Ghost Tour

by Claryn Vaile

  TITHE replaced all of the managers with its own people, outsiders who knew nothing about the Griffins Keep’s place in Denver’s history or in Denver’s heart. They didn’t know how things had been done in the past, and they didn’t care. Never mind that The Keep was unlike any other property they had ever managed. They quickly imposed their generic template on everything. Not only managers were let go, but also general staff. With the drastic cuts, personnel was reduced by more than a third. Many who had worked at The Keep for years or even decades had quit, uncomfortable with the new slapdash paradigm. No one who left was replaced. The level of service for which the hotel had always been renowned suffered noticeably.

  TITHE’s new logo for The Keep, unveiled with great fanfare at a media event, was everywhere evident. It featured a cartoon griffin with huge eyes and chipmunk cheeks.

  “Where are my display cases?” Rebecca demanded of the new front desk manager. “They’ve always been right here, where guests checking in or out can see them. Every month or so, I switch out the displays to highlight different aspects of Keep history.”

  The cocksure young man shook his head. “Not any more, lady,” he said. “Every trace of history is outta here, per Mr. Branson’s instructions.”

  Rebecca’s absence of surprise did nothing to blunt her outrage. “What about the cases themselves? They’re beautiful antiques.”

  “Forget about ‘em,” the new manager advised. “They’ve already been shipped off to our furniture liquidators in California.”

  An Us-and-Them dynamic soon prevailed among staff. Arrogant TITHE associates strutted throughout the premises, dictating new policies and procedures and soliciting no input from longtime staff.

  “I feel like I’m walking on shifting ground,” Dawn commented when Rebecca encountered her on the service elevator one morning.

  “Or on eggshells,” the historian said.

  “It doesn’t feel right. All out of whack and unbalanced – like everything could fall apart at any moment.”

  Rebecca tried to inject a positive note. “Probably just growing pains. A rocky period of adjustment that will pass soon.”

  “I hope you’re right,” the usually optimistic admin assistant said, attempting a smile. “But I’m updating my resume, just in case.”

  The middle-aged women who appeared on a bright late autumn Thursday were casual but genial acquaintances. “We studied under the same master medium,” they explained to Rebecca at the start of their private tour. “I’m Margaret and this is Molly. Of course we want to hear about the hotel history, but we hope you won’t mind if we wander a little or linger a bit here and there to tune into whatever impressions and messages entities from the hotel’s past might convey to us.”

  Rebecca assured them she had no objections. Here was a perfect example of why Ms. Jordan’s cookie-cutter recorded tour wouldn’t work for everyone. The women had begun receiving extra-sensory perceptions even before the historian arrived.

  “The level of paranormal activity in here is amazing” Margaret said.

  Molly concurred. “This throng of spirits would be frightening if they weren’t so overwhelmingly benevolent. I’m sensing that most of them are delighted to be here. The place is awash in warm, contented auras.”

  “While we were waiting for you, I saw a very distinguished gentleman descend the Grand Staircase,” Margaret said. “He nodded acknowledgement to a couple of ghost guests in the lobby and drifted on out the Carson-side doors. The guests whispered among themselves after he passed, ‘That was Mr. Kuhrsfeld himself. That was Rolph Joseph, Sr., the old man.’”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t Harrison Griffin?” Rebecca asked. “Seems he would be more likely to continue overseeing his hotel.”

  “Oh no,” insisted Margaret. “It was Mr. Kuhrsfeld, all right. Another one of the guests whispered that he kept a beautiful mistress in an apartment upstairs, next to his own. Do you know anything about that?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “But the Kuhrsfeld patriarch did live – and die – in an apartment here in the hotel after he left his wife Nellie in the 1920s.”

  Except for seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, the two women seemed quite rational and intelligent. Smartly dressed, they appeared to be business professionals on a break from work. Margaret was a large woman, tall but not heavy, almost regal in bearing, with an expressive round face and golden hair pulled back into a neat French twist. Her hazel eyes sparkled one moment, flashed the next. Molly’s strawberry blonde hair was short and wavy. The blue-gray eyes magnified by her glasses seemed to hold a serene secret wisdom. She fairly glowed with an inner warmth. The ladies’ earnestness and genuine wonder was infectious.

  “There’s a handsome young man up on the third floor balcony directly across from us,” Margaret declared as they stood where the original Grand Entrance had opened onto the lobby. “He’s a bellman, and he’s watching everyone who enters the hotel, especially the women. He’s quite the charmer – and a jewel thief! The rich old ladies love him and invite him into their rooms. Even when he robs them blind, they scarcely seem to mind.”

  “I see a little girl in a long Victorian nightgown on the fifth-floor balcony,” Molly said. “She’s pushing a doll carriage with her little dog in it, around and around the atrium.”

  “I can always tell when you’re ‘reading’ spirits,” Margaret told her fellow medium, “because you get those red streaks on your neck.”

  “Red streaks?” Rebecca sought explanation.

  “Oh yes,” Margaret said. “Whenever the spirits communicate with us, we get a flush of heat. With Molly, it’s more obvious than most.”

  “Sounds like a hot flash,” Rebecca observed without thinking that her comment might offend.

  “Well, yes, actually, it is sort of like that,” Molly replied. “But it’s more than that, too. It’s like the spirits take your air. It’s hard to breath, and a lot of times they crowd your personal space. It can be very uncomfortable.”

  Both women sensed an almost endless parade of spirits through the lobby. “Ladies promenading gracefully with rustling crinoline petticoats, hoping to be seen and admired. Gentlemen strutting, puffing on cigars, doffing bowler hats, feeling very superior and sure of themselves.”

  The two women played off one another’s perceptions. “There was a gunfight here in the lobby,” began Molly, “A big argument. One of them stole something from the other. Very heated.”

  “I’m getting it, too. An angry fight. Lots of shouting,” Margaret confirmed. “Are they fighting over a woman?”

  “A woman? No. I think it was over…a cow!” The mediums laughed, then turned to the historian for validation. “Could that really have happened?”

  “A gunfight over a cow? Seems unlikely,” Rebecca began. “Then again…The Keep was always the hotel of choice for wealthy stockmen. Maybe the argument wasn’t over a cow, but a bull – prize breeding stock, you know? Anything’s possible.”

  As the three walked the hotel, floor by floor, Rebecca was surprised to find herself re-energized by the sensitives’ perspective. She’d become burned out on The Keep’s oft-repeated ghost stories after five Halloween seasons. But the things the women seemed to see and hear and smell throughout the place were somehow opening her eyes anew.

  “So much positive energy!” they effused over and over. “And so many secrets. This is such a place of power. People could be made or broken here.”

  One smelled cigar smoke and saw playing cards and stacks of poker chips on an invisible table in the Silver Spoon space. The other claimed to actually feel the agony of a cook who was badly burned in the old club kitchen space. “Hot grease, all up and down this arm,” she said, shuddering. “I only felt it for a moment, but now my whole arm is tingling. That poor boy.”

  They continued their exploration.

  “Oh my!” Margaret exclaimed when the elevator doors opened on 8. “This is the party floor.”

  Molly nodded and smiled. “Laughing,
dancing…drinking! It didn’t always look like this, did it?”

  “Not at all. Before these top two floors were converted into apartments in the 1930s, this floor had private dining rooms and the two-story Ballroom and Banquet Hall in one of the 45-degree corners.”

  “Lovely! Let’s head that way, can we?”

  “Young ladies giggling. Young men teasing. A band playing – up there,” Margaret said glancing up as they rounded the corner to the Grand Staircase.

  Then, looking as if the floor had fallen out from under them, the women’s cheerful demeanors suddenly transformed. Margaret stepped back so quickly she almost stumbled, raising an arm as if to shield herself. Molly stopped in her tracks, transfixed and trembling.

  “Oh Jesus. This is bad. Something really, really tragic happened here.”

  “I’m sensing a man – very violent, very cruel….”

  “And a woman…terrified, desperate. She’s some sort of servant or server. ”

  “He’s choking her, strangling her – she can’t cry out, can’t breathe.”

  The mediums looked at each other with wide eyes, struggling to interpret their strong perceptions.

  “What was here?” Margaret asked, pointing to the glass blocks that had enclosed the atrium since the Parapet Apartment days.

  Rebecca swallowed. “It was open to the atrium, with a filigreed railing --just like floors Two through Seven. You would have been able to see the lobby, far, far below.”

  “I can’t stay here,” announced Margaret weakly, suddenly mobilized. “It’s unbearable.”

  Chapter 12

  Disturbed by the turn the tour with Margaret and Molly had taken, Rebecca hesitated to continue. “I was going to show you our most famous ‘haunted’ room next. But if you’d rather not…”

  “We’re fine, dear,” Margaret hastened to assure her, “Aren’t we, Molly?” The other medium nodded. “We both put on protections before we came today – just in case. You never know what you might encounter in a place this active. Let’s go pay a visit to Sybil.”

  The two mediums were obviously well acquainted with the life – and afterlife --story of Mrs. Dawson Thorne. Rebecca was relieved not to have to tell it again. They climbed the stairs to 940. Rebecca knocked on the door before tapping the key card on the pad. For once, it worked on the first try. The historian had intentionally left off all but a few of the lights in the suite when she’d previewed it before the tour. They closed the door gently behind them.

  “I smell soup,” Molly said. “Someone’s making soup over there.”

  Margaret was quiet, gazing around the sitting room, taking it all in. “I’m drawn to this corner,” she said, walking slowly to the far side of the room. “I sense Sybil sitting here for hours on end, not even looking out the windows. She’s sad, so very sad – remembering the social life she no longer enjoys and just wanting to disappear. It’s like she’s collapsing inside of herself, imploding….” Margaret’s eyes filled with tears and her voice was choked. “I smell medicine, but she doesn’t want to take it. Doesn’t care if she dies. She feels ugly and abandoned. Her sons don’t even come to see her. And her nurses are cruel to her. So lonely, so sad…”

  “I see a very old woman restrained in a wheelchair in this bedroom,” Molly said from the doorway. “She’s slumped over, would probably slip out of the chair without the straps. She feels like a prisoner….. She doesn’t want anyone to see her like this.”

  “During Mrs. Thorne’s years in this apartment, they say she grew increasingly reclusive and increasingly senile,” Rebecca confirmed.

  “She’s very insecure, pitiful and helpless – not at all the haughty person you always hear she was in her social heyday,” Margaret said, still visibly affected by the grief she sensed.

  Sans segue, the medium turned to the historian. “Sybil has message for you,” she said, regarding Rebecca sternly, “Stop saying she was ‘heartless’ on your tours. She wants you to know she had a heart – a generous, trusting heart -- and it was broken by her young man. He was the true love of her life. Her husband Dawson was never emotionally available. I’m getting that he liked men – boys, actually…”

  She had Rebecca’s riveted attention.

  “Sybil wants you to know that she never intended to destroy the man who betrayed her,” Margaret continued, “Never meant to drive him to suicide. The news of his death devastated her.

  “And she asks that you never speak her lover’s name. On tours in this room, when you tell her story, don’t say his name. It hurts her something awful to hear it and remember how he deserted and humiliated her.”

  Taken aback, Rebecca promised never to mention the name of Barkley Heath in the suite again. Sybil Thorne had been a flesh-and-blood person, the admonishment from Beyond reminded the historian – not just a character. If her spirit did indeed haunt this suite, the sensitivity and vulnerability the woman had in life would linger, as well.

  Caught up in the surreal moment, Rebecca wondered aloud. “If Mrs. Thorne was so unhappy during her years at The Keep, why is she still here? I would think she’d haunt her old Capitol Hill mansion, where she could relive all the elaborate parties of her happier glory days.”

  The mediums seemed to ponder her question for several moments.

  “I don’t know why she’s here,” Margaret said at last. “But I suspect she’s punishing herself. I wish we could set her spirit free and let her rest in peace. Even if she wasn’t always the nicest person during her lifetime, surely she doesn’t deserve to endure this sort of torment for eternity.”

  “Be careful, Margaret,” her fellow medium cautioned. “That’s not our call to make.”

  Margaret glanced at her wristwatch then, and the mundane intervened. “Gracious, my parking meter ran out half-an-hour ago! The time just flew by, didn’t it?”

  Molly agreed and said that she had to move on, as well. “But it’s killing me. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of The Keep’s many layers.”

  Rebecca considered her proposal carefully as they rode the elevator back to the lobby. “This has been fascinating for me, too. Would you ladies consider returning next week as my guests? I’d love to show you the hotel archives and hear more of your impressions of the place.”

  The mediums grinned at each other with delight. “Would we?! That would be a dream come true. You have our emails. Just let us know when. The sooner the better. Thank you!”

  “The Keep spirits support you, you know,” Margaret said as they explored the archives together the following week. “They appreciate your passion and all you do to protect the artifacts. You have two guardians in this space – both female, both very proprietary. They want to be sure you know these things are not yours, but only yours to care for.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “One of them says, ‘Bring back the book.’ Does that mean anything to you?” Molly asked.

  Representative Women of Colorado. She’d taken the rare book home from the archives months ago for research. “Yes,” Rebecca replied. “I understand the message. Please excuse me, Charlotte,” she added sheepishly, glancing toward the ceiling.

  Rebecca randomly withdrew an old 1898 guest register from the storage slots on one side of the center island cabinet and opened it on the desktop podium for the mediums’ inspection. Molly lightly traced the signatures with her finger, almost reverently. “I can feel their personalities in their handwriting,” she marveled. “This is wonderful!”

  The original blueprint of the ground floor that Rebecca next laid out for the mediums’ inspection evoked a strong reaction from Molly.

  “The architect has so much pride in this design, so much satisfaction in this accomplishment. But something’s not quite right…” Molly followed the outline of the floor plan with her open hand, palm down, hovering just above the rendering. “This was his masterpiece, his perfect creation. But someone made him change something at the last minute. An adjustment – minor, I think, but more than he wante
d to make. Something about a capstone – I’m getting that word ‘capstone’ – and ‘blood.’’ He had to make the change against his will, and he had to make it…in the dark?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “I’ve never heard about any last-minute adjustments, unless…” She remembered Lochlan’s assertion that the Keep was intentionally positioned to correspond to the cosmic cycles. “Could the building footprint have been slightly tweaked to align the entrance with the equinox?”

  Molly’s eyes turned from the blueprint and flashed at the historian. It was as if the medium had momentarily receded and something else had surfaced. “You’re not supposed to know that,” her menacing voice accused.

  Rebecca instinctively recoiled from the intensity of the reaction. Molly blinked and laughed uneasily. “So sorry,” she said. “I don’t know where that came from. Don’t let it bother you. Just a blip from Beyond. All good now.”

  Later, as they circumnavigated the fourth floor balcony, Margaret fell behind.

  “Come stand here,” she called, beckoning Molly back to a spot they had passed. “Now look up there.” She pointed to the northeast corner of the stained glass skylight, high above the concierge desk. “Do you sense anything?”

  Molly drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, then opened them again and directed her gaze to the space her fellow psychic indicated. “Oh my!” she said, startled. “It’s bright! Terribly bright. Like something burning. Like the sun…but the sun’s somewhere over here.” She glanced in a generally southwestern direction, then back to the high corner opposite. “What …what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Margaret confessed. “But I’m sensing great power…protective power. Whatever it is…whatever they are…they’re the reason the hotel has closed only once, the reason things that seem hopeless work out inside this building. They’re guardians…more than one, but I can’t tell how many…”