“The elevator to the fourth floor smells faintly of chlorine and something older, like the inside of a library book nobody's opened since 1937.”

Tunnel Road climbs away from the flats of Berkeley in a way that makes your ears pop if you're on a bike, which you shouldn't be unless you're training for something. The AC Transit 65 drops you at the bottom of the hill, and from there it's a ten-minute walk past eucalyptus groves and houses with increasingly dramatic driveways. You hear the hotel before you see it — not the building itself, but the quiet. The traffic noise from Ashby Avenue fades out. A red-tailed hawk circles above the tree line. Then the Claremont appears through the branches like something that wandered out of a different century and decided to stay: white, enormous, vaguely Mediterranean, perched on the hillside with the confidence of a building that survived the 1906 earthquake and has opinions about your outfit.

The lobby is grand in the old California way — tile floors, high ceilings, the kind of natural light that makes everyone look slightly better than they actually do. A woman in athletic wear crosses the lobby with a smoothie. A man in a blazer reads a newspaper, an actual physical newspaper, which feels like its own kind of haunting. The Claremont opened in 1915, and it carries that history the way certain buildings do: not as a performance, but as a fact. The hallways are wide enough for two bellhops and a ghost, which is relevant, because apparently there are several.

The room, the ghosts, and the pool nobody warns you about

The rooms vary wildly. Some face the bay and San Francisco's skyline, which at sunset looks like someone spilled gold paint across the water. Others face the hills, which is quieter and greener and arguably better for sleeping. Mine had a view of both the Golden Gate Bridge and a parking structure, which felt like an honest summary of the Bay Area. The bed was firm in a way that suggests the hotel knows its clientele includes people who've just hiked Strawberry Canyon. The bathroom had good water pressure and a showerhead that actually reached above my shoulders — a detail I mention because it's rarer than it should be in historic hotels where the plumbing predates the moon landing.

But nobody stays at the Claremont for the room. You stay for the pool deck, which sits above the fog line on clear days and offers the kind of panoramic view that real estate agents would commit crimes for. You stay for the spa, which is large and serious and smells like eucalyptus because everything within three miles of here smells like eucalyptus. And in October, you stay because the hotel runs haunted tours — actual guided walks through areas normally closed to guests, including a room on the fourth floor that staff refer to with the kind of careful neutrality that tells you everything you need to know.

The ghost tour guide — a historian, not an actor — walks you through the hotel's past with the steady pace of someone who's told these stories enough times to believe some of them. There's the tale of a woman seen in the hallways in period dress. There's the fourth-floor room where objects move and the temperature drops for no mechanical reason anyone can identify. The hotel doesn't oversell it. There are no jump scares, no fog machines. Just a 109-year-old building with long hallways and creaking floors and the accumulated weight of a century's worth of guests who checked in and, apparently, some who never quite checked out.

“The fog rolls in from the bay around 4 PM, and for twenty minutes the Claremont floats above it like an ocean liner that got lost and ended up in the Berkeley Hills.”

The honest thing: the hotel is a Fairmont property, and it occasionally feels like one. The restaurant prices lean corporate. The WiFi login process involves more steps than filing taxes. And the hallways, while beautiful, are long enough that you'll learn to grab everything you need before leaving the room, because the walk back is a commitment. But these are the imperfections of a place that's been around long enough to have imperfections, and they're preferable to the sterile perfection of something built last year.

For food, skip the hotel restaurant at least once and drive or ride down to Vic's on Solano Avenue, a fifteen-minute trip, where the chaat is sharp and bright and costs a third of what you'd pay on-site. Or walk downhill to the Elmwood neighborhood, where Ici Ice Cream makes a salted caramel that will rearrange your priorities. The Claremont knows it sits slightly apart from Berkeley's street life — it's a hill station, really — and the best thing about it is how quickly you can descend back into the noise and taquería smoke of Telegraph Avenue when you want to.

Walking back down Tunnel Road the next morning, the fog is still burning off and the bay is a flat grey sheet below. A jogger passes me heading uphill, breathing hard. A woman on a porch waters a fern and doesn't look up. Somewhere behind me, the Claremont sits white and enormous against the green hillside, and I think about the fourth-floor room, and the historian's voice, and the way the temperature did drop — probably the ventilation, probably — and how the best ghost stories are the ones told in buildings old enough to have earned them. The 65 bus arrives at the bottom of the hill right on time.

Rooms start around $350 a night, which buys you that view, the pool deck, and the particular pleasure of sleeping in a building that's older than most of the cities in California. The October haunted tours book up fast — reserve a week ahead if you're visiting around Halloween.