The Hotel Sold at Auction. The Woman in Room 207 Never Checked Out.

On Powell Street in San Francisco, where the cable cars clang up the hill from Market Street, a six-story hotel with 131 rooms has stood dark for years. Its doors have been locked since 2021, its lobby has gone quiet and the last shop on its ground floor closed in 2025. But according to the people who once worked and slept there, the hotel has never been entirely empty, because somewhere on the second floor, behind the door of Room 207, a woman is still pacing. At UX Auctions, where we cover government and real estate auctions every day, we have a feeling she didn't leave when the building sold.

The Golden West

The hotel opened in 1908 as the Golden West Hotel, rising out of the rubble of the great 1906 earthquake and fire, and it spent the next century at the center of San Francisco's busiest shopping district.

The Golden West Hotel, rising above the corner of Ellis and Powell. During Prohibition, its basement held a speakeasy called the Golden Bubble, where the gin flowed and the jazz played long after the respectable guests upstairs had gone to bed.

One of the regulars was Dashiell Hammett, the former Pinkerton detective who wrote The Maltese Falcon and turned San Francisco's foggy streets into the home of hard-boiled crime fiction. The hotel became part of one of the most famous love stories in American literature, too, because it was here that Hammett carried on his stormy affair with the playwright Lillian Hellman, a brilliant, hard-drinking writer who could out-argue anyone in the room. The two were said to favor one room above all the others, and its number was 207.

The woman in Room 207

Long after Hammett and Hellman were gone, the guests in Room 207 started telling stories. They heard footsteps crossing the floor when nobody was there, felt the air turn suddenly icy cold in the middle of a warm night and watched a woman walk back and forth across the room, pacing as if she were waiting for someone who was late. The hotel staff had a name for her, and it was Lillian.

One of the best-known encounters happened to a young man from Scotland who checked in with his grandmother. He told the concierge the next morning that a woman's ghost had appeared to him in the night, that she was friendly, in fact "too friendly," and that he had spent hours closing the bathroom door again and again because she kept trying to come out and wake his grandmother. The hotel's own owner admitted she preferred to stay out of the room altogether, because things in there had a way of appearing out of nowhere.

The auction

The hotel's living guests checked out for good during the pandemic. From the middle of 2020 to late 2021, the building served as temporary housing for the city's homeless, and when that ended, the doors never reopened. Its owners fell behind on the mortgage in 2023, the debt grew to $102 million and the old Golden West went to auction.

In September 2025, the hotel sold for about $30 million to Hotel Union Square LLC, a company tied to real estate investor Mahmood Alam, wiping away its $102 million in debt and handing a new owner the keys to 131 empty rooms. The new owner hasn't said what comes next for the building, and the neighborhood is waiting to find out.

Checking in

Every room in the hotel came with the sale, from the old basement speakeasy to the top floor, and nobody has said a word about whether Room 207 was empty when the new owner walked through. Perhaps Lillian finally packed her bags, or perhaps she is still pacing the floor, waiting for Hammett to come up the stairs from the Golden Bubble. If the old Golden West ever opens its doors again, the first guest to check into Room 207 just might find out that the room was already taken.

Hotels, office buildings and historic properties come up at auction more often than most people think, and the government sells land and buildings every year. Search every government auction platform at once at uxsearch.app.