Ghost Tour

by Claryn Vaile

  “Now, in the 1930s, when this was the Aladdin Room, the restaurant was entirely draped in billowy silks, covering the walls and hanging from the ceiling to create the atmosphere of an exotic boudoir. One evening, a flicked cigarette ember set the fabric ablaze, enveloping diners and dancers in a suffocating canopy of dripping flame.” She secretly savored the shocked expressions on her listeners’ faces.

  “Firefighters from a nearby station extinguished the blaze in less than 12 minutes after they arrived on the scene. But it was too late for the seven revelers who died agonizing deaths.”

  “Wait…Is this like the Titanic being ‘unsinkable?’” a bespectacled guest in a bowtie sought to clarify. “I thought you said this place couldn’t burn.”

  Rebecca explained. “The building is fireproof, yes. But not the contents. This restaurant space itself was undamaged. Only the decorative features, furniture and such, were destroyed.”

  “And the victims,” a woman dressed for Afternoon Tea in a flowered dress said quietly. “Is anything known about them?”

  Already regretting the beans she’d spilled, Rebecca knew there was no retrieving them. “The Keep’s owners and management at the time wielded their considerable influence to bury the story,” she confided. “But a small piece in the Denver Times-Herald reported that several victims of the tragedy were hotel orchestra members.”

  “Cool,” Jacob whispered loudly to Hannah.

  From behind Rebecca, an authoritative voice dissented. “There’s no evidence that management ever tried to cover anything up,” declared Mr. Beaumont. He glowered at Rebecca, who wished she could disappear into her top hat like a magician’s rabbit. “If you want to continue conducting these so-called ‘ghost’ tours,” he admonished her directly, heedless of her audience, “I suggest you stick to the script.”

  The flush that began with embarrassment deepened with outrage. Rebecca pulled herself together and continued the tour like the professional she was. But she was smarting still when she retreated to the basement to punch the timeclock after her shift. The service elevator she usually rode up to the archives had a hastily scrawled “Out of Order” sign stuck on the control panel.

  Breakdowns and malfunctions were daily occurrences in the old building. To the casual visitor, the Griffin’s Keep was still impressive. But those who knew the hotel intimately understood that the façade was deceptive. As a “woman of a certain age,” Rebecca could relate personally to the hotel’s struggles with leaky plumbing, deteriorating appearance, and fluctuating internal temperature.

  She was prepared to walk through the basement kitchens to the other service elevator when the out-of-order lift arrived unexpectedly, without a sound. The automatic doors slid open to reveal the floor of the car strewn with a dozen short-stemmed roses, weeping petals.

  Finding the sight inexplicably disturbing, Rebecca hesitated as the doors closed slowly. She opted to take the service stairs instead.

  Chapter 2

  Mr. Beaumont looked pleased later that afternoon as employees filtered into the Longs Peak meeting room and helped themselves to coffee and pastries from long tables just inside the entrance. Interdepartmental mingling was rare at these mandatory staff meetings. Housekeepers sat with housekeepers, accountants with accountants, cooks with other cooks. The whispered exchanges between co-workers seemed more solemn and urgent than usual.

  “That must be why they called us together,” Rebecca heard a room service staffer say. “They’ve got to say something about her. How can all the big-wigs look so happy?”

  The back rows filled up first, as always. Only the hotel historian marched straight to the front so as to miss none of the presentation. Maintenance engineer Lochlan MacKenzie, who sometimes assisted Rebecca with the ghost tours, moved up to keep her company.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” Mr. Beaumont began cheerily when all were settled.

  “Good afternoon,” a few associates replied less enthusiastically.

  “I’ve called this All Hands meeting today to bring you all up to date on the new ownership of the hotel. As you may remember from our previous briefing, the more than 100 parties who expressed interest in the Griffins Keep had been narrowed down to three who submitted bids prior to the deadline date. After months of negotiations with the finalists, I have some excellent news that will affect you all.”

  The assembled associates braced themselves.

  Mr. Beaumont pressed the clicker in his hand to bring up his first Powerpoint slide. “It is my pleasure to officially announce that the Griffins Keep Hotel and Spa has been acquired by Tagawa International Theaters, Hospitality, and Entertainment, Incorporated.”

  The big screen in the front of the room displayed the TITHE logo. Though entirely coincidental, the acronym was apt, as company founder Chad Tagawa was well known for contributing 10% of his corporation’s profits to the Church of Scientology.

  “Who is Chad Tagawa?” the next slide was headed, and Mr. Beaumont summarized the billionaire founder’s rags-to-riches story. A third generation Japanese American, Tagawa had grown up in California, surfing, hang gliding, working at a sushi bar and taking the occasional community college business course. At the age of 23, Tagawa bought a microwave burrito and a lottery ticket. That ticket matched all the numbers in one of the biggest Powerball drawings of all time. A new American millionaire was born.

  Chad’s uncle Stan Tagawa was the financial genius who managed his young nephew’s fortune, ambitiously acquiring one successful enterprise after another. Now 38, Chad Tagawa still enjoyed carefree bachelorhood, leisure sports, and microwave burritos – at his three palatial estates.

  “What is TITHE?” the next slide asked. The corporation’s bulleted list included a movie theatre chain, a film production company, amusement parks, casinos, cruise ships, and hotels around the globe. Subsequent slides highlighted examples of TITHE’s signature properties: Wallaby Wunderland in Queensland, Australia, a wildlife park and family-friendly resort built on a repossessed sheep property, and Haunted Haggis Castle in the Scottish Highlands, a slickly refurbished seventeenth-century fortress that featured animatronic “ghosts” and full-moon “Druid Barbeques” in a circle of fake standing stones.

  “What is TITHE’s Corporate Vision?” As this slide appeared, Mr. Beaumont gestured for a young gentleman who had been standing to the side to come forward and take the clicker. “To answer that question, I’d like to introduce the future managing director of the Griffins Keep, Mr. Mickey Branson.”

  Rebecca supposed the blonde, brown-eyed Branson to be 35 – tops. Good looking, athletic, and confident, dressed California Corporate-style in polo shirt and khakis, Branson accepted the clicker and shook Beaumont’s hand, beaming broadly. “Hey everybody, how’re ya doin’ this fine afternoon?” he began, energetically striding back and forth across the front of the room as the soon-to-be-unseated GM stepped aside.

  “Wow, you all look so serious and worried. You’d think somebody had died or something.” Several back-of-the-house employees cringed at this all-too-apt characterization.

  “This is awesome news for you guys and The Keep,” Branson insisted. “A brand new beginning! I’m excited. Are you excited? You will be by the time I finish this presentation, I guarantee it. Because TITHE is all about creating unique and entertaining experiences for our guests. It’s about fun!”

  Lord help us, Rebecca thought. The Keep has fallen into the clutches of cheerleaders.

  Following Branson’s whirlwind video overview of TITHE’s successes worldwide, he explained that new management would be taking over The Keep in November. “And then,” he rubbed his hands together, grinning, “we’re gonna bring this old dinosaur back to life, just like in ‘Jurassic Park.’”

  “As I recall,” Rebecca said to Lochlan after the All-Hands meeting, “Jurassic Park ended in disaster.”

  “Mmm,” the engineer murmured, nodding agreement. “The dire consequences of manipulating natural processes without fully considering the
ramifications. “

  “All in the pursuit of popular entertainment and profit. Is TITHE missing a lesson here?”

  “So it would seem,” Lochlan said, “although in this case, they may be tinkering with supernatural processes.”

  Here he goes again, Rebecca thought. As much as she liked and respected the engineer, his theories about The Keep’s “higher function” were a little too out-there for her. She knew Lochlan was dead serious about the building’s mystical role in both Denver’s development and the spiritual continuum. And she knew his commitment to preserving The Keep’s magic was genuine -- albeit delusional.

  Rebecca’s reasons for concern were more down-to-earth. Her personal and professional mission was preservation of the Griffins Keep’s legacy. The hotel’s history was inextricably intertwined with the history of the city and the Rocky Mountain West. To understand The Keep’s story was to understand Denver’s distinctive character, the circumstances and choices that had shaped it. The past had value, and connecting to it through a physical place that could be explored and experienced, like the Griffins Keep, provided a touchstone that deserved respect.

  Like every other Keep associate, Rebecca was anxious about what to expect with the change of ownership. Though she had never been impressed by the current management group, it was a classic case of the devil-you-know vs. the devil-you-don’t know. The hotel had not changed hands in more than 30 years, atypical in the hospitality industry. The owners had let things slide over the last few years with regards to maintenance and upkeep. Griffins Keep daily operations had become stagnant. Employees were overworked and underpaid. Standards slipped.

  Devoted employees discovered that the more they struggled, the deeper their morales sank. They grasped the prospect of TITHE ownership like a low-hanging branch, hoping new capital and leadership might lift the hotel out of the quagmire of mediocrity into which it was sinking.

  And then there was Rebecca’s “manager.” Director of Sales and Marketing Dick Plotz had never even taken her hotel tour. Only after she’d been on the job a year did she insist that they hold one of their one-on-one meetings in her “office,” the hotel archives which he had never visited. He’d endured her showcasing of its treasures without interest or comment. From New Jersey, not Colorado, Plotz never quite got what the hotel meant to the city and to the West. He couldn’t care less about The Keep’s history because he couldn’t see how it translated into direct profit.

  While she preferred his hands-off style to micro-management any day, when Rebecca needed support or advocacy, Plotz rarely provided it. Acquisition by TITHE meant his days with The Keep were numbered. But Rebecca feared that the geniuses behind Haunted Haggis Castle would have even less regard for Griffins Keep legacy than Plotz had.

  Not until the next day did Rebecca learn about Momaday’s mysterious death from Lochlan. Usually out of the employee loop, she often felt like a snorkeler on the surface, observing but only partially immersed in the ecosystem that flourished below. The other hotel associates existed in a world of which she was not really part. She floated on the interface between hotel staff and hotel guests, belonging with neither of them.

  “No wonder the staff is so upset. But I don’t understand,” she said. “How could Momaday have fallen down an open elevator shaft? It makes no sense. Why would the doors open with no elevator there? Did she jump? Did she trip?” An even more disturbing possibility dawned upon Rebecca. “Was she pushed?”

  “We may never know. It makes no logical sense, you’re right,” Lochlan agreed. “But you know as well as I do that some things that happen in The Keep have been known to defy logic.” As they approached the group gathered for today’s tour, he reminded Rebecca, “It’s exactly those logic-defying stories these folks are hungry for.” He split off from Rebecca and headed toward the back of the Treble Clef, leaving her to handle the check-ins and awaiting his turn as co-tour guide.

  Following the usual introduction and ghost musicians tale – without the fire postscript -- Rebecca said, “Because our group is so large today, we’re going to divide you into two as we begin exploring the hotel. Half of you will be escorted by my colleague, Lochlan MacKenzie – there in the back”

  He waved to identify himself. A tall, fit man in his late 50s, he wore his once-dark long hair pulled back, and looked unaccustomed to the tie he was obliged to wear when leading tours. He leaned casually against a support pillar. His white shirt’s rolled-up sleeves revealed the forearms of a working man. His smile revealed quiet assurance.

  “Lochlan has been here at Griffins Keep as a maintenance engineer for many years, so he literally knows the place inside and out. If you have a particular interest in our architecture, or in The Keep’s Masonic and Knights Templar connections, you’ll definitely want to be part of Lochlan’s group.”

  “So, you know where all the bodies are buried?” a comedian called out.

  “Sure,” he replied good-naturedly.

  The historian continued. “The rest of you are with me, and we’ll be starting with the Kipling cigar bar, so prepare to hold your breath,”

  “My group is heading for the Pirates Pub,” Lochlan announced, “Step lively, maties!”

  “Are we allowed to take photos?” a guest asked Rebecca.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Rebecca replied. “I should have mentioned that at the beginning. You’re welcome to take photos anywhere on the tour.”

  “What about special lenses for capturing things not visible to the naked eye?” a young man in a brown sweater vest inquired.

  Rebecca shook her head. “Our management frowns upon such things,” she answered automatically. But she was still smarting from Mr. Beaumont’s public rebuke and miffed by his inconsideration. The GM would be gone soon, anyway. The hell with him.

  “On second thought,” she amended, “as long as you’re not disruptive, I’ll never know the difference. Just promise you’ll email me any spirit images you might capture.”

  Several guests smiled at the possibility.

  The Kipling transported guests to an Edwardian gentlemen’s library, with its mahogany paneling, sofas and wingback chairs upholstered in burgundy velvet or deep-brown leather. Bookshelves filled one wall, complete with copious leather-bound volumes and a library ladder on a rail. The curved bar was black walnut, as was the floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted humidor cabinet where elite club members stored their private cigar collections for a substantial fee. By this time of day, the aromas of a dozen different smokes were battling for dominance.

  “This is the only place in downtown Denver with a special license that actually allows smoking indoors,” Rebecca explained. “And that continues a longtime Keep tradition of wheeling and dealing over brandies and cigars.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m going to wait outside,” an elderly lady said, holding a lace-trimmed hanky over her nose and mouth and excusing herself.

  “I completely understand,” Rebecca said, “and for the rest of you, I’ll be quick.

  “Now, before this space became a bar, the wall on that far side, with the leaded glass windows and louvered shutters -- That was the original Grand Entrance to the hotel. It’s in the middle of the Grand Avenue side of the building, and if you get a chance to look at that side from across the street sometime, you’ll see that it has a much more impressive appearance than either of the two entrances we use today. Here on the ground floor, just outside, there’s a profile of our founder Harrison Griffin carved in the stone on one side and his initials in a medallion on the other.

  “Harrison was on the scene here in Denver during the 1859 gold rush that gave Colorado its start. But he knew that the one thing even more precious than gold in the West was water. A gifted diviner, Harrison located a huge aquifer beneath the baby city and made his fortune with the Griffin Water and Drilling Company.”

  “So that’s how he was able to finance this place,” a guest concluded for her.

  “Exactly,” she confirmed. “But what they could never hav
e imagined in the 1890s was twentieth-century automobile traffic on Grand, which grew heavier and faster until it finally made loading and unloading hotel guests on this side of the building too dangerous. They had to close this entrance in the 1930s, and this whole wall was added to create the bar.”

  The tour-takers struggled to imagine the former layout.

  “I’m sure our architect, Edward Brookings, rolled over in his grave when they made the change, because now, when people enter on the Carson Street side, it’s like coming in the back door. You can’t even see the Front Desk – it’s around the corner – and everyone tries to check in with the poor concierge.”

  Nods from some of her listeners indicated their familiarity with the confusion.

  “I encourage you, as we’re walking out, to pause for a moment in the doorway and take in the view of the atrium lobby as it was intended to unfold before you when you entered the hotel. I’m sure you’ll agree it is much more impactful.”

  Brooking’s masterful vision had placed the entrance in the center of the hypotenuse of the right-triangular building, facing the 90-degree corner of the soaring atrium. The power of the design and the delight of the details both energized and soothed all who entered,

  Ghost story time.

  “Now, when this was the Grand Entrance, Harrison Griffin’s office was in the back part of this room. And strange goings-on in that space after hours make us wonder if Harrison’s spirit is still around, trying to run things in his namesake hotel.

  “My favorite report comes from about six years ago. The manager was working late one night, figuring out the day’s receipts and doing the deposit, when all of a sudden the sound system came on, skipping from track to track and loud to soft. The manager walked over to deal with the problem and discovered that the sound system was not, in fact, turned on – it wasn’t getting any power. And yet the noise continued. In frustration, he blurted out, ‘Harry, please – I’m trying to work!’ And it stopped instantly.”