by Claryn Vaile
“I’m told by several of the mediums among us this evening that The Keep’s spirits are excited to finally be recognized,” she said. “Apparently they are eager to share their stories.”
The logistics of routing multiple groups was tricky. “It’s imperative you move along to your next stop after no more than 10 minutes,” Rebecca emphasized to the other guides before the event, “because the next group will be right behind you. If your guests balk, remind them that they’ll have the rest of the night to return to any of the sites on their own for further – and longer – investigation. Remember, this is just an overview – a little history, a couple stories, then off. We should all re-convene in the Silver Spoon by 9:00.”
Rebecca’s quarter of the guests remained in the Club after the others had departed. “You’re lucky to be starting in the hotel space considered by many to be the spookiest part of the building,” Rebecca began. “You heard the stories of the ghostly bartender and the railroad conductor in my presentation. You’ve got about 5 minutes now to see what your tech gear or your ESP can detect here before we have to move on.”
Camera shutters clicked. Ghost meters flashed and beeped like Geiger counters. Guests hovered around the bar seeking spirits, alcoholic and ethereal. All busied themselves contently except for one woman dressed all in black, her face barely visible behind the dark veil of a vintage mourning bonnet.
“The spirits in this space are most unhappy,” she informed Rebecca somberly. “They think these decorations are disrespectful, and they’re upset by the whole spectacle. I doubt you’ll contact any presences under these circus-like conditions.”
The historian took her point and saw no reason to defend the arrangement her boss had orchestrated. “I think I would probably feel the same way if I were a ghost,” she said. “Hopefully the spirits will be more receptive later this evening, when most of this has died down.” But even as she said it, Rebecca knew the majority of the investigators would likely settle into the Silver Spoon till all hours. Intimate spiritual encounters seemed unlikely.
Precisely 10 minutes later, the historian announced, “OK, you can bring your equipment and bring your drinks. But we have to vacate this space for another group and head for our next stop.” Amid grumbles, the ghost hunters reluctantly complied and followed her to the mezzanine railing overlooking the atrium lobby.
“Oh my god!” a Ghost Bustie leaning against the balcony railing directly in front of Rebecca cried. “Look at all the orbs I got in this picture!”
Her compatriots clustered around excitedly. “Here’s one, two, three…”
“I’m sensing several distinct entities in this space,” an older woman announced. “One is definitely a male presence, very dominate, very strong. And at least two feminine entities, much weaker, smelling faintly of flowers or perfume.” Several sniffed the air for traces of sweetness. “I sense that the big one controls the other two. Their aura is subservient, even fearful. But for some reason, they can’t get away from him.”
“I’m not getting any of that,” said a pink-caped wizard with dark-framed glasses. “I’m sensing joy and warmth. Like a reunion with loved ones, or coming home after a long absence. It’s a sort of effervescent happiness.”
Rebecca hoped the woman who had expressed concern about the unhappy spirits in the Silver Spoon had caught that last observation. But she scanned her twenty faces for the mourning bonnet in vain. The guest must have decided to pass on the tour and returned to her room.
The dynamic among these paranormal enthusiasts was extraordinary. Some erupted with insights, prompting others to either enjoin or dispute their impressions. Some bent silently over their gauges and meters, praying for recordable, measurable data to validate their intuitive perceptions. Some were disappointed when nothing jumped out at them.
The scream from the seventh floor balcony on the opposite side of the atrium startled, but did not surprise, the assembled ghost hunters -- and the staff. The hyper-sensitivity charging the hotel atmosphere on this bizarre occasion made such an outburst inevitable.
Security rushed to the scene to find a woman crumpled on the floor.
“It was horrible, horrible,” she said feebly. “More than she could bear. So hopeless, so defeated. She jumped – from right here. Oh god… I saw it…her falling so far…something fluttering…white…stocking feet….and then the sound – the sickening, heavy thud as she hit the floor -- dead.” Wracked with sobs, the woman struggled to her feet with help. “Get me away from here. Far, far away from here. Please god.”
Rebecca continued touring her group, only later learning details of the commotion above. The tenor of the event turned from light-hearted to anxious.
From the atrium, Rebecca’s group moved to the Grand Salon (disappointingly inert, according to an intuitive with them), then down the Grand Staircase to the delightfully dark Treble Clef. Regrettably, no ghost musicians deigned to appear. Rebecca led her safari through the kitchen and down the service elevator to the part for which they had all been waiting: The Keep’s sub-basement.
The fact that the Griffins Keep sub-basement was rarely seen by outsiders made the usually forbidden space especially tantalizing.
“I’m sure you’ve all heard stories of a tunnel said to have once run under Carson Street, connecting the hotel to the Silken Rose, a notorious brothel. We have here the evidence that such a passageway did, in fact, exist at some time in the past.” For a moment, she feared one of the Busties was going to wet her pants as she squealed with excitement. With cameras and sensors at the ready, they all looked where Rebecca pointed.
“You can see how these manufactured bricks appear quite different – and newer -- than the stone around them. This bank of electrical boxes obscures most of the blocked off entrance to the former tunnel, but we’ve outlined it in chalk to make it easier for you.” The glow-in-the-dark sidewalk chalk had been Plotz’s idea.
“We believe the tunnel was used for coal cars between the buildings’ furnaces back in the day. A set of tracks at the other end in the Silken Rose basement, where their furnace used to be, seems to confirm this theory. But we can easily imagine the passage was used for other dirty transport before it was blocked up, probably in the 1950s.”
“Shit!” a Haunt Hunter exclaimed, turning his camera’s viewscreen around for all to see. “Check out all the orbs leaking through here where the bricks have been moved.”
“I hear laughter, very faint, inside the wall,” another contributed.
A parabolic mic crackled, and the young man holding it translated. “It said ‘pay me.’”
“No, it said ‘maybe’,” his colleague insisted.
“I distinctly heard ‘Sadie’,” reported another.
A guest in a MWPI leather jacket shook his head and whispered confidentially to Rebecca, “Spirit voice interpretation is an inexact science, at best.”
“Can we come back down here later tonight?”
“You may.” Rebecca said. “That’s why you signed liability release forms. But you’ll need to go through Security and get someone to accompany you.” Kevin, security supervisor, had scheduled extra staff throughout the night for exactly that purpose.
“I heard there was another tunnel from here to the Capitol,” a wizard said.
“We’ve never found any evidence of one down here,” Rebecca reported.
She drew their attention next to a circular platform nearby. “The water source for the boiler, which used to sit on this brick foundation, and for the entire hotel, is in this corner. There are actually two artesian wells here below the Pirates Pub. This one with the heavy blue steel cover currently supplies all our water. It taps an aquifer more than 700-feet below us. But the original well is just behind it here – this hole in the old wooden cover. Hasn’t been used since the 1930s, when the aquifer it tapped at about 480 feet was exhausted.”
The real deal was an anti-climax for many of the investigators who’d expected great things from the fabled Griffins Kee
p well. Neither one of the bores was much to see. “You can look down the open hole if you’ve got flashlights,” Rebecca offered, “but you can’t see the bottom.”
“The bio-energy here is palpable,” declared a woman in wiccan-esque garb. “This old well may be disused, but spirits are still streaming through it into the hotel. Does anyone else feel that?”
“I do,” affirmed a thin, dark-skinned woman who had been silent until now. She gingerly touched the wooden cover around the old well opening and trembled. “The rush of souls emanating from here… It’s too much….” she said breathlessly before swooning to the cold concrete floor.
“Sweet Jesus!” gasped her companion, dropping to his knees beside her. Prepared for such an eventuality, Rebecca unclipped the radio from her waistband and called Security. “We’ve got a fainter here by the well, Salma. Over.”
“She’s so faking it,” one Ghost Bustie whispered to another, “just to get attention.”
Salma was there within a minute and easily brought the woman around with an ammonia capsule. “Are you okay now, ma’am?” she asked when the swooner sat up. “Take my arm and we’ll go get you some fresh air outside.”
Ghost meters went crazy around the well mouths, but the tour guide insisted it was time to move on. Nearby sounds of the next tour group approaching indicated their basement time was up. “Okay, if you’ll follow me to the service elevator over by the laundry, we’re going next to the ballroom.”
The rest of the paranormal event unfolded virtually without incident. Every group but one returned to the Silver Spoon Club more-or-less on schedule, and Grace’s guests wandered in about 15 minutes later. While the psychics and mediums and ghosthunters and magickfolk enjoyed coffee and Halloween treats, Dick Plotz, delighted by the evening’s success, burst into much-too-loud laughter at the most inappropriate times. He passed around a microphone and invited participants to share any experiences or impressions they cared to from the tours.
Plotz dismissed Rebecca and her exhausted associate historians around 11:00. Many of the guests stayed up all night -- camping out in notoriously haunted spaces, prowling the property with their various recording and detection devices, or settling into their hotel rooms. But no significant disruptions occurred.
“I attribute tonight’s relatively smooth achievement to the Power of Preventive Worrying,” Rebecca confided to Dawn as they exited through the employee door into the chilly night. “My mother always maintained that worrying hard enough about something keeps it from happening.”
“Maybe that was it,” Dawn said, “Or maybe The Keep’s spirits themselves made sure that positive energies prevailed tonight. A lady in my group claimed she actually saw the ghost of Harrison Griffin on the mezzanine balcony. And she said he was smiling.”
Chapter 8
“Call It what you will. Assign a gender, if you must. Ascribe a motive, if you can,” Maureen said to her housemate the next evening as they polished off a pitcher of margaritas. “but Somebody Up There hates older women. Ask anyone who bunches the bedding on and off all night as she feels her youth burn away. Who wakes herself with gasping snorts, though she never snored before in her life. Who gazes with trepidation into the morning mirror, only to see her aging mother – or worse, her father - gazing back.”
Rebecca agreed wholeheartedly. Menopause sucked. No two ways about it. No more periods, the obnoxious optimists would point out. Big whoop. The minor monthly mess had been a way to periodically shed water-weight bloat. Rebecca sometimes missed the regular “visitor.” The baggage that came along with the uninvited end of ovulation was odious by comparison.
For a while in her early 50s, Rebecca had imagined that she might be the only woman in history to miraculously escape the inevitable. But Nature was disinclined to make an exception in her case, and menopause, though relatively late in arriving, waltzed right in without knocking. It wasted no time rearranging things to suit itself.
Gradually, insidiously, facial hair grew faster and coarser. Head hair grew thinner and drier. Rebecca swore she was shrinking. Compacting, actually. Hips spread and bosoms slipped. Flesh rolled out from over and under her bra like bread dough.
She was spared daytime “hot flashes” – at least so far. But the equally uncomfortable “night sweats” made restful sleep impossible.
It wasn’t called “The Change” for nothing. Like a reverse adolescence, hormonal shifts were transforming the body she scarcely recognized as her own. A glance in the mirror reflected her clothes hung on the frame of an unfamiliar middle-aged woman.
Failing eyesight was a blessing. Rebecca kept the lights dim in the bathroom to soften the ugly details. She could live with the lines at the corners of her eyes, across her forehead and around her mouth. It was the sags that made her want to hide. Cheeks that had once shone like apples were slowly descending. When she held a compact mirror to her chin line, her grandmother’s features appeared. Her hands, too, were becoming grandmother hands, with bulging veins and age spots. She didn’t feel on the inside like she looked on the outside. Unfair! Where was a ref to stop the clock?
On bad days, it was hard to see anything positive in growing older. “It beats the alternative,” her life-insurance agent cheerily observed in his annual birthday greeting card. Sometimes Rebecca wasn’t at all sure about that.
Puberty had been painful, with its plumpings, eruptions and oozings. The difference at this end of the hormonal spectrum was that, over the years, she had become a master of disguise. Haircolor, chemical peels, firming lotions, depilatory, fade cream and make-up were trusty allies in the daily battle to hold back time. But all the pricey products in the world were merely fingers in a dyke whose cracks spread with alarming speed. At her core, Rebecca knew it was only a matter of time until age swept away all her puny attempts to keep it at bay.
How lucky, Rebecca mused, that she was alone at this stage of life. A man, practically any man, would probably be repulsed by the physical changes wrought by menopause. Rebecca’s ex, J. Bryce Bridger, certainly would have been. No wonder so many middle-aged men left their wives for younger “trophy” models. That heartbreak, at least, was already behind her.
ever underestimate the importance of a handy restroom to a menopausal woman. The little-known, rarely frequented 10th floor ladies room right outside the archives almost made up for Rebecca’s abominable salary.
When Nature called, Nature insisted. What did she expect with a breakfast of oatmeal, yogurt and coffee? Her private tour was just ten minutes away, but first things first. Rebecca wiped off the seat with a wad of toilet paper as she always did, and sat, relieving herself, as the euphemism went. A sharp knock on the door startled her.
“It’s occupied,” she called out to the impatient next customer. Rebecca peered through the downward-facing slats in the bottom third of the door to see the feet of whoever aimed to rush her. She saw nothing but the floor. The pushy pest must be standing well to the side.
Finished, Rebecca stood and flushed. The knock came again, this time louder and more insistent.
“Just a minute.” She ran the hot and cold faucets until she got the mix just right and washed her hands. As she dried them on paper towels, she turned and glanced again through the slats in the door. Pant-legs this time, pinstriped, the rubber tip of a cane. And two-toned, black and white wingtip shoes. A gentleman’s wingtip shoes.
What was a man doing, rapping on the ladies room door? No way she was opening up. Rebecca took her time, wiping down the counter, washing out the sink, fooling with her hair, tucking in her blouse. When she looked through the slats again, the feet were gone.
“Still out there?” she called. No answer. No movement of any kind. She opened the door cautiously and scanned the area. Apparently all alone, she bolted toward the service stairway and down to her waiting tour.
The private ghost tour scheduled on that Thursday afternoon was for just two people. The older woman, about Rebecca’s age, had long, white-blonde hair that fell alm
ost to her waist. In flowing sleeves, ankle-length paneled skirt, and vintage high-heeled lace-up boots, she looked like an exotic fortune-teller.
“I’m Rosslyn,” she said, reaching out to take Rebecca’s hand. “I have something of a psychic gift.”
Of course you do, Rebecca thought. Psychics, mediums, intuitives. If I had a nickel…
“I’ve known it since my first spirit communication when I was nine years old.”
“Nine. Really? I’ll be interested to hear your impressions as we explore the hotel today.”
“I’ve been to The Keep many times with a friend who works here,” Rosslyn began, “But I felt it the very first time I walked in. This place is so alive with spiritual presences that it blew me away at first. I’ve been sitting in your beautiful lobby for about half an hour, growing accustomed to it, sifting through the spiritual cacophony.”
The younger woman was obviously her daughter. “This is Miranda.” Miranda smiled shyly and said nothing as she shook Rebecca’s hand.
Unexpectedly, Rosslyn retreated several feet and appraised their guide from head to toe with wide eyes. “You know you’re a magnet, right?”
“So I’ve been told.”
The woman meant a spiritual magnet, of course. It was not the first time an extra-sensitive observer had noticed and commented upon the way Rebecca seemed to attract paranormal presences. Most recently, in photos a tour guest had taken in the Silver Spoon, they had been amazed to discover almost a dozen “orbs” collected around the guide.
“They seem to be drawn to you, like a kindred spirit – no pun intended,” Rosslyn noted. Maybe it was because Rebecca was so immersed in the past, coming into contact with historic documents and artifacts almost every day. Maybe the ghosts related to her period costumes. But the historian knew it was something more.