The rumour that Jeffrey Dahmer murdered a man in Room 507 of the Ambassador Hotel has long echoed on social media, throughout the travel logs of ‘dark tourists’ and even in the occasional Trip Advisor review. But where did this specific room number come from? What truth is there to the 507 claim? And why has it been perpetuated to the point of causing grief for the hotel?

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The Murder

The Room

The Hotel

The Source

The Problem with Recollection

The Explanation

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The Murder

On the morning of November the 21st, 1987, Jeffrey Dahmer woke under the weight of a 151 proof rum hangover. Beneath him, on his bed at Milwaukee’s Ambassador Hotel, lay the body of 25-year-old Steven Tuomi – beaten and bloodied around the mouth.

It wasn’t the first time Dahmer had used the Ambassador as a liaison site. After being banned from the local bathhouse for drugging a number of its patrons in order to explore a still, but still breathing, body, Dahmer had switched to renting the $43 a night hotel¹. There he repeated his practice of drugging-and-exploring strangers who accompanied him back to his room for some kind of good time. On one occassion, this involved two young men at once – one of whom later testified to having been left rugburnt while his friend had awoke to find his underwear gone. “We thought it was strange,” the man said, “but just put it off [that] somebody had slipped us a Mickey and took advantage of us for some reason or another.”

It was Steve Tuomi who was to become Dahmer’s second murder victim, however. Nine years after Dahmer had killed Steven Hicks in Bath, Ohio.

After meeting Dahmer outside Club 219, the Michigan-born fry cook had readily accompanied him back to Dahmer’s pre-booked room. There the two carried on drinking and engaged in sexual activity, before Steven passed out from a combination of alcohol and the sleeping pills Dahmer had prepped in a glass earlier that evening. Dahmer continued to lie with the heavily sedated man before emerging from his blackout to the sight of a caved in chest and death – the heavy bruising on Dahmer’s own arms indicative of his responsibility for Steven’s broken body. “I was just planning on drugging him and spending the night with him,” Dahmer later said. “I had no intention of hurting him, [but] apparently I had beaten him to death with my fists.”

Dahmer was “extremely horrified” by what he had done, yet couldn’t remember having done it. “It’s almost like I temporarily lost control of myself,” he said. “I don’t know what was going through my mind. I have no memory of it. I tried to dredge it up, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.”

In his bestselling book The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, author Brian Masters speculated that perhaps “blinded by alcohol and madness” – and posessing a fascination with listening to a person’s heartbeat – Dahmer had “dug his fists into the sleeping man’s breast in order to get inside of him. To achieve that which, in his deranged mind, was the ultimate intimacy.”

However, Dr. Ken Smail – who interviewed Dahmer on behalf of his defence team – proposed that the pummelling of Steven might’ve been evidence of a repressed rage. Though “where that rage came from, or why that happened, I don’t know,” said Dahmer, finding some merit to Smail’s hypothesis. “I must have pounded awful hard because the ribcage had broken [and] I could feel the bone.”

Panicking, Dahmer hid Steven in the closet and went out to buy a large suitcase from the Grand Avenue Mall, just a 10 minute bus ride away. Steven’s body was stuffed inside the case and transfered from hotel room to the boot of a taxi, before being unpacked in Grandma Dahmer’s fruit cellar where it lay over Thanksgiving week, undetected due to the stench-suppressing cold of the winter air.

Eventually, Dahmer was able to dismember the body and smash the bones with a sledgehammer before disposing of them in the trash – where the tripple-bagged remains were carried away by unsuspecting garbagemen the next day. “Except the skull,” Dahmer explained. “Kept the skull.”

The skull itself was thrown away a week or two later, when the undiluted bleach Dahmer had attempted to preserve it with rendered it too brittle.

“After that,” said Dahmer, “my moral compass was so out of whack – and the desire, the compulsion [to permanently possess and control someone] were so strong – that I just continued with that mode.”

The continuation of ‘that mode’ would last four more years and claim the lives of another 15 young men.

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The Room

Still open today, the Ambassador has long retained the infamy bestowed upon it via Dahmer. For many true crime enthusiasts and ‘ghost hunters’, it’s become a novelty to visit or even stay in – particularly if one requests to rent Room 507:

The room where Dahmer allegedly murdered Steven.

There have been several first-person accounts of strange activity from those who have stayed in the now-infamous room – including the reporting of nightmares, “heavy energy”, sleep paralysis, coldness and unexplained bruising.

One guest from 2016 claimed that the hotel had “always had a creepy vibe about it,” before recounting how they and their partner had both spontaneously woken up at 3am – a supposedly “supernatural” sign that the significance of this hour “was not a good thing”. A short while later, the former-guest claimed they’d awoke again – this time to find their partner hanging over the side of the bed, head almost touching the floor, asleep but “like something out of The Exorcist.”

On a later occassion, a self-proclaimed ‘ghost hunter’, visiting the room armed with a spirit box and REM pod, complained about the pain in their ribs – which had started to develop when first sleeping in the room directly opposite. “[They] feel bruised,” she said. “I feel someone there in the [empty] hallway. You can’t tell me that there’s nothing there.”

Inadvertently finding themselves in, what they called, “the Dahmer room”, also led to a troubled night for another guest – and a 2-star review on Trip Advisor:

Guests can request to stay in Room 507 at the discretion of cautious and cagey staff, who – while they will not volunteer the specifics as a topic of local interest – may humour guests who are already inquiring politely. “Is there a reason why you picked the room?” one deskclerk is recorded (off-camera) asking a self-proclaimed ‘paranormal investigator’ in 2022. “Are you on vacation or are you doing TikToks in there?” Another member of staff then warns the guest: “Don’t be surprised if you get knocks on the door asking ‘can we please stay in the room for a couple of hours?‘”

However, some deskclerks will simply claim (truly or falsely) that the room is undergoing maintenance and is not available for rent. “There are relatives of the victims still in area,” said a spokesperson for the hotel, “and it is not an event that we feel should be glorified in any way.”

Following a period of constant disruption during 2022’s wave of Netflix-induced ‘Dahmermania’, the ‘507’ identifying the room was removed. Many visitors (most not even staying at the hotel) had turned up to take pictures, disturb its occupants and attempt to steal the door number. Even the placeholding paper numbers were reported to have been taken “pretty much immediately” by souvenir hunters as soon as they were put up, leaving the hotel to give up trying to replace even those.

“We were getting calls like crazy,” said one desk clerk at the time. “Creepy calls like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in love with him! I love Jeff!'”

However, despite its notoriety, Room 507 was never once mentioned by Dahmer as having been the room.

There is no mention of it anywhere in his 179-page official police confession; across the 2 weeks worth of footage from his trial; in the transcripts of his FBI interviews; in any of the newspaper coverage from the time; or in any of the reports obtained from the various psychiatrists tasked with analysing him.

It was never covertly disclosed to a penpal, nor mentioned to Nancy Glass or Stone Philips in their respective televised interviews with Dahmer from prison.

It’s not referred to in the earliest Dahmer documentaries (including the BBC’s 1994 Everyman: Profile of a Serial Killer and A&E’s ’96 The Monster Within), in 2013’s The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, or in Netflix’s most recent Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.

Brian Masters doesn’t disclose it in the deeply detailed Shrine, and neither does Lionel Dahmer in the autobiographically retrospective, A Father’s Story.

Other books written about Dahmer – including The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough by Anne Schwartz (the first reporter to break Dahmer’s story to the media), Massacre in Milwaukee by Jaeger and Balousek (the first book ever released on the case in October ’91) and Deep Journey, Dark Grace by Roy Ratcliff (Dahmer’s prison minister) – bare no mention of it either. In fact, the only books which may do so are of the independent or self-published kind which came far later.

By all official accounts, it is not an official part of the story – and yet, for many, it remains a prominent part of true crime history.

Extracts from various books omitting any mention of ‘Room 507’ in their account of Steven’s murder

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The Hotel

In 2005, the Ambassador emerged from a $14 million dollar rennovation – which had been underway since new management had purchased the hotel 10 years prior.

While the Ambassador previously contained 189 rooms, the renovation condensed the total down to 132 in favour of combining some of the small old rooms into larger suites. The previous rooms were gutted and stripped of everything – right down to their cement floors and steel beams. New bathrooms were installed, original doors and hardware were incorporated into adjoining rooms, smart thermostats were added, old furniture was replaced, and room numbers were moved around. Any room Dahmer might’ve inhabited bears no resemblance to any room today – interiorly or logistically.

Even if, by coincidence, Room 507 had been the room, it was in a different location in 1987 than it is now.

As one source connected to the Ambassador (who wishes to remain anonymous) explained:

“507, as we know, is not the room number. The hotel was completely gutted to the studs of the outer walls and the rooms reconfigured and constructed in 2004/2005. [As it stands today,] the infamous 507 would have been part of three different rooms in the old configuration.

However, there were no records kept at the time of the alleged victim by Dahmer... There has been speculation internally over the years from rumors about it actually being on the sixth floor. However, we don’t have any documents to support that either.”

Photos showing the rennovation of the Ambassador Hotel. Circa 2005

A video in which a guest claims a locally-living, long-serving female manager told him the story of Room 507 was also dismissed as being “completely fabricated”:

“At no time did we have a female manager and one that has been here for years, nor lived in the neighborhood all that time… Our female assistant general manager never has, or ever will, speak publicly about Dahmer. She lives an hour outside the city limits, so she isn’t the one who ever lived in the neighborhood either.“

– Source from the Ambassador

^{The Ambassador’s art deco interior. Photos from 2024}

By all accounts, the male senior staffers at the hotel are also fiercely discouraging of the rumour – and at least one person close to the Ambassador has tried to inform a wider audience about the unfounded claims in recent times. Seemingly to no great avail.

In October 2024, a now defunct Reddit account appeared to have searched the site for mentions of ‘Dahmer Room 507’ and left a string of comments irritably attempting to share the truth:

Screencaps detailing some of ‘[deleted]’s’ comment history and insider information

Perhaps growing aware of just how deep into Dahmer lore Room 507 had sunk – and the futility of trying to convince the internet otherwise – the account was soon deleted. But in this attempt to wage a war of reason against one social media site, the account missed the real source of the rumour:

Tumblr.

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The Source

^{NOTE: Although the blog was public, it felt somewhat distasteful to directly include its handle as though trying to inspire a witchhunt against its owner. After much consideration, I decided to omit this information – especially after contacting the source directly and being met with only kindness and courtesy. However, he was content to use his first name for the sake of a bit more transparency, and was “super happy to help clear things up!”}

The first mention of Room 507 anywhere on the internet was on the 5th of August, 2014 – when a then 24-year-old drummer named Cody enthusiastically documented his stay at the hotel during a gig.

In his first Tumblr post of the day, Cody shared a picture of the hotel alongside the caption:

“The venue I’m performing at tonight is directly across the street from the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This hotel is where Jeffrey Dahmer killed his first Milwaukee victim in 1987. I’m geeking out big time. Can’t wait to explore more after I play!”

A few hours later, Cody uploaded some more photos showing himself outside the room and a view of the corridor:

“Okay, guys. This is room 507 at the Ambassador Hotel. This is the room where Jeffrey Dahmer committed his second of 17 murders on September 15th (sic), 1987. Love it.“

The first ever mention of Room 507 online.
As posted on Tumblr in August 2014 by an excited true crime fan

With hotel rennovations having taken place 10 years beforehand, no records from the 80s having been preserved, and no mention of it from Dahmer or detectives, such posts call into question how Cody could’ve possibly known that was the ‘murder room.’

Luckily, a decade on, he was gracious enough to share the story behind his old post:

“So, in this instance in 2014, I was on tour with a band and one of the stops was Milwaukee.

Prior to embarking on the tour, I saw Milwaukee on the itinerary and immediately cued up some classic Dahmer spots. Like the original Apartment 213 on 25th Street (which has actually been leveled), the Ambassador Hotel and Club 219 – which was seemingly vacant at the time (not abandoned, but there didn’t seem to be an operational business in the space at that time – though I could be wrong).

When I visited the Ambassador for the first time in 2014, the staff was awesome. They let me take a bunch of photos of the elevators and the lobby as I was trying to envision [Dahmer] lugging Tuomi’s body through the lobby.

While I was down in the lobby chatting with the staff, they called down a maintenance guy to answer some questions for me (I can’t remember his name, but I think it was Jeremy). He had worked for Rick Wiegand as a maintenance man on various properties of Rick’s since the 90s. Rick Wiegand was the owner of the hotel at the time. Since 1995, I think…

Well, this maintenance man explained to me that in the mid-00s the hotel went through massive renovations, so none of the original rooms exist in the original format. He kind of explained how the rooms are staggered and more open now [and] the entire floor plan was remodeled, so Room 507 is just in close proximity to the original scene of the crime – according to this maintenance guy. The rooms numbers apparently had changed multiple times since 1987 as well, and there are no guest records available or on file that pre-date 1995. So the 507 lore is honestly just a myth that people ran with (me included, but I was young and excited).

There is really nothing stating that Jeff’s room number was ever 507. It’s just that according to the legend, Room 507 is in close proximity to the original door placement of the crime scene.”

– Cody, the original source of the Room 507 rumour

Cody went onto add that, though he had been to Milwaukee a few times since 2014, the staff at the Ambassador has changed “multiple times – and it seems [they] have been directed to not entertain any questions regarding the case. Which is a bummer… It’s worth popping in though, because the energy is electric.”

Cody’s post was reblogged 20 times and ‘liked’ 42 times over the following months and years. Today, only 1 of the reblogging accounts remain visible – the other 19 having been deleted by their owners or banned in Tumblr’s attempt to remove anything glorifying true crime. However, as some of the accounts still present in the posts ‘likes’ section depict avatars of Ted Bundy and the ‘jeff[Dahmer]-and-richie[Ramirez]-blog’, it’s safe to say it was picked up on by several members of the true crime community and taken at face-value. Including by the long-since-deleted account, ‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’.

‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’ made three posts about their trip to Milwaukee between the 19th and 21st of May, 2016:

• The first documenting their general Dahmer-themed trip
  
  
• The second anticipating their upcoming night in Room 507
  
  
• And the third describing the night in Room 507²

The culminating description came complete with all manner of colourful detail for the true crime community’s mastabatory entertainment. With highlights including a group of drunk strangers standing outside the door shouting: “Happy Birthday, Jeffrey!”³; raiding the minibar while watching a Dahmer documentary, despite the “incredibly heavy vibe” in the air; waking up to find their partner looking like he had just been murdered⁴; and toasting to Jeff with rum and coke.

‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’ posts picked up a lot more attention than Cody’s⁵ (both on and outside of Tumblr) and really began to perpetuate the claim that the exact location of Steve’s death was known.

Google results showing no mention of Dahmer and Room 507 prior to Cody’s post…

… Before the popularity and visibility of ‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’ posts indexes ‘Dahmer and Room 507’ to Google in 2016. Two years after Cody’s initial claim

When a popular Dahmer account on YouTube made their own video about the room in 2020, the story was as good as gospel.

Today a YouTube search for ‘Dahmer room 507’ brings up a range of videos detailing Steve’s death in “the Jeffrey Dahmer room” or the uploaders own stay there. Each one embedding the myth deeper into the Dahmer story.

Elsewhere, several other sites have reported the significance of Room 507. Including:

• WROK News’ Haunting’s at Milwaukee’s Ambassador article
• Boise City Ghost Hunters community
• Haunted Rooms of America⁶
• And various posts on Instagram, TikTok and other social media.

Cody was both amused and shocked to find out his post had lit the fuse which blew Room 507 into true crime lore.

“I really didn’t intend to lead anyone on with that,” he said, “and I’m sorry for the confusion and conflict. I just remember the dude telling me, ‘right where we’re standing is the general vicinity of where the original door was’ and the door right next to us was 507. So, from then on, I just called it 507… In retrospect, I should’ve touched on that in my original post!”

Cody also stressed the need to research such claims before blindly believing them – especially when stories are passed down from a third-party to a fourth and further party “like a bad game of telephone.” The maintenance man who’d spoken to Cody had himself only began working at the hotel in the mid-90s after all – when room numbers had already been swapped around, new management was making changes and no records from ’87 were even available.

“People can get really posessive with their beliefs and tend to write their own truths,” Cody said. “It’s absolutely beneficial to be a skeptic with shit like this. It’s gotta be so frustrating [for the Ambassador and Dahmer researchers] to see frail claims become so set in stone.”

The source at the Ambassador today was pleased to finally learn the origin of the 507 rumour. “Funny story,” they added, “it used to be 213 they all took pictures by. That was, however, his apartment number, not the hotel room.”

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The Problem with Recollection

Even if its origin remained unknown, were one to assume the 507 claim had come from Dahmer directly somewhere, it’s worth considering what the likelihood would’ve been of him even remembering the number of a room he’d stayed in four years prior to his arrest.

As the source at the Ambassador pointed out:

“I don’t know the room number I stayed in last weekend, let alone years later.”

Though Dahmer was notably very open in his confession, his memory could also be a little muddled at times – either due to the stress of his questioning; the genuine inability to recollect certain details alongside nine years worth of homicide and drunken dismemberment; or moments where his shame caused him to be selective about the information he provided (or at least initially – as when he feared being judged by detectives for “branching out” into cannibalism and the consumption of about 10 pounds of human flesh).

While it could be conversely argued that, due to the gravitas of the situation (and the fact Dahmer had to provide the number to extend his reservation), ‘507’ had simply stuck in his mind as a haunting reminder of what he’d done, the lack of direct-Dahmer source dispels this. Even without Cody’s role in the story.

The fact that Dahmer really could’ve stayed in any room at the Ambassador was exploited by one opportune ‘murderabilia’ dealer in 1994, when Illinoisan Kregg Sanders claimed to be in posession of the exact key Dahmer had used the night of Steven’s death – valid for Room 715 and retailing at $500.

Letter from Kregg Sanders in 1994, assuring a potential buyer that the key to Room 715 is “of course the key held by Dahmer.” To further inspire faith in this claim, Sanders believes this was where Dahmer committed his “first” murder – despite the Ambassador being the death site of Dahmer’s second victim

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The Explanation

The Room 507 myth has had a lot of staying power since its conception over a decade ago. Presumably because few people have thought (or cared enough) to look into its origin and have been content to take it with a pinch of spooky salt. For many, the strange experiences reported in the room also appear to confirm its direct role in the Dahmer case.

An explanation of these experiences would depend on the belief system of those refuting them. For some, such stories will be no more than an eerie coincidence, psychogenic superstition, the product of confirmation bias, or the misinterpretation of excitement or angst. More disdainfully, they’ll just be an attempt by their narrator to elicit some clout and attention – potentially for self-promotion or financial gain.

However, for others they’ll remain evidence of the paranormal pull of the hotel and its general energy – regardless of any particular room. After all, the Ambassador has a history of once operating as a residence for drug dealers, prostitutes, and other down-and-outs not unfamiliar with illegal activity – and Dahmer had made sinister use of several rooms prior to his time with Steve.

Even today, the hotel inhabits a rougher part of the city where crime is high. “We are aware of the challenges in our neighborhood,” a member of staff wrote on Trip Advisor in 2017. “Which is why we have a minimum of two bellman on duty at all times.”

It’s worth noting, however, that many people stay in Room 507 each year and don’t report anything untoward.

Though the rumour of Room 507 was ultimately a result of innocent enthusiasm picked up by Google’s algorithm and perpetuated by social media and false belief, the fact it allows true crime fans to say they stayed in a room so particularly linked to one of America’s most notorious serial killers, means it’s unlikely to disappear from dark tourism anytime soon.

Dahmer’s time at the Ambassador was objectively interesting and gruesome enough without the need for embellishment, though not knowing exactly where he committed his murder – and therefore not knowing which ‘murder room’ to actively avoid – may make a stay at the hotel even scarier for some.

Jeffrey Dahmer was never formally charged with the death of Steven Tuomi.

With insufficient evidence to support an indictment, Steve officially remains missing.

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A very special thank you to Cody for his generous help and time 🙂

Appendix:

• More screencaps from conversations with Cody here, here and here
• How Google’s results for ‘Dahmer room 507’ stood between 2016 – 2020

Sources:

• ‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’ on Tumblr
• Inside Edition
• Various books about Dahmer. Including I Have Lived in the Monster by Robert Ressler & Tom Shachtman (1997), The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters (1993) and Step into My Parlour by Edward Baumann (1991)
• The Ambassador Hotel
• Several YouTube videos and first-person accounts of staying in Room 507
• Trip Advisor, On Milwaukee, The Fitz
• Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes (2022)

Footnotes:

1. Dahmer said he made use of the Ambassador and another hotel in the area about 15 times in total, 7 or 8 times each ↩︎
2. The original blog has long been deactivated, so the posts today remain reblogged on several other pages – some of those a few months (or even years) later ↩︎
3. Dahmer was born on May 21st, 1960 ↩︎
4. Referenced earlier in this post as the guest who’d claimed their partner had been left looking “like something out of The Exorcist.” ↩︎
5. Their post documenting the night in Room 507 was reblogged 69 times and ‘liked’ 143 times; while their post anticipating the night was reblogged 39 times. ↩︎
6. As likely apparent, most of these types of sources are websites specialising in documenting ‘paranormal activity’ and strangers personal experiences – not formal facts obtained by people close to the case, et al. ↩︎