At this point, I know a lot of you are still unbelievers, or at the very least, certainly not convinced of the existence of ghosts based upon these few incidences I’ve described. I’m not 100% certain myself, as there are possible explanations for these things, such as, I simply could be mistaken about the absence of the bath mat. I know I took a bathmat off the chair, but it’s possible there could have been another already on the chair; I don’t think so, but it’s certainly possible. And for the water knobs being turned off, someone suggested that you can get a surge of reverse pressure, and it may have sucked the water backwards and made the knobs turn backwards as well. I’d never heard of this, nor have I had this happen before in my 50+ years of showering, so I ran it by Tony, the sober, reliable Plumber; the look he gave me when I asked the question told me the question would have made more sense to him if I’d asked it in ancient colloquial Slovakian. No reverse pressure, or if so, first time in the annals of plumbing history. Anyway, it’s possible there was some sort of never before encountered plumbing thing that made the knobs shut off.
And as far as Lucy’s odd behavior being a reliable source upon which to base your belief in the supernatural, well, come on now! Although she has the title of “Head of Security” at the Riverside, she is a known food and shoe thief, she regularly participates in wanton acts of vandalism and destruction of property, and she has started more street fights than Mike Tyson. If she could actually talk, my guess is she’d be a foul-mouthed, smack-talking liar as well.
Hmmph! Head of Security, my ass! How about Coordinator of Chaos Dissemination?
Twice, my eyes have shown me things at The Riverside that I hope, I pray, were merely tricks of the light, or at the very least, vestiges of the prior evenings’ curative treatment from Dr. Bombay.
One day in late spring, I was upstairs in the west wing, the part of the hotel that overlooks the river and was added to the original construction sometime in the early 1930’s. It contains two of the hotels most popular rooms – ‘Mil’, also known as the John Lennon room, and ‘Tootie’ or #80, the corner two-room suite with the best view of the river and Mt. Bross. It was early afternoon, and I was finishing up cleaning that wing of the hotel; all of the beds were made, the floors vacuumed, sinks cleaned and trash emptied. I was on my final round cleaning the mirrors, and was walking down the western-most hall. As I walked north, from Mil to Tootie, I passed the little feeder hall that joins the two main halls in the western wing. (If you’ve been to The Riverside, you know that this section of the hotel is cobbled together in a maze-like fashion; it ain’t exactly laid out like a Holiday Inn Express.)
Standing in the feeder hall was a man, dressed in a jacket and slacks, with a plain white shirt, buttoned at the collar. His hands were at his sides, and he was looking in my direction. He wasn’t elderly, but he looked old; certainly as if he were from another era.
Now comes the part of the story that will make you say, ‘well, that’s nothing’, but it’s still something to me. I didn’t stand there and face this apparition full on. I was in full stormin’-down-the-hall mode, walking from the southern-most room to the northern-most room at a fairly good clip. I generally walk pretty fast; moseying isn’t something I ever do a lot of, especially when I’m trying to get the hotel cleaned. And I’m admitting here that I saw the vision peripherally, as I flew past the feeder hall. Was it something that was always there that I’ve never paid attention to, and walking quickly past, I mistook it for an old man in a suit? I don’t believe so, as whatever decorations, wall sconces, pictures, etc. might have blurred together in my peripheral to form the full figure of a man, they’ve been hanging there since we bought the hotel and I’ve stormed down that hallway 1000 times and have never seen anything. The truth is, after seeing and sensing the vision, (I also had one of those up-and-down my spine, ghost-induced chills) I took about two more steps and stopped, started back to see what I think I saw, and then lost the nerve to go back; I was afraid I’d see it again. I headed on to the Tootie room, quickly cleaned the mirror, and resolutely, but scared to death, walked right back to the feeder hall to put the cleaner in the linen closet; nobody there this time.
The final apparition was a little more substantive and not viewed from a sideways glance as I was flying down a hall. It was a beautiful summer evening, maybe 10:00 PM, and I was sitting alone on the back patio. As it was a Monday, the restaurant was closed, and no one was staying at the hotel – a rare summer night off. Julie and Lucy had gone to bed, and the rest were in watching TV. Anyway, it was the kind of summer night that makes you want to chuck it all and move to the mountains; oh, that’s right, we did that. I’ve mentioned it numerous times before, but the stars on a clear night in Hot Sulphur are beyond description. You’re 100 miles away from any significant concentration of interfering lights, and you’re at almost 8000 feet. I’ve seen shooting stars that blaze across the entire width of the sky and last for 5 seconds. Also special about that night was a full moon, rising at my back from the east, bathing Mt. Bross in a lustrous, luminescent glow, and making the river look as if it were a rolling jumble of diamonds and fireflies.
I’m sitting in a chair, looking west at the mountain, the river and the spectacular western sky. The western side of the patio has a low limestone wall, a fireplace, and two rather large lilac bushes. There is a 10’ gap, or view, to the north of the northern-most lilac bush, before a 6’ tall privacy fence obscures the view of the river. It is important to note that while I’m sitting in the chair looking at the scenery, I’ve nothing in my hand; i.e. read that as I’m not nursing a martini. In fact, I was pretty much sober as a judge ( though not a Grand County judge); minimal alcohol had been consumed by me that evening, and what had been consumed was quaffed before dinner. I also didn’t have my sound-dock playing; it was quiet, the only sound to be heard was the gentle rush of the sparkling river.
A dark, tall figure walked very slowly along the walk the length of the 10’ span between the lilac bush and the privacy fence. I didn’t hear it coming up the path from the river to the patio, and had it been of this world, I would have. It didn’t walk between the open space to the south of the southern-most lilac bush, and had it been a human walking up the path, it would have. Yet it was as solid and as real as anything you’ve ever seen; and its unworldly silence, as it slowly moved from left to right across my line of sight, was profound.
A man appeared out of nowhere and slowly walked right in front of me; of this, I am dead certain. This wasn’t a peripheral glance; I followed the figure as it walked along the path and disappeared to the back of our privacy fence. I was out of that chair and into the house faster than a shooting star; the only thing faster than my exit from the porch was my pulse.
I’ve made light of ‘out of the ordinary’ things that others have experienced at The Riverside. My standard response is something like “this is a 100+ year-old wooden building with sketchy plumbing and electricity. It moves with the change in temperature, it moans and groans with the winds and it creaks and rattles with the shift of the earth.” I still believe that the climactic movement of this big, all-but-living wooden thing is behind most of the chicanery that people attribute to ghosts. But the wind and the wood don’t explain what I felt and what I saw. What I saw.
To be concluded………
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