Bethlehem landmark hosts Rooms with a Boo over April weekend.
By MARCIA WHITE
The Express-Times
BETHLEHEM | Unexplained things happen, especially at night.
A tap on the shoulder by an unseen hand.
The feeling of a presence but no earthly body in sight.
Staff and guests at Historic Hotel Bethlehem have been saying for years it is haunted, and the time has come to talk about these ghostly experiences in the daylight, to embrace the hotel's turbulent past to ensure its future, hotel historian and special events manager Natalie Bock said.
The hotel recently announced plans for an April weekend event, Rooms with a Boo, featuring ghost tours, lectures by noted paranormal experts and even a complimentary Bloody Mary at midnight.
The hotel's management, under its new, private owners Christmas City LLC, "was very reluctant to discuss the hauntedness in general," Bock said. And, in making the decision to offer an entertaining weekend tied to the spirit world, did consider the fact a tragic fire at the hotel less than 20 years ago claimed five souls.
Bock pointed to the early history of the hotel site as the location of Bethlehem's first house, in 1741, its time as site of the former Eagle Hotel in the 1800s and its Roaring '20s heyday as a Bethlehem Steel Co. creation as the sources of its reported other-worldly occurrences. She said the event in no way will reference the blaze.
The fire, Jan. 28, 1989, resulted from a faulty electrical cord on a hotel guest's travel iron, city officials ruled.
Among the dead were elderly residents from the nearby Monocacy Towers senior apartments who were being housed at the hotel while renovations were taking place at the towers, officials said.
The victims were found collapsed and overcome by smoke. Some died trying to escape, others died in the days following the fire.
"Hopefully the funk hanging over this hotel is gone and the families have come to terms with it," Bock replied when asked if fire victims' family members, some who are still alive and dealing with their losses, might question the tactfulness of the haunted hotel events.
"We are struggling to do our best, to have a beautiful hotel, one of (the few in the country) not owned by a chain. To cower and be ashamed of something none of us has to do anything with" wouldn't serve a purpose, she said.
"All five families had major lawsuits, and I hope they are all feeling comfortable justice was done and they don't feel any animosity toward the hotel."
Numerous lawsuits were filed by victims' families -- including suits against the hotel, owned by Robert and Dee Decker; the woman who owned the iron, and the Northampton County Industrial Development Authority, which had provided a loan to help the Deckers buy and renovate the hotel in 1984.
Attorney John R. Vivian Jr. of Easton represented Betty Kromis of Germansville who lost her mother, Alma Evans, 83, a Monocacy Towers resident, in the fire.
"If I were Betty, I think having a ghost hunting event where her mother died it seems in poor taste," he said.
Kromis, reached by phone at her home, said her mother's death is still too painful for her family to talk about publicly.
"Any haunting we are talking about would be Colonial or Victorian times," Bock stressed. "We aren't talking about any recent deaths.
"None of the hauntings involved are related to the fifth floor (where the fire occurred) or with older people," who would fit the profile of the fire victims, she added.
"It's not our intention to upset or hurt anyone. If there are family members that have issues with us being a haunted hotel, they can call us," she said.
Bock said other hotels have also done similar promotions, and Hotel Bethlehem is "trying to make it in an area where there will be a huge casino hotel in a few years. We have to do what we do best, be a unique, historic, boutique hotel."
Bethlehem Fire Commissioner George Barkanic, a firefighter at the time of the 1989 blaze, said he's a history buff and he knows such haunted events are popular, citing Gettysburg, Pa., as one town that markets its haunted history.
The time has come to do the same with Hotel Bethlehem's history, Bock said. Ignoring the ghostly stories "wasn't productive for the staff. They were getting spooked out."
http://www.nj.com/news/expresstimes/pa/ ... thispage=2
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
