An October afternoon inside a once-grand resort hotel in Sharon Springs, New York.
Photographs: Jerry Reed, October 22, 2022. Historical postcards and promotional materials: author’s collection. Historical background: Sharon Historical Society.
I’ve never believed in ghosts. But I have visited places where I could understand why other people do.
One of them was the abandoned Adler Hotel in Sharon Springs, New York.
On October 22, 2022, I joined a small group of photographers invited to explore the long-deserted hotel. We were permitted to wander through the property individually, without guides or escorts, photographing whatever caught our attention.
There were no ghosts to greet us. But there was plenty to stir the imagination.
When the Adler Was Alive
Sharon Springs was once a thriving resort community, famous for its mineral waters and visitors who came seeking their reputed therapeutic benefits.
The Adler was one of the last of the town’s grand resort hotels. Construction began in 1927, and the five-story, 150-room hotel operated from 1929 until 2004. It catered primarily to Jewish summer vacationers, offering kosher dining, mineral baths, entertainment, and the pleasures of an extended holiday.
Vintage postcards show a handsome building with striped awnings, landscaped grounds, and automobiles parked outside its entrance. Everything suggests a place prepared to welcome another busy season.
Even in its final years, the Adler was still selling the promise of a relaxing summer. Yarkony’s Adler promotional materials for 2000 and 2001 advertised a heated swimming pool, sulphur baths, guest telephones, nightly entertainment, and kosher meals.
But mineral-water resorts had been losing their appeal for decades. One by one, Sharon Springs’ great hotels closed. The Adler finally ceased operating in 2004.
Eighteen years later, I walked through its empty rooms.
No Vacancy — No Guests Either
One of the first things that caught my attention was a wall of small, numbered compartments, apparently once used for guests’ mail or room keys. How many visitors had approached that desk over the years? How many keys had been handed across the counter?
Now the compartments were empty. Nearby stood an old elevator, its folding metal gate partly open. A battered chair occupied the space where hotel guests once stood.
Then there were the hallways. Long, narrow corridors stretched toward distant windows, their walls scarred by peeling paint, graffiti, and years of neglect. Doorways opened into rooms that hadn’t welcomed a paying guest in nearly two decades.
The Rooms Tell Their Stories
In one room, two neatly arranged single beds remained side by side. Their bedspreads were faded and dusty, the window shade torn, but the arrangement still suggested a room waiting for its next occupants.
Other rooms had surrendered almost completely to the elements. Plaster crumbled from ceilings, wallpaper peeled from walls, and in a few guestrooms something extraordinary had happened.
Nature had moved in.
Moss and greenery covered the surfaces of old mattresses. What had once been devoted to human comfort was slowly becoming a garden of decay.
Then there was the telephone. A black receiver lay disconnected on a bed, surrounded by rotting pillows and faded floral bedding. Had someone called the front desk? Ordered a meal? Spoken to family back home? Whatever the final conversation might have been, the telephone had long since fallen silent.
Elsewhere, exercise equipment stood in a deserted fitness room, while old television sets were piled together, their screens covered with graffiti. They were reminders of the conveniences once advertised as reasons to spend a summer at the Adler.
The Wallpaper Remembers
As a photographer, I found myself fascinated by something easily overlooked: the wallpaper. Room after room displayed different patterns and colors. Some were floral, others geometric, and still others reflected the decorating fashions of decades past.
Despite the ruined furnishings and crumbling walls, many patterns remained remarkably vivid. Someone had chosen those designs. Someone had furnished those rooms, made the beds, and prepared everything for arriving guests.
And for decades, guests had come. That, to me, was the real story of the Adler: not simply an abandoned building, but a place where countless ordinary lives had briefly intersected.
Ghosts of a Different Kind
Halloween was just nine days away when I visited the Adler. It certainly had the atmosphere for a ghost story: deserted corridors, darkened rooms, broken windows, and furnishings left behind as though everyone had departed without saying goodbye.
But I encountered nothing supernatural. No mysterious voices. No apparitions. No unexplained footsteps. Only the remains of a once-busy hotel and the unmistakable evidence of time. Perhaps the most haunting places aren’t haunted by ghosts at all. Perhaps they’re haunted by the absence of the people who once filled them with life.