The Palmer House Hotel
Sinclair Lewis clerked at the front desk here as a teenager and put the building into Main Street as the Minniemashie House. The ghost stories are a century newer, and in December 2025 the hotel was bought by a paranormal radio host, which makes the haunting the business plan as well as the folklore.
Field Guide Entry
The Sauk Centre House burned on June 26, 1900, and Ralph and Christena Palmer put up a new hotel on the same corner the following year. A 1916 expansion by the St. Cloud architect Roland C. Buckley took it to 44 rooms. It went onto the National Register on February 11, 1982.
Sinclair Lewis worked two summers at the desk and used the place in Main Street in 1920, renamed the Minniemashie House and described without affection. The town he grew up in is the town in the book, and Sauk Centre has spent a century deciding how to feel about that.
Lucy, Raymond, and the basement
The paranormal reputation is recent and traceable. Kelley Freese ran the hotel for over 20 years and kept an account of what staff and guests reported: footsteps in the upstairs hall, objects moving in the basement, a woman who came through the front door and was not there when Freese turned around. Two names get used, Lucy in room 17 and Raymond in room 22, both attached to a story that the upper floors once held a brothel.
Nothing in the county record supports the brothel, a murder, or either name. Freese has said herself that the basement is where the activity centers, and the basement is a stone cellar under a hotel built in 1901 on a lot that had already burned once.
Ghost Adventures, The Dead Files, and a run of smaller productions have all filmed here, and most of the claims in circulation trace back to those visits rather than to anything older.
Bought by a broadcaster
On December 15, 2025, Dave Schrader, who hosts the Paranormal 60 podcast and had been coming to the hotel for nearly 20 years, bought it with Winnie Schrader. He had already been a business partner in it. The hotel still rents rooms and runs a restaurant and bar, and it sells lights out basement tours and overnight investigations.
Schrader joined the cast of a Hulu paranormal series in 2026.
Visiting Information
The hotel takes overnight bookings year round, and the restaurant and pub downstairs are open to people who are not staying. Rooms 17 and 22 can be requested at booking and go first.
Basement tours and overnight investigations are sold separately through the hotel and fill up well ahead for September and October. The building is 19 rooms over three floors on the original stair, and there is no elevator.
Sauk Centre keeps its other claim on the same street. The Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home is a few blocks away and the interpretive center sits out at the interstate exit. The hotel changed hands in December 2025, so hours and programming taken from older listings are worth confirming before setting out.
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