On Court Square · Fredericktown, Missouri
A working hotel, a bus depot, a café — and a register longer than anyone in town remembers. Here is what the newspapers actually recorded.
The Womack Hotel, c. 1940s · “Home when you're away from home”
1929
The Womack family had run the old Commercial Hotel since about 1927. In September 1929 they bought and remodeled the Perringer building across the street — fresh upstairs guest rooms, baths, a corner lobby — and moved in as Womack's New Hotel. Lawrence “L.L.” Womack and his wife, Alice, ran it (their son Clarence took the desk by 1931), and for four decades it doubled as the town's Greyhound bus depot and café. “On Court Square,” as every ad said.
1931
In February 1931, Mrs. Emma Cole, 59, set out for Fredericktown with more than $1,500 in cash and her young cousin, Amos Lewis. She was never seen alive again. That midnight, Lewis walked into the Womack lobby, where proprietor Clarence Womack took his hire car and sold him a bus ticket to Memphis. He boarded — and vanished. The hotel lobby is the last place anyone can prove he stood. Her body was found that May, wrapped in an army blanket. The inquest named Lewis. He was never found.
Her death certificate →1932
May 1932: five bandits robbed the Security Bank across the square and shot their way out. As they fled, one bullet punched through a second-story window of the Womack Hotel. A posse ran all five down within two hours.
1938
The hardest one. On May 27, 1938, during a convention, sixteen-month-old Peggy Louise Womack — the hotel family's own daughter — was napping in an upstairs room. She crawled from the bed and fell so that her neck caught between the footboard and the mattress. She had been gone only minutes when she was found. “The tragic event,” the paper wrote, “threw a pall of sadness over the entire community.”
1970
The hotel era closed in 1970, when the building went up for sale — “only Bus Station Equipment and space,” the ad read, “ideal for a nursing home, apartments, etc.” The Womacks had run the hotel, and the bus line, right to the end.
The Democrat-News · May 14, 1931
Mrs. Emma Cole, 59, left home with $1,500 and her young cousin. Her body was found in May, wrapped in an army blanket. The inquest named Lewis — last seen buying a bus ticket in the Womack lobby at midnight.
Her death certificate →
The case that came through the lobby
She was never seen alive again after February 24, 1931. The last place anyone can prove her cousin stood is the desk of this hotel — where the proprietor took his hire car and sold him a ticket out of town.
He boarded the bus to Memphis and vanished. No one has found him since.
From the register
Four people died inside these walls. Here are their certificates — the State of Missouri's own record. Tap any one to read it.
16 months · May 27, 1938
The hotel family's own child — fell from her bed during a convention.
77 · March 21, 1934
The family's grandmother, who had been living at the hotel for months.
65 · Aug 18, 1943
A traveling appraiser from Illinois; his heart gave out in his room.
49 · July 8, 1946
A World War I veteran who drank himself to death over a week upstairs.
The family plot — Peggy Louise's stone stands behind her father's
What the papers don't say
We went looking. Five hundred and forty-six newspaper pages, 1917 to today. Every “ghost” and “haunted” we found in print near this hotel turned out to be a movie listing or a church notice — not one period ghost story.
If the Womack is haunted, the haunting is newer than the newsprint. We'd rather tell you that than sell you a legend. So come decide for yourself — in the rooms where these things actually happened.
One more, for the record: the old Madison House on the west side of the square was a different — and older — hotel. Any Civil War–era hotel lore in Fredericktown most likely belongs to it, not to the Womack. We'd rather get it right.
See for yourself
