Post by Joanna on Jun 8, 2015 19:17:46 GMT -5
Historic Hotels Love Ghosts
In Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a 102-year-old hotel (above) that looks like a stone castle. Built from granite boulders transported from nearby Sunset Mountain by mules, wagons and ropes, the structure served as a prison for Axis diplomats held by the State Department during World War II. Thomas Edison once stayed in the hotel, as did Helen Keller and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But for many decades the Grove Park Inn (now the Omni Grove Park Inn) has been most concerned with a guest who was never famous – or even really known. She is known as the Pink Lady, and she’s is a ghost.
The Pink Lady is not so much a lady as a mist. Or a fog. Sometimes she appears in the dead of winter, i.e., during the off-season when few people are at the hotel. She tends to materialize early in the morning and late at night and when she is least expected. She is chiefly associated with Room 545, where past and present employees say they have felt a cold chill, which they attribute to her presence. Perhaps she occupied in this room long ago. Perhaps not. “It’s not that she was wearing pink when she died – she just appears as pink,” says a man sitting in an armchair in the lobby. “Like a pink fog.”
It is not uncommon for historic hotels to boast a resident ghost. From the infamous Stanley Hotel in Colorado (Stephen King’s inspiration for The Shining to random Days Inn hauntings), it’s almost pro forma to brag of supernatural guests. There’s even a website to help you locate and book rooms at haunted locations. Ghosts embody the past and suggest the past persists in the present; they also authenticate old hotels. The nearby historic Lake Lure Inn is believed to be haunted by founder Lucius Morse, who died in 1946, as well as by the GIs who convalesced there following World War II.
The Grove Park Inn undertook an investigation into the phenomenon of the Pink Lady in 1996, but the stories about her span half a century or more. The hotel was built in 1913 by Edwin Wiley Grove, who made his fortune from Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, a treatment for malaria that masked quinine’s bitter taste with iron, sugar, lemon flavoring and alcohol. It was a household name by the late 1890s. On a trip to Detroit, he befriended Fred Seely, another man in pharmaceuticals, who promptly married his daughter Evelyn and began working for his Paris Medicine Company. In the first decade of the 20th century, when Grove began acquiring land to build a hotel on Sunset Mountain, but found himself dissatisfied with all potential architectural plans, Seely drew up his vision for the inn and Grove approved it.
Some of the boulders that make up the hotel’s cave-like walls weigh as much as five tons, an architectural ruggedness that connects it to the landscape. Builders were given instructions that no cut stone should be visible: guests should see only “the time-worn face given to it by thousands of years’ sun and rain that had beaten upon it as part of the mountainside,” according to one brochure. The Great Hall, or lobby, was decorated with 700 pieces of furniture and more than 600 light fixtures of solid copper made by the Roycrofters of Aurora, New York. In excess of a dozen quotes by writers such as Ovid, Thoreau and Emerson were carved into the stone. The huge, medieval-looking fireplaces (above) at either end of the room burned 12-foot logs. An old photograph depicts women standing by the fire, their own forms blurred and ghostly.
Like many ghosts, the Pink Lady’s history is defined as much by gaps in the narrative as by tantalizing details. The legend is that a beautiful woman – perhaps wearing a pink gown, perhaps not – fell to her death in the Palm Court, the interior atrium of the main historic hotel. The guest rooms line this open space, which is framed by low walls on each floor. She may have been murdered. She may have killed herself. She may not have existed at all.
Although the Pink Lady has been sought with contraptions worthy of Ghostbusters, she is more readily found in stories. Most of these tales emphasize her benevolence, but she is still disruptive: an unpredictable element in a controlled environment. At its inception, the Grove Park Inn was nothing if not controlled.
Seely managed the hotel according to regulations designed to cosset his guests. He made sure no automobiles entered the property after 10:30 p.m. or before 9 a.m. Guests were requested not to run the water late at night. Young children were also discouraged. Signs in the historic elevators encourage guests to be quiet once they leave the Great Hall (above). Early brochures even promise that cleaning is done by Sturtevant Vacuum Cleaners that are “noiseless.” It is precisely into this silent, rule-bound environment that the Pink Lady intrudes, violating the mandates that define this space of retreat. She wanders the corridors. She tickles your toes when you sleep. She does not obey the rules.
Guests and employees like to talk about the Pink Lady. They tend to say that she’s the spirit of a woman who died “in the 1920s” or “around 1920,” the uncertainty adding to the elusiveness of the legend. “She’s like a shadow,” says someone reading a newspaper by the fire. “She’s strange but gentle,” says a guest at the bar. The woman at the check-in desk says some visitors call and request Room 545, but others make it clear they want to be placed as far from that particular room as possible.
My waiter in the hotel’s Edison Restaurant is sure she exists. He recalls strange events late at night when closing. Once, a commercial-grade lock unlocked itself. The restaurant is part of the modern addition to the resort, so the Pink Lady’s purview extends from the old into the new. “She turns lights on and off,” says a woman sitting at the next table, after he walks away. “Late at night.” The elevator operator says that everyone asks about the Pink Lady. On the walls of the 5th floor hang reproductions of old black-and-white photographs of the hotel.
Although the Pink Lady is primarily associated with the hotel’s interior spaces, the landscape beyond is also suitable for a phantom. The Blue Ridge Mountains are characterized as otherworldly in early advertising materials. It is “the Land of the Sky”: the ideal location for a restless spirit.
Doormen open and close the hotel’s large main doors, letting in an evening breeze. Guests flow in and out, some dressed for dinner and others still in their hiking clothes. Upstairs, it is silent: Seely’s dream. Someone must be staying in Room 545, because a Do Not Disturb sign hangs on the doorknob.
Perhaps historic hotels like ghost stories so much because ghosts are like guests: wandering and displaced. Restless. The Pink Lady is the ultimate hotel guest, the embodiment of travel itself. She will never leave.
Source: Susan Harlan, Atlas Obscura, June 8, 2015, Asheville Ghosts.
Guests and employees like to talk about the Pink Lady. They tend to say that she’s the spirit of a woman who died “in the 1920s” or “around 1920,” the uncertainty adding to the elusiveness of the legend. “She’s like a shadow,” says someone reading a newspaper by the fire. “She’s strange but gentle,” says a guest at the bar. The woman at the check-in desk says some visitors call and request Room 545, but others make it clear they want to be placed as far from that particular room as possible.
My waiter in the hotel’s Edison Restaurant is sure she exists. He recalls strange events late at night when closing. Once, a commercial-grade lock unlocked itself. The restaurant is part of the modern addition to the resort, so the Pink Lady’s purview extends from the old into the new. “She turns lights on and off,” says a woman sitting at the next table, after he walks away. “Late at night.” The elevator operator says that everyone asks about the Pink Lady. On the walls of the 5th floor hang reproductions of old black-and-white photographs of the hotel.
Although the Pink Lady is primarily associated with the hotel’s interior spaces, the landscape beyond is also suitable for a phantom. The Blue Ridge Mountains are characterized as otherworldly in early advertising materials. It is “the Land of the Sky”: the ideal location for a restless spirit.
Doormen open and close the hotel’s large main doors, letting in an evening breeze. Guests flow in and out, some dressed for dinner and others still in their hiking clothes. Upstairs, it is silent: Seely’s dream. Someone must be staying in Room 545, because a Do Not Disturb sign hangs on the doorknob.
Perhaps historic hotels like ghost stories so much because ghosts are like guests: wandering and displaced. Restless. The Pink Lady is the ultimate hotel guest, the embodiment of travel itself. She will never leave.
Source: Susan Harlan, Atlas Obscura, June 8, 2015, Asheville Ghosts.
