A Haunting in Shoreditch

The Ace of shades.

It was a barista who first told me about the ghost.

‘We think it’s wretchedly haunted,’ I recall her saying. This was back in 2014, inside the Bulldog Edition, the espresso bar inside the Ace Hotel, where I happened to be staying. The hotel’s spook status centered around the untimely death of its founder Alex Calderwood, who died on the third floor in the previous autumn, a few weeks after trading commenced.

‘It’s like you feel someone else with you when you’re there by yourself,’ she continued, describing a sense of unease. The presence of something unseen. People have said that they felt this too, on the front steps of the hotel, or in the hotel lobby, where the stereo system had the unexplained habit of turning itself on some mornings for a sharp blast of six seconds, at the very highest decibel imaginable, to blast dance music before abruptly stopping into silence.

The bar staff had checked the wiring, the barista told me. They’d called the sound guy. It couldn’t be explained. And it kept happening.

‘The Ace Hotel guy fucking died here and now it’s a bloody ghost hotel.’

Of course, as I discovered recently, there’s far more to the story.

You might understand Alex Calderwood best as a sort of Gen X answer to César Ritz. In some ways, Calderwood’s venture echoed the status hotels occupied at the turn of the previous century, when grand lodgings like The Savoy, The Biltmore, Raffles, and The Plaza Hotel defined public urban life in major cities around the world. Calderwood’s Ace Hotels took this idea and flipped it on its head, furnishing rooms with original fringe art and vinyl hi-fi systems, plunking down locations in the off-cut parts of city after city. At its zenith, Ace Hotel boasted properties on four continents, with locations in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, New York City, Kyoto, Pittsburgh, Panama City, Palm Springs and London.

Calderwood was born in a suburb of Seattle, and fell headfirst into the city’s 1990s scene. He ran event nights at dance clubs, owned his own design consultancy and launched a chain of influential barber shops; the sorts of places where the desk girl would smoke cigarettes and pull tarot cards while accepting your booking for a trim. He was gay; his romantic partners were often his business partners, and together they built up a juggernaut conglomerate centered in and around Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

By the end of his life, Calderwood was also – and this is not particularly in dispute – a drug addict. A heroin user and a prolific drinker who took cocaine and stayed out late, he lived in the hotels he built for months before and after they opened, catching international flights on the weekends while his friends and lovers slept.

Speaking of friends, many of them are hesitant to talk about him for a thousand reasons. They’re sad. They miss him. But also they feel guilty. They participated, each in their own way, and some more than others. There is a profound sense of mourning and sadness that colours his memory, intertwined with his brilliance and influence. His complicated legacy lingers on, particularly a part of him that still feels eerily here among us.

If you can come up with a better premise for a haunted hotel story, I’d love to hear it.

A decade on, The Ace Hotel London no longer exists. It’s been replaced by One Hundred Shoreditch, which feels like every ounce of the corporate hotel experience Alex Calderwood once deigned to rail against. I’m here to ask strangers a series of uncomfortable questions, namely: have you ever experienced the Ghost of the Shoreditch Ace?

‘I haven’t personally experienced the ghost,’ says the bartender downstairs, blitzing up a Sazerac in a Megamix. ‘But people come in asking about it all the time. We keep hearing all sorts of stories, and there are issues with the stereo system. People have heard some strange things in the mix.’

The front desk clerk, meanwhile, is the very face of detached professionalism. She tells me that, no, she’s not aware of any of those sorts of claims. She then hands me a card from her desk arsenal, with a QR code printed on it. ‘Use this code the next time you stay with us!’ she says cheerfully. ‘It offers a 15 percent discount.’

I walk back down Shoreditch High Street to the neighbourhood’s St. JOHN outpost. I eat dinner, and drink more cocktails, and I’m about to leave when the waitress asks where I’m headed next.

‘I’m going to walk back down the street to this hotel I’m snooping around,’ I tell her.

‘Do you mean the old Ace Hotel?’ she asks.

I perk up.

‘Yes, do you know it?’

‘I helped open that place!’

‘Really?’

‘I worked there when I was just 19. I was a DJ, and I got a job there in the basement club.’

‘That’s fascinating,’ I say, my fingernails clawing into the tablecloth. ‘Did you know Alex Calderwood?’

She did, in fact, know Alex Calderwood. He hired her to help him run the nightclub and she worked with him directly for six months leading up to the opening of the hotel.

I cop to my mission.

‘Some people say the hotel is haunted. Did you ever hear anything about this?’

Her face tightens, her ears pin back. It’s just the two of us then. The rest of the dining room falls away into the etherworld.

It started with muffled voices in the stereo system, she says. Then there were voices in the hallway of the third floor, where Alex died. There were also some weird feelings up there, like… you were sure you’d heard someone walking down the hallway, but there was no one around. Everyone felt the same shadows, unexplainable shadows, flickering across the front steps of the hotel, as eerie and present as a death’s head gale, most keenly felt after hours by anyone who dared to smoke a cigarette outside, or else first thing in the morning by the café staff as they prepared to open the lobby bar.

‘He was into drugs in a sad way, you know? Doing coke by yourself. I don’t mind drugs but there was something sad about all that,’ the waitress told me.

She thinks all this business about the ghost might really mean something.

‘It’s about what happened after he died,’ she says, ‘All the uncertainty, all the legal shit. He got fucked by his partners here. They weren’t good people. And everyone knew it. I know everyone you should talk to.’

I try to ask her to meet up after her shift, but she can’t. I’m trying to be polite but this is the marrow of the journalistic bone-gnaw. Can I call you? Can I email you? Can we speak more?

She agrees to correspond by email. I hand her my phone. She taps out her email address. As strange as it might sound, we embrace.

Like me, Alex Calderwood was from the Pacific Northwest. A haunted land, alive with the spirits of the Native Americans who occupied it before western settlers (English, Scottish, German, Dutch) came here during the expansionary colonial period of the late 19th century. The tribes who dwelled here (Squaxon, Puyallup, Muckleshoot, Cowlitz) believed in a robust and active concept of an afterlife, one in which the epigenetic veil between the living and the dead was pointedly permeable. This belief system posits that spirits from the afterlife visited us for one of three reasons: because they missed you, because they had something to tell you, or because they wanted to take you with them.

East London is also a famously haunted place. There’s presently more than a dozen individual companies offering ghost tours of Shoreditch and Whitechapel, many of them focused on the true crime legacy of Jack the Ripper, whose murders were infamously discovered in the environs.

When Alex Calderwood died the media was pretty polite about it. But then came the inquest: ‘The 47-year-old’s room was littered with gin, whisky, wine and Grey Goose vodka, while a pipe made from a burnt brandy bottle was also found,’ reported the Daily Mail. ‘The court heard how on November 11,2013, Mr Calderwood met a man at The Redchurch Bar in east London. The man has since been arrested and is on bail for possession with intent to supply Class A drugs.’

By 2015, a lengthy and brutal probate was underway between the remaining owners of the Ace Hotel and Tom Calderwood, Alex’s elderly father, to whom his estate was left. Calderwood left no living heirs, and had no will.

Today, the hotel group is in the hands of creditors and creative partners, and was the subject of an aborted takeover by a Portland-based hedge fund, Sortis Ventures, in 2023.

The Ace Hotel London is deceased but the group still operates hotels around the world. In 2019 a new entity, the Alex Calderwood Fund, was announced in the pages of The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative newspaper. A trademark was registered that year with limited Delaware liability and a website was established, which now returns a 404 error. There is no further information on the Alex Calderwood Fund after 2019. It’s become a ghost.

On my last day in London, a Sunday, I jumped into an Uber, intent on spending one more moment at One Hundred Shoreditch, wherein I bluffed my way onto the elevator alongside a nice couple, also Americans, pretending to be a guest who’d simply lost my key card. They let me off on the third floor.

I walked the length of it. I thought about Alex Calderwood and opened myself to the possibility that he might still be here, quite literally, in spirit. And I felt… a great big twinge of nothing.

Ghost stories can be found in every culture, in every corner of the world, back to the very origination of agrarian society. So why wouldn’t there be modern versions of the phenomenon? Why shouldn’t there be Gen X ghosts? If you acknowledge ghosts are possible – and I do, despite my lack of a personal experience with said – then surely the phenomenon would continue forth as part of the here and now. Of course there could be modern hauntings.

The waitress from St. JOHN never wrote me back. Maybe she jotted down her address wrong. Maybe my emails got lost in the spirit realm.

I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but I believe in Alex Calderwood. Something bad happened at that hotel in 2013. Maybe Alex is trying to tell us something from the great beyond. Maybe he’s furious about what became of his hotel group after his death.

Or maybe he’s just not ready for the party to be over. So many of the encounters with his spirit reported at the hotel pertain to music, to stereo systems, to DJ rigs, and here was a man who lived to the tune of a particular beat, fuelled by the intertwining bibendum of art, music, drinks, parties, excess, the very best and worst of it all.

Maybe being the city’s first 21st century ghost was the coolest final act imaginable. His true and last grand achievement. The polite American who fell in love with London and never left. The genius hotelier who checked into his life’s dénouement and never checked out.

I want to believe.