Saturday, June 23, 2007
Sarah Crump
Plain Dealer Reporter
Innkeeper Elaine Crane defends the kindly spirit in a white nightgown that sometimes greets guests of Crane's historic Painesville establishment.
"She's friendly," insisted Crane. Mistress Suzanne is more Casper than poltergeist.
She isn't mean like the ghosts who terrify lodgers in the thriller "1408," which checked into theaters Friday. The movie, based on a Stephen King story, is about the haunted hotel room in which jaded horror writer and ghost debunker Mike Enslin spends one horrific night.
Like most of the apparitions at Ohio hotels and inns that boast of ghosts, Suzanne is a sweet presence that looks after Rider's Inn as she did in 1823, when she married its owner.
The good mistress may be hospitable, but her appearances are unsettling. A few times, late-arriving guests have stayed the night after Suzanne -- the sole innkeeper on duty at the time -- answered the door. These wee-hours encounters occur in the dark when Crane isn't at the inn.
"One couple told me I was rude. They said they asked for a couple of Cokes and I just shook my head no," said Crane.
Farther south in Newbury Township, the Punderson State Park manor has its own ghost sightings.
Several years ago, employees reported a grisly scene they watched for hours before it vanished at sunrise. A shadowy figure dressed in outdoorsy gear had a rope around its neck. "The Lumberjack" rotated, hanging from the dining-room rafters, according to the accounts innkeeper Mia Bell has heard, though she said she has never had any personal visits from the dead.
Kathryn Burton does not want to believe in ghosts. But in the four years Burton has been the general manager of The Lofts in Columbus, six times she's glimpsed a ghostly white lady in Victorian dress on the first and second floors of the hotel.
A group of corporate lawyers have had their annual meeting at another hotel ever since the time two members lay awake one night at The Lofts listening to the sounds of wallpaper being scraped off a wall, accompanied by screams.
There hasn't been a scrap of wallpaper in the Lofts - once a wallpaper supply house - for decades, Burton said.
In Granville, the faint scent of imported gardenia perfume sometimes wafts through the halls of the Buxton Inn. The Lady in Blue is passing, said Audrey Orr, who owns the inn with her husband Orville. She's heard "many, many stories" of guests' encounters with the lady and a male ghost - both friendly sorts, she said.
"We'll hear doors open and close when they're locked," said Orr, adding that a guest was once awakened by a woman at the foot of her bed, and then the woman suddenly disappeared.
But what haunted hotel wins the prize as Ohio's spookiest? The Lafayette Hotel in Marietta, said John Kachuba, author of "Ghosthunting Ohio." Housekeepers there whisper of glimpsing a deceased supervisor who spends her afterlife sweeping the halls. Wait staff have spied a restaurant manager - long dead - sitting in a booth. One worker followed a teenager in old-fashioned dress - until the boy walked through a wall.
Rider's Inn is the second scariest on his ghost-hunting list, said Kachuba, who once stayed in Mistress Suzanne's old bedroom.
Reading the inn's journal the next day, he learned that other guests had been startled at exactly 3 a.m., just as he was. He had been awakened by the loud sound of rushing wind - without feeling the slightest breeze.
Said Kachuba, who describes himself as an "objective observer" of the paranormal, "That was weird."
http://www.cleveland.com/living/plainde ... thispage=2
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