With roughly an hour left in her young life, Leone Jensen took an envelope provided to guests by the Hotel San Carlos in Phoenix, and on the back penned a thoughtful apology to the manager.

The woman in her mid-20s, visiting from Los Angeles, didn’t mean to check out permanently without paying the bill, she wrote in the early hours of May 7, 1928.

“The coroner will attend to my bill and be sure all my clothes are packed,” Jensen wrote. “I have five dollars, which he will get later tonight. Will that help any? My income was due on the 10th, but it wasn’t to be.”

She wrote other notes — one with detailed requests for her funeral, others saying goodbye to friends — before ascending four stories to the hotel’s roof atop the seventh floor. All would be on or near her shattered body, which was found on Monroe Street by the patrolmen who heard a scream and a thud at 2:45 a.m.

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It was a tragic end for a woman, and the beginning of a ghost story that plays out today.

Jensen died a well-documented death thanks to newspaper reports at the time, which detailed her notes as well as her untimely end.

It's no wonder, then, that as guests and employees reported seeing a ghostly figure of a woman roaming the halls or appearing at the foot of beds, Jensen immediately came to mind, making her one of Arizona's most notable specters.

How the Hotel San Carlos got its ghost

Phoenix city officials joined the community's elite on March 28, 1928, for the grand opening of the Hotel San Carlos, the finest accommodations in the Southwest at the time.

Built at a cost of $850,000 (about $12.5 million today), the San Carlos was Phoenix's first high-rise hotel with air conditioning. Over the next few decades it would host celebrities and high-ranking politicians, and was the place to stay when visiting the desert.

The hotel was just over a month old when Leone Jensen checked into a room on the third floor. She would have been just another guest if not for the decision she made on her second night.

According to a May 8, 1928, story in the Arizona Republican, Jensen spent her final hour or so writing notes on hotel stationery as well as on the back of telegram blanks. The longest was to an undertaker in Los Angeles in which Jensen planned her own funeral.

“Bury me in my tan dress and tan high-heeled slippers,” she wrote in the missive that included the date and time, according to the Republican. “Organ music above all things. And can you arrange for two girls to sing, as I have never loved harmony, ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ … Good-by and good luck. Think of me kindly.”

In her last moments, Jensen addressed her reasons for the drastic action she was about to take. She noted various health problems including weakness and difficulty breathing, referencing a nervous breakdown.

"Just another lonesome and ill stranger," she wrote.

The tale has been embellished

This is far from the Leone Jensen tale told today during ghost tours, or in the many haunted-Phoenix stories that inevitably appear with each Halloween.

The story of a sad and lonesome woman who lost the will to live collapsed under the weight of much more tawdry tales of unrequited love, an abusive boyfriend and allegations of murder.

In the version repeated most often, Jensen traveled across the country to see her boyfriend, a bellboy at a neighboring hotel. The bellboy rebuffed her, if not beat her, and on that fateful morning she donned a formal evening gown and plunged to her death (if she wasn't pushed by the bellboy).

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If Jensen had a boyfriend, she made no mention of him in the letters she wrote before taking her life. Nor was she in an evening gown — the 1928 newspaper report said she was wearing a rose-colored dress "of good material," light shoes and stockings, and a tan-colored summer coat.

While the woman in white is not the hotel's only reputed spirit — disembodied giggles have been heard in the basement, said to be of children who died in the well that once was there — but she is its most famous.

If she exists at all. But that's another story.

Have any tips on relatively unknown, must-see destinations in Arizona? Reach the reporter at scott.craven@arizonarepublic.com or at 602-444-8773. Follow him on Twitter @Scott_Craven2.

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