The HAUNTED Baker Hotel, located in the once booming but now very very quiet Mineral Wells, Tx, has been on my list of places to visit for a long time. We live about 4 hours from the hotel, which, in Texas, feels like a lot more than 4 hours on the open road. We didn’t want to drive all the way to Mineral Wells just to walk around the Baker Hotel, and then turn around and drive 4 hours back. We got the call to drive to an even smaller Texas town for a family thing, and I looked at the map–Mineral Wells could easily be on our way! So the plan was set.
We pulled into town a little after noon, and the first thing you see from about 5 miles outside of town is this absolutely massive building that looks totally out of place in what is clearly a small town. It towers over everything else. At one point in time, the Baker was a huge tourist draw, and thousands of people flocked to Mineral Wells to bathe in the mineral rich water running through springs under the city. Now, though, the shine of that “Crazy Water” has worn off, and when the hotel closed, the people stopped coming to this beautiful little Texas town.
First thought I had after getting over how large the hotel is, was how spooky the whole place is. A place this big should be bustling. There should be people walking up and down the streets in town, conducting business or vacationing, but there is absolutely no one, except the few of us walking around the hotel, peaking into broken windows and wondering what it must’ve been like in its heyday.
It’s a real shame that such a marvel of a building is sitting there rotting, but there may be some good news for the old Baker Hotel in the future. Contractors and businessmen have been working on getting together the money to completely remodel the hotel. No telling when that’ll actually happen, but I can only hope that Laura and I get to return to the (haunted) Baker Hotel someday for our own mineral water bath!
There’s a list, and we’re already on it!
The Baker Hotel, July 2016 The HAUNTED Baker Hotel, located in the once booming but now very very quiet Mineral Wells, Tx, has been on my list of places to visit for a long time.
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