The Stanley Hotel, from our investigation there in 2008

One of our FB friends linked a few weeks back to this para-listicle about America’s most haunted hotels. We normally don’t read these, since they’re usually intended to promote some book or some group someplace, but this one caught our eye since we had actually investigated two of these places – the (in)famous Stanley Hotel, in Estes Park, CO, and the St. James in Cimarron, NM.

OK, fair enough, so we read the piece (at least the sections on these two hotels) and we posted a lengthy comment about both of them. Just so you know, we weren’t nasty or vulgar: here was our response to the post:

My wife and I have investigated at the Stanley (twice) and the St J, as well as a few other reputedly haunted hotels not on your list. All three investigations yielded not a single bit of compelling evidence. The staff had the Stanley had a few interesting stories to tell, and we got a few ‘orbs’, but that’s all. The first time we stayed in the famously haunted room, investigated most of the night, and zip. This was a few years before the Stanley turned their haunted reputation into a mini-concession – exhibits, charging for investigative teams, paid onsite mediums (really ???), paranormal conventions with TV personalities, etc. The place is a carnival now.

The St J was also a complete bust, although in fairness it was  Saturday night and there was a lot of noise coming from the bar. We asked a few staff there for stories, none had any. It’s a great old Victorian building and a nice place to stay, but its reputation appears much scarier than the reality, at least in our experience. They do have fake bullet holes in the dining room ceiling, to ‘mimic’ the bullet holes from the late 19th century that were plastered over or removed years ago.

I do accept that a reputation for being haunted is great for business these days, and I don’t begrudge any hospitality business trying to drum up paying customers. But in our experience, actually looking for the real thing is quite different from enjoying a good ghost story.

Doesn’t make for particularly fun copy, does it?   

That wasn’t too nasty, was it? Well, the webmaster there evidently thought so, because the comment got whacked by the administrator and didn’t appear below the story. I guess any feedback that scrapes against the legend, even if it was based on firsthand experience, is rather dimly regarded.

The author of the piece is named Troy Taylor – I am unfamiliar with him and his work – but his bio describes him thusly: “Troy Taylor is the author of more than 100 books on ghosts, hauntings, crime and the unexplained in America. He is also the owner of American Hauntings, one of the oldest haunted history websites on the internet. He is also the owner of a publishing company, eight ghost and crime tour companies and has appeared in numerous books, magazines, television shows, documentaries and one feature film about the supernatural.

Perhaps that explains it, then.

The first was about a month ago, when Zaffi’s team went down to Cimarron, NM to do an investigation of the St James Hotel. We visited and investigated this place a couple of years ago, on a weekend trip down to Northern NM for sightseeing and cemetery photography. The stories that Zaffi recounted about the place were more or less the same we heard – the figure of a lady in the hallway, the ominous always-locked room on the second floor and the allegedly terrible effects it had on hotel patrons when it was accessible.

Here are a couple of pictures we took from there:

Looking down the hallway on 2nd floor of the St James

Poker room, 2nd floor St James Hotel

Not much was made in the program of the room we stayed in, at the end of the hall. The room was known as “Mrs Lambert’s room”, referring to the wife of the hotel’s builder and first owner. The legend goes that the room will spontaneously smell of roses, without any discernable cause…and sure enough, the room did smell of roses periodically while we were in there. We found no deodorizer or soaps (it was just in the sleeping area, not in the bathroom) or potpouri that would have caused this, and it came and went. Sharon found it interesting…me, somewhat less so. And we spent a quiet and uneventful night sleeping in there. We did some EVP’s also around the place, but it was Saturday night and the bar downstairs was busy and noisy, and we got nothing we couldn’t rule out as clamor from the partying downstairs.

For their part, Zaffi’s team did come across something interesting – three glasses of water left on the bar for a time, and when the water temp was measured, one was ten degrees colder than the rest. We suspect it was left on the bar over a small refrigerator under the bar itself…but in any case, they chose to instead focus on the bullet holes in the ceiling over the dining room (which, in its wild Victorian days, was the saloon itself), and postulate that the “energy” of drunken gunslingers was somehow embedded in the beams overhead.

Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that the original tin ceiling was replaced some decades ago and the bullet holes were “reproduced” for the tourists, this is a fairly reachy proposition, and we didn’t find anything compelling about it. Especially given the fact (even if we were playing along) that the bullets in the ceiling beams were probably fired out of bravado or drunken rowdiness, and are most likely not involved in anyone’s death or mortal wounding. Just…stray bullets. By that standard, one might presume large swaths of still-standing 19th century western towns have tons of residual-bullet ghostly energy.

The word that we have, from a friend with long roots in Cimarron and his friends who live there, is that a few other buildings in the town are way more haunted than the hotel itself. Too bad John didn’t investigate those spots…we hope to sometime soon.

The other spot that Zaffi investigated was the Pueblo Fire Museum, in Pueblo CO. We were just down there in March, and our full report is here. They did find, as did we, that the place is fairly crackling with EMF, mainly due to the exposed eledtrical router boxes on poles just outside the building. Their primary piece of evidence was a voice-box recording of someone named Robert, presumed to be the fire station’s first chief, Robert Krague, who died in the line of duty in 1891. There was little else to support this theory, apart from the dubious use of this frequency-scanning device, which scans and transmits radio signals that supposedly blanket across different frequencies and which allow ghosts to communicate through radio waves unbounded by a single frequency…or something like that.

Some of the stories Zaffi heard were the same we heard – hand prints on the window, shadow figure at the top of the stairs, disembodied voices. Zaffi certainly took it on faith (without much solid evidence) that the place was haunted – the people who work there certainly seem to think so. We got two very dubious EVP’s when we investigated, and witnessed some interesting EMF anomalies upstairs in the crew bedroom, but mostly left the place without very good evidence of anything paranormal. It may well be haunted, but we didn’t capture much that evening to support the notion.

The team removed a Victorian mourning pendant from the premises (or, purported to anyway), which also left us puzzled. None of the people we talked to from there expressed a desire to see the activity stop (indeed, the staff there regularly hosts “ghost hunts” for the locals), and why they would willingly relinquish a rare and historically significant antique is a mystery. If it indeed represented a link to Mr Krague, the thing belongs there. Not in Zaffi’s basement. It is the property of the firehouse, and the community.

We still maintain some acute reservations about this program. First off, it is egregiously scripted – the opening videos asking for help, the vigorous and deadline-driven search for the haunted item, and the pleading of the property owner (or renter) to remove the haunted item. Why exactly a) removing an item from a home will cause the spirit the quiet down or b) cause the the spirit not to start haunting Zaffi’s basement, where he stores all these bewitched items, is never really explained. Zaffi has a long history in the ghost hunting world, and we respect that…but this show is starting to come across as a gimmicky and unsatisfying GH knock off, with a “haunted item” hook. Real investigating consumes only a minor potion of the already-short 30 minutes devoted to each case – the rest is intra-team dialogue, John chatting reassuringly with the client (who is always frightened, but usually and oddly not interested enough to actually patrticipate in the investigation ), a little library research (usually very little) and a mandatory seek-and-remove exercise with the supposedly haunted object.

His tech team is pretty good and the drama-level is kept at a reasonable pitch (are you listening Zak Bagans?). But their determination to hammer their gimmick is pretty annoying.