The Croatan's main lobby area featured a lodge-like ambience, with a large brick fireplace, juniper paneling, exposed beams and a homey feel. Former employee David Stick said the place was known throughout the East for its service, great food and its location on the oceanfront. But there wasn't a ghost in sight, he said. Outer Banks History Center
Around 1930, a Currituck family investment gave rise to a beautiful new inn in Kill Devil Hills, near the hull of the ship wreck "Irma." The Croatan, as it came to be known, was renowned in the East for its ambience, service and fare.
Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part story about the often reported ghost of Croatan Inn.
The beach-front structure had a homey, lodge-like feel, with brick fireplaces, juniper paneling -- and something more. A resident ghost, perhaps?
The Croatan changed owners several times throughout the years, then became Papagayos Mexican restaurant in 1981, and later, Quagmires on the Beach, in 1996. Developer Bud Dean took over in 2005, and wished to restore it. However, the property (near mile post 7.5 on the beach road) was beyond repair, and demolished in May of this year.
So where do old ghosts go when their haunts are hauled to the landfill?
Was the place really haunted?
The local lore is that the spirit of a young woman whose family built the inn, and who passed away of natural causes, decided to call the place her eternal home. It appears that the story started circulating in the mid-1960s.
Go back a few years
Kill Devil Hills home builder Kenny Guns worked as a host at Quagmires just a few years ago. He remembered that employees made extra sure the lights were off before locking up for the night. He said the building was so old, everyone was afraid an electrical short might burn it down. "I knew I turned it off. When I came back later, it was on. I went back to turn it off and there was nothing in my way, but I fell. Someone tripped me," he said. Guns said Quags employees would sit around and share encounters with each other, and he assured that it wasn't the restaurant's fine spirits that conjured the spirit.
Go back 20 years
Chuck Voigt, of Kill Devils Hills, is a school counselor at Nags Head Elementary school. He was the first general manager of Papagayos from 1981 to '87. Voigt confirmed the story of the young woman. "That is the spirit that is supposed to be there," he said.
Voigt noted he didn't personally meet the special house guest, but added, "Just before or just after we opened, I was living in an old hotel room in the main building and was awakened by a really loud crash, and the woman staying in the room above me said the mirror on her dresser more or less jumped off the wall, as if it had been knocked off, and she didn't have anything to do with it. She attributed it to a haint -- a haunt."
Voigt said he was aware of others who claimed to have felt the spirit, including one who described her. "She was someone who looked like a washer woman, who was working; not well dressed," Voigt said.
Grandy resident Richard Fletcher worked his way up to kitchen manager from dishwasher at Papagayos, during those years. "I was spooked many a time in there, but I never felt it was a spirit," he said.
Fletcher said, "I lived upstairs by myself. I was there in 1981 to '85 or '86, on and off," in early March before the restaurant opened, and in late November, before closing for winter.
"Just the noises of the building itself. When the wind was howling -- and I was there many a stormy night -- it was scary. I left one time and stayed with some friends."
While he said, "I kind of wrote it off to something outside the spiritual world," Fletcher admitted he was there when the piano in the bar started playing by itself. "We all turned around. Four of us. It was actual keys. Music was played. Nobody was there."
More ghost stories
Fletcher met his future wife, Nancy, at the restaurant. Nancy said she feels she had a direct encounter. Mrs. Fletcher said she was hostessing one evening, and wearing dress clothes. "A few of us, we were sitting on an old trunk." She said a waitress walked by with a tray, carrying guacamole sauce in small cups. "They slipped off and hit the floor. I thought to myself, I'm glad it didn't get me. Then it all flew up, and got all over the bottom of my pants."
She said she felt the spirit was female and young. "I always assumed it was a child. Anything that happened was innocent and childlike.
"We always called her Jimmy," although she didn't know why a female ghost would have a boy's name.
She said she also felt an ongoing presence in the short hallway upstairs. "We had two bathrooms up there and you would sometimes get this feeling that someone was there, and you couldn't get out of that hallway fast enough. It really spooked me. It was just that feeling."
One of Papagayos' general managers was also quoted in a Virginia newspaper many years ago as saying she was skeptical until experiencing it herself. She said she heard a door creaking, footsteps and someone climbing the stairs, after she had closed for the night. As she drove from the parking lot, she noticed a light was on in a part of the building that was closed and locked.
Who was that woman?
Outer Banks Author and Historian David Stick set some of the record straight. He said that Bernie Hampton Griggs built the Croatan Inn. Her husband, Russell, was a hunter and fisherman, and they owned the prestigious Hampton Lodge near Water Lily.
Stick said the Outer Banks was lacking in hotel facilities, and the Griggs had wonderful clientele at the Hampton Lodge who had nothing to do during the non-hunting season. "So Bernie decided she needed a hotel on the beach and bought the site from my father."
He said that a little girl named Jeannette Gray started playing a lot near the Griggs' house, and her nickname was Jimmy. The youngster was a member of the Gray family, which had several children.
"Bernie and Skipper took a liking to her, and were close friends of her parents, who had their house full. And Bernie was better off, and Jimmy spent more and more time with them and became a member of the family, unofficially."
Stick said he didn't think the Griggs ever formally adopted Jimmy, but when they died, they left everything to her.
"Jimmy was no more than in her 30s when she died, and the first town clerk of Kill Devil Hills, the first municipality on the beach," he said.
Stick said he, too, worked at the Croatan, some 70 years ago. He labored part-time at the front desk, waited tables and was even a lifeguard. However, he noted that he had never heard the story about the haunting.
He said Jimmy was buried near Bernie and Skipper Griggs in Currituck. After a two-hour search, this reporter found the grave sites in Water Lily. Gray died in 1961 at the age of 38.
What did Jimmy look like?
A call to the Kill Devil Hills Town Hall, a visit to the Outer Banks History Center, and extensive Internet searches, turned up no photos, illustrations or information about Jeannette Gray. Stick said he had 8 millimeter film with her image, and he described her.
"She was an attractive young woman, but not beautiful." He said she wasn't as feminine as many of her counterparts, but she was vivacious. He said he couldn't remember, but thought her hair was brown. She was 5-feet, four-or-five inches tall, and never overweight.
Go back another 20 years
After the Griggs, the Croatan was owned by the Briggs family of Roanoke Island, then the Tupper family. Rick Tupper of Nags Head acknowledged that his father bought the inn "way back." His brother, Bob Tupper, of Bethesda, Md., recollected direct contact with Jimmy Gray -- the ghostly Jimmy Gray.
"I was employed at the Croatan before my parents bought it, and there was speculation about Jimmy," he said. That was in 1966 after employees began playing the game of Ouija. Ouija consists of a large board that has words and letters of the alphabet on it. On top of the board is another board, shaped like a pointer, with wooden legs beneath it. Players each place a finger lightly on the pointer, which supposedly is guided by supernatural powers to spell out messages on the bigger board. Some religious leaders condemn the game as demonic, and a dangerous outreach to dark spirits -- and the devil itself.
Tupper said he knew Ouija wasn't a game, and stayed away, but other staff members became addicted to it. That is, until one night when they got a very bad feeling. The pointer got out of control, Tupper said. "It wasn't the message, but the movement was almost uncontrollable." About the same time, he said the longtime night desk clerk divulged that he was the only clerk who lasted more than two months. There was some kind of spirit roaming the inn.
Tupper said the first year after his parents took over, in 1969, he had the job of reopening the inn after the winter. He said he and his Saint Bernard dog arrived in the spring, and he un-nailed the shutters, then went upstairs to his room.
The lights suddenly went on in the women's bathroom in the short hallway, and he didn't think anything of it because the place was old, and it might have been a short. But then the water went on. He turned it all off, but it went on again. Then it happened in the men's room. He said he thought a fisherman had gotten into the building and he did a thorough search, to no avail.
Tupper said the lights and water continued to go on and off all night long, and his dog's hair continuously stood straight up on its back, and it growled at the doorway throughout the night.
Tupper recalled having to open in the spring again, the following year. He had married his new wife, the month earlier. They had just settled in when he said they heard someone "tapping out a rhythm on the piano." He said he became very angry and yelled, "Jimmy stop it. You're scaring my wife." At that very moment the music ceased, he said, and didn't bother them again.
"It sure opened up my possibilities about things," Tupper concluded, "and it even strengthened my faith. Because if this could happen, it made a lot of other things possible, too."
See Part II in Wednesday's edition of the Outer Banks Sentinel.
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