Quote Originally Posted by glc View Post
That is the Hotel Connor in Jerome AZ. What you blurred out is Spirit Room.
Just in case there's still any doubt: yes, yes, and great job, as usual! I planned to create a convincing little cloud, floating in front of the sign for the Spirit Room--which had to be obscured, because it would have been a dead giveaway! (Ahem) But in the end, I settle for a simple blur, and besides, the scrambled letters on the hotel sign didn't even slow you guys down. Strange goings on and scrambled signs come with the territory. Jerome is a ghost town, after all, and the Connor is one of several establishments reputed to be haunted...

Jerome is part of Scenic Side Trip #9, an alternative to Interstate 17 on that crowded run between Phoenix and Flagstaff. This is definitely one of the most popular routes in the book, and for good reason! Here's an excerpt, with a little bit of background on the Billion Dollar Copper Camp that we now know as ghost town Jerome:

Quote Originally Posted by Arizona and New Mexico: 25 Scenic Side Trips
"Jerome was built on the site of one of the richest copper ore deposits that has ever been found. It’s high up on the slopes of Mingus Mountain, and to get to it you’ll have to negotiate hairpin switchbacks that make the curves on Yarnell Hill seem tame. The higher you climb, the better the view of Verde Valley, almost 2,000 feet below, but if you’re doing the driving, keep your eyes on the road!

The town comes at you all at once. You drive around one last curve, and there it is: four parallel streets carved like steep stair steps into the side of Cleopatra Hill. Today, Jerome is a ramshackle perch of a ghost town. Some of it has been restored, and people do still live here, but most of the place is falling into ruin. Some structures in the lowest street, including the old town jail, are actually sliding, very slowly, down the mountainside, giving rise to the popular civic motto: “Jerome, a town on the move!”

Jerome wasn’t abandoned until the mine closed for good in 1952, but the boom times were almost half a century earlier, in the early 1900s, when as many as 15,000 people lived and worked here. Space was at such a premium that miners slept three to a tiny single room, in rotating shifts of 8 hours each. To serve the needs of all those hardworking men, downtown Jerome was a festering mess of brothels, saloons, and gambling halls—so many that the New York Sun declared Jerome to be “The Wickedest Town in the West.”
Rick