Haunting Connections: Movies, Dancing & Love
A mysterious connection that never ends well binds the Hotel San Carlos and the Westward Ho. Hitchcock felt it, or knew it, when he immortalized the low-rise skyline of downtown Phoenix in the opening sequence of Psycho.
During that chilly December in 1960, Hitchcock filmed a long shot showing the Hotel San Carlos and then closing in on an eighth floor window of the Westward Ho. Hitchcock doesn't actually show the whole Westward Ho building, but Gus Van Sant does in his 1998 remake. This subtle dissonance reflects a connection which ran the opposite way from the Westward Ho to the Hotel San Carlos when it was forged in 1928.
On a May night in 1928, a young blonde woman called Leone Jensen dressed for an evening of dancing at the new luxury Hotel San Carlos in Phoenix. The San Carlos had opened just the year before. The combination of Italian Renaissance glamour with virtually every modern convenience of the time was already attracting beautiful people from around town and beyond.
Leone may have been planning to meet her boyfriend, an unnamed bellboy at the Westward Ho hotel. Perhaps she was thinking of finding a new one. Some say she was pregnant, at a time when unwed mothers were, well, weren't --- at least, in public. She may have been broken-hearted, or, like Marion, caught up in a romance without a future. Whatever her motivation, sometime in the pre-dawn hours of 7 May, Leone Jensen leapt, or was pushed, from the roof of the Hotel San Carlos, falling seven stories to her death.
Almost immediately visitors to the San Carlos began to report feeling cool breezes that didn't come from Arizona's first air conditioning system. Others saw a misty apparition described as feminine figure wearing an evening gown floating through the hotel. Ghostly noises have been heard, as well.
Today, the Hotel San Carlos retains the glamour that attracted the crème of Hollywood from Clark Gable to Marilyn Monroe, however, travelers might be surprised to discover how snug luxury was until quite recently. A $1 million renovation means visitors will have many modern conveniences, including wi-fi and in-room beverage service. The Westward Ho is now housing for seniors.
The connection between the Hotel San Carlos and the Westward Ho never ends well. The same cannot be said of Leone Jensen, because there was another Leone Jensen. She was born in 1921 seven years before the ghostly Leone Jensen shuffled off this mortal coil from the roof of the Hotel San Carlos. Leone Jensen, the younger, lived a full life, dying while sailing the Greek Islands in 1998. So perhaps there is hope that someday the lovelorn ghost of the Hotel San Carlos will find herself at peace.
