By Eric Adler
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Blossom House Haunted Hotel, a decaying warehouse in Kansas City’s West Bottoms that was presented to customers as offering a real, not fake, paranormal experience, has been shut down by the Kansas City fire Marshal.
The fire marshal closed the building at 817 Santa Fe St. on Wednesday, hours after The Star published a story about the venue.
“On Wednesday, Oct 18,” city spokeswoman Sherea Honeycutt told The Star in an email, “the Kansas City Fire Department issued emergency orders to vacate 817 Santa Fe Street. The Fire Marshal also issued a stop work order for all occupancy in the building.”
The city said the owner of the property, Luther Glenn McCubbin, who told The Star he works as a bellhop at a Kansas City hotel, would be required to make “extensive repairs on the property if they wish to use it in the future.”
The owner will also have to go through the proper permitting process to occupy the building, even as a warehouse, the city said.
The Star wrote about the five-story warehouse following a tip from a reader, Aaron Jacobsen of Douglas County, who recounted the story of paying $40 each for himself, his 19-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son to tour the Blossom House, which he found advertised online.
The site claimed that the warehouse was haunted by real ghosts and that for $40 each, visitors could be a part of a real paranormal experience. Jacobsen, however, found himself truly frightened by what he saw as the dangerous condition of the warehouse, replete with rotting wood, cracked joists supported by temporary braces, one mended by a two-by-four, a leaky roof and ceiling in near collapse.
The building appeared to have no running water, limited electricity, no working sprinkler system or emergency exits. At one point in the tour, visitors were asked to climb through a trapdoor in a floor and descend an unsecured ladder with flashlights to a dark basement.
The Star, through city and state records, found that the Blossom House Haunted Hotel was not licensed as a business or nonprofit, nor did it have permits to operate as either a hotel or haunted attraction.
When a reporter for The Star made a reservation early this week, a confirmation text was returned that included the following recommendation: “Use bathroom before coming but we can supply bucket and toilet paper.”
McCubbin, in an interview with The Star earlier this week, conceded that he had had yet to be licensed and needed to get permits. He said he had opened the site up for paranormal tours to “test the waters” of the business.
His business partner and the tour guide, Paul Phillips, meantime, said he believes that the warehouse is truly haunted and that they had opened up the building primarily for paranormal investigation. He viewed The Star’s story on the warehouse as an unfair attack piece in league with the “fake” Halloween haunted house industry.
“The fake haunted houses are afraid we are taking business from them,” he texted to The Star. “We have real ghosts, not actors!!!”
©2023 The Kansas City Star.
Visit kansascity.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.