The Skirvin, room 1015

Visiting NBA teams have blamed this hotel for losing games.

The Skirvin is the oldest hotel in Oklahoma City, thirteen storeys and 225 rooms in the middle of downtown, on the National Register of Historic Places and a member of Historic Hotels of America. It opened on 26 September 1911 with 224 rooms in a ten-storey, two-winged tower. A third wing of twelve storeys went up in 1925, and in 1929 and 1930 all three were raised to thirteen floors, taking it to 525 rooms.

It is named for its founder, William Balser Skirvin, whose daughter Perle Mesta became ambassador to Luxembourg under Harry Truman. Theodore Roosevelt spoke to a crowd from one of its balconies on 24 September 1912, touring Oklahoma as the Bull Moose candidate. The hotelier Dan James bought it in 1945 and spent years modernising, adding air conditioning, a swimming pool and new furniture.

Then it closed in 1988 on low occupancy and sat abandoned for nineteen years. In 1999 Mayor Kirk Humphreys appointed a Skirvin Solutions Committee, which toured other restored historic hotels to see how those projects had been paid for and recommended in October 2000 that the city look at a partnership. The eventual renovation cost about 51 million dollars, drawing on tax increment financing, grants, Empowerment Zone credits, historic tax credits and New Markets tax credits. The Skirvin Hilton reopened in 2007 with the original exterior finish restored, historically accurate windows, reconfigured rooms and new elevators. A 22 million dollar renovation finished in 2025.

And the ghost story. Rumours of a haunting persist, attached to room 1015 and to a grim story about the original owner and a maid named Effie. Basketball made it famous: in 2010 the New York Knicks blamed a loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on it, the Chicago Bulls reported doors slamming on their own, the Miami Heat's stay during the 2012 NBA Finals put it back in the national press, and in 2019 Kyrie Irving announced he was producing a film about it.