The Good-Time Ghosts

Unexplained footsteps are nothing new to the current caretaker of Garnet, Dwight Gappert, who has heard the sounds of walking and doors shutting inside buildings known to be empty. "For one thing, most of these old structures no longer have doors," he explained. "And one of the more frequently heard noises is that of people walking up the staircase to the second story inside the Wells Hotel. The stairway has about thirty steps, so there's a definite recognizable pattern to the footsteps. And whenever you approach the buildings, the noises stop."

Dwight said that most of the unexplained sounds he has heard occur either at daybreak or at dusk. He remembers one woman who had a very frightening experience after leaving her rental cabin just after the sun had gone down. "It was quite a jaunt from her cabin to the restroom," he recalled. "And on her way back to the cabin she noticed two people walking up the street. She called to them but they didn't answer. And then she noticed that their clothing was old-fashioned and that the gentleman was wearing bib overalls.

"She continued following them up the main street, which had only a few buildings still standing. They approached the hotel and went inside; the woman following them heard the sounds of a piano playing and people dancing.

"She ran the rest of the way back to her cabin and told her husband what had happened," Dwight said. "They grabbed a flashlight and returned to the hotel, only to find the front door locked and no sign of music or dancing."

John Ellingsen, a former curator and one of the directors of the preservation project, had his own spooky experience at the old hotel. He was taking measurements there in the summer of 1970 accompanied by a German shepherd dog belonging to John Crouch, the other director. Suddenly the dog ran frantically from the building, barking hysterically.

"At first I thought he'd probably heard a pack rat," John said, "but as I stood there and listened, I heard what sounded like human footsteps up on the top floor. The dog refused to go into the hotel after that.

"A year later, I had another scare at the same place," he continued. "I was in Garnet with a group of high school kids, and we'd spent much of the evening telling ghost stories and getting all psyched up. There were about eight of us, and we decided to take a flashlight to the hotel to see if we could find any spirits.

"It was a spooky night with the moon shining, and we walked out through the woods. The hotel was all boarded up back then, so we had to enter it through the back door. We started up the stairs with the flashlight and passed the second floor. But just as we got to the third floor, the flashlight went out.

"You should have heard all the screaming," John said, laughing. "We thought the ghost had gotten us, but a bigger danger was that somebody would fall through one of the holes in the floor. By groping along in the dark, we all got out of there in one piece.

"I had decided that the flashlight going off while we were inside the hotel was just a coincidence," John said, "until it came on again the second we walked out the door."

© Article copyright Pruett Publishing.