Ghost stories

Ready for a good Halloween story?

A new book plus a spooky photograph e-mailed to the Daily Inter Lake add up to a spine-tingling coincidence with haunting possibilities.

The new book, “More Haunted Montana” by certified ghost hunter Karen Stevens arrived last week just in time for the season. A sequel to her first “Haunted Montana,” this book continues the theme of investigating haunted sites of historic interest across Montana.

One chapter is dedicated to stories of ghosts at the Remington Hotel in Whitefish — the same location of a scary image the Inter Lake received several months ago. The digital photograph captured a translucent, disembodied head of a woman floating just behind a dinner party in 2007.

Janice Campbell of Whitefish said it was a happy occasion with several out-of-town guests attending her 50th birthday party in the restaurant area of the Remington Bar & Casino on Central Avenue. At one point, she stood up and snapped a photo, capturing her nephew Kyle Maddux and her mother Joyce Budner.

“I downloaded the pictures onto my computer and never looked at them,” she said.

Campbell finally opened the photo when she traveled to visit a cousin in Canada that she hadn’t seen in 30 years. In the process of catching up, she pulled up the party pictures on her computer.

She got quite a shock when she saw a creepy, uninvited guest floating in the stairway leading up to the old hotel.

“I had heard that there was a ghost at the Remington,” Campbell said. “It was like ‘whoa — there’s a ghost in my picture!’”

Since then, guests at the party have seen the photo. While none recognized the woman as their waitress or anyone else in the restaurant, they have different opinions about what the image might be.

Her sister insisted that it must be a reflection but Campbell said she couldn’t figure out how a reflection would end up in that position. She expects some may question the photo’s authenticity.

“I wouldn’t know how to doctor up a photograph if I wanted to,” Campbell said.

In fact, she wasn’t the one to contact the paper. It was a relative who saw the photo and deemed it too delightfully frightful not to share.

Campbell said her husband, Craig, also got the creeps from the weird image seeming to look sadly down at the joyful family gathering. When it comes to ghosts, the image seems to meet the spooky standard.

“You can see through her,” Campbell points out.

A recent trip to the Remington with the photo failed to discount the haunting possibility that a ghost was finally documented. Patty Higgins, a bartender who worked at the time the photo was taken, did not recognize the woman’s face.

Pam Sexton, a former employee and customer enjoying a late afternoon beer, was openly skeptical but didn’t immediately recognize the woman as an employee or regular at the popular hangout.  Both Sexton and Higgins had heard the ghost stories for years but declared themselves nonbelievers — with a tiny hedge.

Higgins told of one encounter that Stevens also recounts in “More Haunted Montana.” It started when her shift ended at 7 p.m.

“I always go upstairs, lock the door and count my money,” Higgins said.

As usual, she took her till and went up the stairs to the bookkeeper’s office. She then heard a pronounced squeak.

“You can hear anyone walking down the hall because the floor squeaks,” she said.

After hearing the squeak but seeing no one go through any doors, she got up and looked through a peephole in the door. Seeing nothing, Higgins bravely opened the door for a good look around but saw nothing with a human or other form.

Was it a ghost? Higgins can’t say. She said the regulars like Sexton don’t talk much about ghosts but Halloween usually brings up the tales of a ghostly presence some believe to be George, an outcast railroader found dead with his throat slashed in an apparent suicide.

Versions of the story vary with some saying he died in a hotel room upstairs and another that he died at another hotel nearby after a falling out with hotel owner Mokutaro Hori, a Japanese businessman who bought the building in 1908 and who looms large in the history of the Flathead.

Walter Sayre, president of the Stumptown Historical Society, heard the second version.

“George went to the other hotel, killed himself, and has been haunting the Remington ever since,” he said. “When you talk to past employees, you hear about silverware, pots and pans jumping of the walls and seeming to fly at them.”

Sayre, who collects fun stories to help interest people in history, said it is reported that George entertains himself by strolling into the cafe dressed in black, sitting down and then vanishing.

Sexton, who worked as a bar and hotel employee at the Remington at age 17 in the early 1980s, said she spent hours alone in the spooky basement of the hotel doing laundry for the 22 rooms. She never once saw a ghost but was present when a wall was torn down to repair the foundation.

“You could see where the Chinese had been living, hidden down there,” Sexton said. “We found an 8-by-10 room with boxes of old Havana cigars and old bottles of wine. That’s where we found the old Hori silverware.”

The chills and scares she experienced were from the old taxidermy leftovers in the basement.  Sexton even lived in the hotel at times with nary a scary encounter.

“Maybe they liked me and didn’t want to scare me,” she said. “There was one room I was afraid to go in. It didn’t have any windows.”

Of the many sightings, none have been of a woman until the face showed up in Campbell’s photograph. Ted Sproul, the owner of the Remington for about 11 years, said he did not recognize the woman as anyone who had worked on the premises.

He was taken aback when he learned it was a digital photo, rather than film on which such images can happen from double exposures. Sproul tried to come up with an explanation of the face as a reflection but couldn’t figure out how it happened in the area of the floating head.

“There’s no mirror there,” he said. “I don’t know how it would appear there.”

Sproul said he had experienced nothing paranormal in the building. His swamper, a man identified as Dennis, spoke to Stevens about many encounters from chills to putrid smells to moving tools for her book.

A Whitefish Pilot story from 2004 quotes a former manager who found lipstick-smeared, smoldering cigarettes after the bar was closed and cleaned. Then, there was an occasional cloying sweet odor at the top of the stairs — perhaps trailing from that mysterious, sad woman?

After some thought, Higgins, the bartender, remembered hearing an unconfirmed story of a woman and her baby who died of the flu in the hotel. Perhaps Campbell’s family celebration drew the lingering maternal spirit to grieve her loss.

Her pale, drawn face remains a mystery. The woman who took the photo believes a spirit did join her 50th birthday party.

“It’s hard not to believe,” Campbell said. “There are such things as ghosts ... but please, don’t come and visit me!”

“More Haunted Montana” is sold for $10.95 on Amazon.com.