Ghostly tales draw tourists to Calif. towns Mysteries:
The Gold Rush region, with its tales of living furniture, apparitions and phantom footsteps, is popular with thrill-seeking visitors.
Associated Press
November 25, 2001
COLUMBIA, Calif. - When guests ask for Room 7 at the Hotel Leger in the old gold mining town of Mokelumne Hill, owner Mark Jennings knows they've heard the legend: a rocking chair with a mind of its own, phantom footsteps in the hall, apparitions in a mirror.
Some guests have checked out in the middle of the night, spooked by unusual noises, Jennings says.
More often, visitors seek out the hotel - particularly in October - because of its reputation, which includes "Edith," a ghost Jennings blames for removing candles from a candelabra in the parlor.
The hotel is in one of a handful of Gold Rush towns with haunted reputations and curious visitors.
'No luck'
"We tried to get Room 7," said guest Paul Dugan, 53. "Most of the people here want to see a ghost. The place was packed this weekend. We were hoping to hear a noise or see a figure, but no luck."
About 45 miles south, Columbia claims two hotels with tales of otherworldly residents, says local historian Carol Biederman, who leads a popular ghost tour of Columbia and holds a tour on Halloween.
Biederman says guests at the Fallon Hotel, built in 1858, have told of encounters with three otherworldly residents.
"One is a furniture mover" blamed for moving a large wooden bed to the middle of a room that was supposedly empty, she says.
Another seems to be a little boy who takes toys. Guests with children have reported returning to their rooms to find dismantled toy parts strewn about, Biederman says.
"Staff here report hearing a child cry when they lock up," often when there are no children on the guest registry, she says.
A hotel employee dusting a frame in the upstairs hallway said she saw in the glass the reflection of a man in period clothing. "When she whirled around, of course, there was nobody there," Biederman said.
Columbia was built at the height of the Gold Rush. But by 1860, the gold was running out and the city's population dropped to about 2,000. The town was established as a state park in 1945.
Ghost named 'Elizabeth'
Several guests and workers at Columbia's City Hotel have reported seeing an apparition in the upstairs parlor and the front two rooms, Biederman says. The staff named the ghostly resident "Elizabeth" and believe her to be a woman who lost a child.
Manager Tom Bender says he can't confirm any of the stories. "There are bumps in the night, but they haven't bumped me," he says.
Biederman says she has never had a run-in with any of the characters she tells stories about.
"I don't not believe in them," she says. "I think that there are things that have happened at the Fallon, particularly about the little boy, that are just too bizarre to discount totally. For many of the things that happened, I can attach a real reason to them."
That's not going to stop her from telling the ghost stories. "These are things that people believed happened, and who's to know?" she says.
Much of the mystery of the 150-year-old Hotel Leger can be explained away, Jennings says.
Mysterious smoke
His only unexplainable encounter occurred just after he installed a surveillance camera in the bar. Watching from his room in the building, he saw what appeared to be wisps of smoke in the locked room. He ran upstairs expecting to find a fire, but "the room was crystal clear," he says.
He cleaned the lens, but the "cloudy figures" still swirled around the bar. Then, about 3 a.m., they vanished.
It makes a good ghost story, but even Jennings isn't sure if he believes it. "I'm sort of a nonbeliever," he says, "but there are some things you can't explain."
The stories keep guests such as Dugan and his girlfriend, Karen Hilchey, 45, both of Atascadero, coming back. Both said they'll return to the hotel, and they have several other hotels with ghostly reputations in mind for visits, Hilchey said.
"We really want to see one. We've always been into this," she said.
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