013 as today’s boutique Marlton Hotel, a compact, Paris-meets-Village–style property that still leans heavily on its literary past.

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Haunted Hot Spots & Paranormal Activity

1. Room 214 – Valerie Solanas’ room

• Why it’s famous: Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968, was living in Room 214 at the Hotel Marlton at the time; biographies and hotel histories call this out by number.

• Lore for haunted-hotel fans: There are no solid, repeated ghost reports tied to 214, but the combination of its tiny SRO layout and notorious resident makes it easy to frame as a “psychic hot spot”—a room imbued with intense, unstable energy from one of the hotel’s darkest chapters.

2. Room 408 – Lillian Gish’s “starving actress” garret

• Why it’s famous: Silent-film icon Lillian Gish stayed in Room 408 in 1913; a biographer describes it as a “tiny room” where she lived frugally and cooked tinned food over a sterno lamp.

• Lore: For haunted-hotel marketing, 408 works as the “ghost of the starving artist” room—guests sometimes say these upper SRO-sized rooms feel like time capsules, with an almost monastic intensity after midnight.

3. The narrow upper corridors & small historic rooms

• Travel writers and reviewers regularly emphasize how compact the rooms are and how the hotel still feels like an early-20th-century boarding house—creaky floors, close walls, and narrow halls.

• For paranormal-minded visitors, those upper-floor corridors are ideal “soft-haunted” spaces:

  • Dimly lit stretches of carpet

  • Closed doors hiding who-knows-what stories

  • Occasional late-night footsteps and muffled voices (almost certainly other guests… but still atmospheric)

4. The lobby fireplace & café as a “living séance”

• The wood-paneled lobby, crowded bookshelves and roaring fireplace are deliberately styled to evoke the Beat and bohemian eras; hotel marketing and outside write-ups highlight its “literary salon” feel.

• One feature article even jokes about “all those famous ghosts” of past residents and quotes MacPherson saying that the renovation probably “exorcised them”—a tongue-in-cheek nod that the place is more haunted by memory than by specters.

5. The surrounding Greenwich Village ghost grid

• The Marlton sits just off Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, one of NYC’s most storied haunted neighborhoods, full of ghost-tour stops like the “House of Death” on West 10th Street, haunted carriage houses, and Revolutionary-era grave sites.

• Many dedicated ghost-tour companies start or end within a short walk, and modern “haunted NYC” lists often mention Washington Square Park, House of Death, and Merchant’s House Museum—with The Marlton flagged as a convenient nearby hotel.