This real Michigan haunted location was built in 1918 as the Hotel Fort Shelby. It started out as a ten-story building but as Detroit kept growing, so did the hotel…21 more stories were added in 1927.
By 1951, the hotel was sold and renamed the Pick Fort Shelby by the new owners. The hotel struggled for the next few years and finally closed in December 1973.
It was sold again and became The Shelby Hotel in February 1974, attempting to attract the younger generation. That turned out to be a bad move. Rock concerts were booked inside the hotel’s Rainbow Room, but with the shows came people in their late teens and 20s who were not interested in paying their bills. Numerous fights occurred in the hotel lobby and the place reeked with marijuana.
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Fed up with the hassles, the owners closed the place down that same year. Over the next decade it sat abandoned, riddled with trespassers and vandals and left to rot. Even so, it became an entry on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983…