(First posted in October 2012)
Last summer,
my husband and I decided to explore parts of southeastern Oregon. We’d read
about a State Heritage Site called the Frenchglen Hotel at the base of Hart
Mountain. With the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge straight up the fault-block mountain
to the rear and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge wetlands across the road, the
remote Harney County inn seemed the perfect base camp for our explorations of
this rugged, sparsely-populated landscape.
A few years
back, the Oregonian newspaper ran a travel article about the hotel and the surrounding country. Built in 1924 on hardpan so thick it took dynamite to plant shade trees,
the eight-room American four-square inn offers rustic accommodations and
gourmet dining. Bonus: there were rumors hat the Frenchglen Hotel is home to at least one ghost.
For us the idea of staying in a haunted hotel (Do-it-yourself appendectomy is definitely ghost-worthy by Richard Cockle, The Oregonian) only added
to the hotel's charm. An innkeeper had died in the nineteen-seventies
when he tried to remove his own appendix. (Did I mention how isolated this
place is? Population 11.) Strange goings-on had been reported by employees and guests over the
years. They felt the innkeeper's spirit continued to watch over the Frenchglen Hotel he so loved from the Other
Side.
Or was it someone else?
Or was it someone else?
I made reservations for us at Frenchglen.
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| HOTEL AT FRENCHGLEN |
You have to understand that my husband
has a quirky sense of humor. He claims to have a Bucket List which he’s never
written down. Until we stayed at Frenchglen, he’d always claimed one of
the items on his Bucket List was to see a ghost. (Another is to be abducted by
aliens, LOL.) We’d accompanied a ghost hunting group in Iowa years ago, and
he’d heard voices, but he’d never seen an apparition.
Over the years, we’d watched various
ghost-hunting reality shows. He’d always laughed at the guys who
challenged ghosts to make themselves known and then screamed like little
children when the ghosts did what they asked. He figured if a spirit appeared
to him at Frenchglen, he’d enjoy the experience.
Our first
night was relatively uneventful. We heard a few strange noises, but nothing we
couldn’t write off as the creaks and groans of an old building or noises caused
by the evening wind.
The next day was amazing: exploration, unbelievable vistas and glimpses of the rare Kiger mustangs that are direct descendants of Spanish horses that escaped in the fifteen-hundreds. We fell into our Frenchglen Hotel bed exhausted and ready for a good night’s sleep, or so I thought.
The next day was amazing: exploration, unbelievable vistas and glimpses of the rare Kiger mustangs that are direct descendants of Spanish horses that escaped in the fifteen-hundreds. We fell into our Frenchglen Hotel bed exhausted and ready for a good night’s sleep, or so I thought.
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| KIGER MUSTANGS |
I awoke when
my spooning husband shook my arm and then whispered into my ear from behind. “Wake up.”
His hand was ice cold. “I’m awake,” I whispered back, wondering why we were whispering.
“Do you see a
woman walking around the bed?”
I peered
around our tiny room. There was barely room to walk around the double bed. Nothing
moved in the dim starlight from the open window. Then the floor creaked between
the foot of the bed and the door. Every hair on my body lifted. “Where is she?”
“At the foot
of the bed. She’s talking in a foreign language and walking back and forth
around the bed. She stops to pat the bed every once in a while. You don’t see
her?”
I didn’t. But
the wooden floorboards creaked in a pattern as if someone slowly paced around
the foot of the bed, then back the other way.Creak, creak, creak. I wondered if the ghost could hear my
thundering heartbeat.“I don’t see her, but I hear her
walking.”
“I can’t
believe you don’t see her or hear her talking.” A shiver wracked him, shaking
us both. “I’m cold to the bones. That’s the first thing I noticed when I woke
up. Then she appeared. Are you cold?”
I wasn’t. The
room had barely reached tolerable after a scorching day. My fingers found his cold
forearm, cold shoulder, cold thigh. “I’m not cold, but you’re freezing.”
“I never
thought I’d be afraid to see a ghost, but I’m scared shitless!”
“It just
feels so bizarre,” I said, “so unreal. Maybe that’s why it’s scares people.”
We lay in
silence. I listened to the ghostly footsteps circle the bed and then reverse
several times. I wished I could see her. “What does she look like?”
“An older
woman, short and a little plump, with her hair pulled back in a bun. She’s
wearing a white blouse and long dark skirt, like from the eighteen-hundreds or
early nineteen hundreds. And no color, like a black-and-white movie.”
“Can you make
out her features?”
“Not
clearly.”
I thought
over everything he’d told me. “What language is she speaking?”
“I don’t
know. It’s not Spanish or French.”
“Does she
seem upset?”
He hesitated.
“No, I think she’s showing off the room and the bed. She jabbers and then
gestures at the wall and pats the quilt.”
I thought
about that. “Do you think she knows we’re here? Maybe she’s residual energy,
not intelligent—like a recording that plays over and over.”
“I’m not
sure. But whenever she pats the foot of the bed, she goes on either side of my
feet.”
This
continued for a few more minutes, and then my husband reported she faded away.
The creaking pattern of footsteps also stopped.
After a few
minutes of silence, my husband cleared his throat. “Since it’s our last night
here, when we went to bed I mentally invited any ghosts that might be around to
visit. I really thought it would be cool to see one. But she scared the crap
out of me. Now I’m embarrassed at my reaction. She seemed friendly.”
He sighed.
“Wish I could apologize.”
“Do it in
your head,” I said. “If she heard you the first time, she’ll hear you the
second.”
We lay awake
for a long time with our senses on high alert. The only other occurrence of
note happened when we finally started to drift off. A bang so loud that the floor and bed shook and
I let out a little screech scared the living daylights out of both of us.
I guess we’ll
never know what it meant
.
This is a true account of a recent experience. I wrote down
the details right after it happened so I’d remember them. Have you had an
encounter with the Unexplained? If so, how did you react? ~Sarah
© 2012 Sarah Raplee
