The Stone Lion Inn is the only famous haunted hotel we know of whose current owner openly doesn't believe in ghosts. Grant Aguirre — who runs the Guthrie, Oklahoma mansion his mother restored — attributes the noises to what a big wooden house built in 1907 does at night, and says so on the record. He also happens to operate one of the country's most theatrical haunted businesses: murder-mystery weekends where overnight guests play out a homicide over dinner, in a building that spent six decades as an actual funeral home. That combination — a skeptic's honesty upstairs, a hearse's history downstairs — makes the Stone Lion the most interesting overnight in Oklahoma, whatever you believe.
Booking reality: six named suites from $77 (Parlor, first floor, shower only) to $137 (Wedding Suite with clawfoot tub, Bordello Suite, Kentucky Daisy); the inn's signature product is the murder-mystery weekend with dinner in the oak-paneled dining room. Guthrie — Oklahoma's ornate first capital — is half an hour north of Oklahoma City and worth the trip on its own.
The Legend, and What the Records Wouldn't Give It
The house story is Augusta — in some tellings Irene — a Houghton daughter said to have died in the mansion when a nanny overdosed her whooping-cough medicine, the opium-laced syrup of the era. Guests on the third floor report a child's presence; a longtime employee described something invisible climbing into bed with her. It is a complete, affecting legend with one problem: when Oklahoma's paranormal investigators went looking, they could not find records of the girl. A public-radio investigation of the inn — one refreshingly framed around why we tell such stories rather than whether ghosts exist — collected the accounts, noted the missing paperwork, and let a folklorist land the honest conclusion: most of what people experience here is mundane (footsteps, figures in doorways), and profoundly meaningful to them anyway.
What Actually Happened in This House
The documented history doesn't need a nanny with a spoon. Frederick Edward Houghton arrived in the 1889 land run and made good in the most Oklahoma ways available — the state's first cotton gin, its first car dealership, mercantile stores in Guthrie and Enid — and built his mansion — sources size it anywhere from five to eight thousand square feet — in 1907, the year of statehood. By 1910 the family had leased it out, and from the 1920s until 1986 it operated as the Smith Funeral Home: embalming, viewings, grief, six decades of it. Whatever one thinks follows a building out of that business, it is the funeral-home era — not the legend — that gives the Stone Lion its genuine charge, and at least one investigator's roster reflects it, claiming contact with "Edward," a gray-suited man of the mortuary years.
In 1986 Becky Luker bought the building and spent years converting it into a bed and breakfast; her sons run it today. Television arrived on schedule: Ghost Hunters worked the child-ghost reports in an early season, and Ghost Adventures gave the inn its full theatrical treatment — spirit-box fragments, a door slamming on command, and a detour into the strange post-mortem odyssey of outlaw Elmer McCurdy, whose embalmed remains famously toured the country. Watch the episodes as entertainment; the show's wilder claims about the premises say more about its format than about Guthrie.
The Murder-Mystery Machine
The inn's core product deserves its reputation: a weekend where the guests are the cast, the plot is a homicide, and dinner comes out of the oak-paneled dining room. It is the smartest possible use of the building — a former funeral home hosting staged death, run by a man who doesn't believe the house is haunted and doesn't need it to be. The suites keep the tone: the Bordello Suite with its big sitting room, the Kentucky Daisy and Cora Diehl on the second floor, the Wedding Suite's clawfoot tub (no shower — check your tolerance), down to the $77 Parlor Suite. At these prices, the Stone Lion is one of the cheapest famous haunted stays in America.
The Verdict
Come for the honesty. The Stone Lion offers a documented funeral-home past, a legend its own investigators couldn't source, an owner who tells you the house just creaks, and a stage-managed murder every weekend anyway. That's not a contradiction — it's the haunted-hospitality business with the curtain pulled back, and it's more fun, not less, for admitting how the trick works. Book the third floor if you want the stories where they live; book any floor for Guthrie's Victorian streets in the morning.
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