My great-grandmother & father owned it in the early 1900's, and my grandmother grew up there- they used to bed in her in a drawer in the sideboard so they could keep an eye on her while they ran the lower floor of the inn!
My grandmother visited in the 80s, the owner was a charming woman who had many stories of the place being VERY haunted. the spirits were all benign, but there were audo, visual, and physical manifestations - the most interesting being a room where the bedcovers were always rumpled as if someone had laid on them- no matter that no one had been in the room, or how many times they were straightened. they also saw a women in long old-fashioned skirts walking the halls that they nicknamed 'the white lady'. my grandma did not know who that spirit might be.
A few months later my family took a trip up there and visited as well. we took along an aunt on my father's side (that lived in tacoma) who turned out to be quite sensitive to the place. she sensed all sorts of weird anomolies & 'cold spots' and was traumatized to no end by the courtyard (my grandma later said when she was very little a fire broke out in the henhouse, and she watched dying chickens burning alive in the courtyard. i guess her horrified feelings stuck there for many years)
We took a long & interesting tour of the place, including the 'rumpled bed' room, had lunch with the owner, and left. once outside, my mother, with her ever present super-8 camera, took a slow panning shot of the hotel exterior, lingering for a bit on the haunted room...the furthest window to the right looking at the hotel from the front. everything seemed normal when she took the film (we were directly across the street, our whole party of six was looking while she filmed it, and saw nothing unusual) but when we got the film back and watched it at home...there was a white figure of a woman in period dress relaxing with her arms on the windowsill. well you can imagine how much we TRIPPED when we saw that...i think we almost burned out the film watching that section over and over again.
After that my mom started doing a lot of research, ransacking old family photos and spending hours searching old newspaper microfilms at the public library- and she found out who the 'white lady' was. it was her great-grandmother addie, who was quite famous in her time. she was a designer for butterick patterns, and known as 'the angel of sing-sing' because she helped save her beau from death row after he was falsely accused of murdering his employer (the death turned out to be accidental). she later contracted cancer and died in the hotel in- you guessed it- the 'rumpled bed' room where we filmed the ghostly gazer. apparantly my grandma was too young when it happened to remember or possibly not born yet...can't quite remember myself.
After my mom figured it all out she sent copies of all the articles and photos to the owner of the place and she said YES, that was definately the spirit she had seen there.
The current website for the hotel is
http://www.hotelplanter.com/index.html and it looks like the present owners are promoting it as a far more upscale and genteel place than the quaintly antique and haunted place it once was.
Butcherbaby
Tue Apr 22, 2008 2:50 am
