Ghosts of Goldfield and Tonopah

by Janice Oberding

  Among other exaggerated yarns is the claim that Wyatt Earp dealt cards at the Goldfield Hotel. This would have been an impossible feat. The hotel wasn’t even built until years after the legendary lawman left town. What is true is that no owner has been able to keep the hotel operating in the black since it was first opened in 1908. The superstitious among us could point to this as proof the hotel is cursed. But that notion is quickly dispelled when we look at how the hotel escaped the terrible fire of 1923. Other than cracked windows from the intense heat of the nearby flames, the hotel was unscathed.

  Elizabeth’s Room 109. Note the radiator to which some stories claim Elizabeth was chained. Photo by Bill Oberding.

  About that mailbox: it’s possible the strange story got started because the Goldfield Hotel was used as a makeshift post office for a time.

  Apparently, a ghost enthusiast who had come to hotel looking for the ghostly Elizabeth discovered that anyone who passes a hand across the mailbox will feel an ice-cold breeze—or so the story goes. Recently, I was at the hotel, and the temperature was soaring well into the nineties. A ghostly cold burst of air sounded like the next best thing to air conditioning and a root beer float, so I tried waving my hand in front of the mailbox several times. Alas, I never felt the promised breeze. This may not have been a very scientific experiment; still, it is interesting to note that the mailbox is located next to the safe at the hotel registration desk, which is not that far from the window to Room 109 (Elizabeth’s room).

  VIRGINIA AND THE MOVING FLOWERS IN ROOM 109

  Day or night, there is something oddly disconcerting about the Goldfield Hotel that goes beyond ghosts. During the daylight hours, the building has a very different feel to it than it does once the sun goes down. Many people who’ve visited the hotel only during the day smugly profess it to be “not haunted.”

  Nothing could be further from the truth. But why argue the point? If only some of the naysayers could explain how Virginia Ridgway manages to move the flowers in room 109…Virginia calls herself a psychic hand healer; her ability has surprised many people who have made their way to Goldfield in search of ghosts. When the feisty octogenarian looks someone in the eye and pronounces what ailment they are suffering from, few deny. In fact, few deny Virginia, period.

  Not everyone gains admittance to the Goldfield Hotel. To those few visitors she permits into the Goldfield Hotel, Virginia asks but one thing: bring flowers for the ghostly Elizabeth in Room 109. No one wants to visit Elizabeth empty-handed. Everyone wisely complies, and the flowers, of all colors and types, once placed, are never tossed out. Consequently, flowers in various degrees of decay are strewn around Room 109, tokens of affection to the little ghost whose story is one of sadness and betrayal. Completing the floral mélange are various toys, a teddy bear, mementos from various TV shows and a withering Christmas tree. But the flowers are where the magic begins.

  Virginia Ridgway with her Ovilus ghost-hunting device during an investigation of the Goldfield Hotel. Photo by Bill Oberding.

  When fresh flowers are arranged in a vase in Elizabeth’s room, Virginia stands over them and coaxes them to move. In the softest of voices, she asks that they move in accordance to her questions. And amazingly they do. One person who had witnessed this phenomenon said it was as if the flowers were moving to Virginia’s voice. There are no wires, no strings and no apparent trickery. So how does she do it? Even she is not quite sure. At Virginia’s insistence, others have tried to get the same reaction from the flowers, but all have failed. Those who’ve witnessed the flowers move believe it is the ghost of Elizabeth, who shows her gratitude by gently moving the flowers for Virginia. And that’s as good an explanation as any in the Goldfield Hotel.

  PARTY GHOSTS

  During its heyday, the Goldfield Hotel offered its clientele a superb first-rate restaurant that could serve over four hundred diners per night. On the menu were such delicacies as oysters on the half shell, filet mignon and caviar. Night after night, the sounds of tinkling glasses, laughter and music could be heard in the two bars. Imported French champagne and whiskey flowed. Silence didn’t come until the sun was up and then it was only until other patrons could wander in and start the festivities all over again. The bars never closed in Goldfield. Here in the Central Nevada desert, in the middle of nowhere, one could meet with friends, relax, forget cares and have a good time.

  The News Building with the Goldfield Hotel in the distance. The Boomtown Years Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada–Las Vegas.

  Apparently, the party continues. An elderly man who regularly drove that stretch of Highway 95 between Reno and Las Vegas shared the following with me:

  It was late January, and the weatherman was predicting a light snowfall. I didn’t see a problem with that, so I gassed up the rig and headed out of Reno. I was sure that I could make it to Vegas, no problem. Man, was I wrong. By the time I got to Tonopah, it was blowing in all directions. It wasn’t sticking, so I continued on. By the time I got to Goldfield, snow was coming down so bad I had to pull off the highway. There wasn’t a single hotel in town. “Where was I going to sleep?” I wondered. That’s when I turned and reached for my thermos. It was so cold in the cab; a hot cup of coffee was just the ticket. I looked up and couldn’t believe my eyes. Down the road, the old hotel was lit up like a Christmas tree. “I must not be the only stranded driver,” I chuckled.

  The going was slow; it took me about twenty minutes to cover that short distance. I parked the rig, jumped out and got ready to socialize with other travelers. I could hear a piano and laughter, and from the sound of it, they didn’t mind being stranded. I was even wondering if they might be offering some kind of food when I walked up to the door.

  There was a bolt and a big padlock across the door. I looked inside. The place was dark, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. I could still hear them all having a good time.

  “Hey, what gives?” I yelled, knocking on the door. “Is that a private party?”

  It must have been about ten minutes, and I was shivering there in the snowstorm. “No point in trying to get inside,” I thought.

  There wasn’t any place to stay the night but the local brothel, and they kindly allowed me to sleep there. When I told them about the Goldfield Hotel, one of the girls laughed out loud and said, “That place is so haunted. You’re not the first person to hear that party goin’ on inside there. It’s all those ghosts having themselves a good time.”

  After that night, I always looked to see if the lights were on when I drove past the hotel. They never were.

  AN END IN SIGHT

  When the doors closed behind the Goldfield Hotel’s last paying guests in 1945, the building was locked up and forgotten. Every few years, someone came along and expressed interest in restoring the hotel to its former glory; some of them attempted to do so. But the task proved to be insurmountable.

  If anyone was talking about the hotel’s ghosts during this time, they weren’t doing so publicly. From the late 1960s until the early ’70s, an elderly man lived alone in the hotel. Apparently he was acting as the building’s caretaker for an out-of-state owner. While in residence, he gave a few newspaper interviews on the hotel and its history. He never mentioned ghosts or the building being haunted. Perhaps he didn’t know—or didn’t care to know—about such things.

  In the early 1980s, Shirley A. (Dybicz) Porter fell under the hotel’s spell and purchased it. Her attempts to restore the Goldfield Hotel and her experiences with its ghosts are documented in her book But You Can’t Leave, Shirley.

  Porter’s book is chilling. I know that there are some who question the veracity of her book, wondering if it is based on actual experiences or flights of fancy. Regardless of what anyone might think of Porter’s book, the fact remains: the haunting activity she describes has occurred again and again in the Goldfield Hotel. Yes, it’s haunted. And if you think the hotel is not haunted, you just might change your mind once you step through the doorway of th
e Goldfield Hotel.

  GEORGE WINGRELD

  Ruthless businessman George Wingfield was not well liked by his contemporaries. He is the most maligned ghost in residence at the hotel, and this, I believe, is one reason he often appears angry. During the early twentieth century, George Wingfield was the most powerful man in the state of Nevada. For all his money and power, George Wingfield has apparently not been able to escape the Goldfield Hotel. His apparition has been seen in the building almost since the moment he died in Reno on Christmas night in 1959. When Goldfield historian Virginia Ridgway witnessed an unexplainable puff of smoke on the third floor one afternoon, she may have been in the company of the spirit of George Wingfield, who is said to either leave ashes or telltale smoke in his wake.

  George Wingfield. Library of Congress.

  The ghostly Wingfield is usually seen roaming the lobby or standing on the stairs near the hotel desk. Interestingly, the ghost appears not as the youthful George Wingfield but rather as he did later in life, long after he’d put the Goldfield Hotel far behind him. Those who’ve seen the specter of Wingfield say that he is smoking a cigar and seems to be very angry and upset.

  A young couple who came to one of my Ghost Hunting 101 classes told me the following story:

  This happened in the fall of 1992 when we were on our way back to Reno. We slowed up in Goldfield and decided to take a look at the hotel. It was late afternoon, and I was looking in through the glass door when I saw this man standing on the stairs across the room. I tapped on the door and tried to get his attention. I figured if we were lucky he just might let us come in and take a peek around. He looked at the door and started walking toward it. “Uh oh,” I thought. “He is going to chew us out.” He had this angry scowl on his face and a big cigar dangling in the corner of his mouth. Instead of coming to open the door, he suddenly turned in the lobby and headed across the room.

  He sure was in some kind of hurry. “What on earth,” I wondered. “Hey, we heard the place is haunted. We only want to look,” I called out. “We aren’t robbers or anything.”

  Thinking back, I can say it was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. He walked over toward the big door and was gone. Just like that, he walked right into thin air. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

  Later, I told some friends, and they said it was the ghost of George Wingfield who was stuck at the hotel because he had murdered a girl in room 109. Whoever he was, he didn’t look like a very nice person to me.

  ELIZABETH, THE GHOST IN ROOM 109

  Did Elizabeth exist? Or was she simply the product of overactive imaginations? Many historians and ghost researchers doubt the validity of the entire Elizabeth-in-Room-109 story. Nonetheless, her ghost has become synonymous with the hotel. Her poignant story is the most often repeated in connection with the hotel’s hauntings.

  There are several different versions of the tragic tale of love and betrayal that begins in 1908, shortly after the hotel was completed. There are those who say the affair between Elizabeth and the wealthy George Wingfield took place much later. They put the story at some time during the 1930s.

  If anyone would know about the Elizabeth story, it would be Virginia Ridgway, who has been caretaker of the hotel for over thirty years. When asked, Virginia said, “None of the psychics I have taken into the hotel in the past thirty years has ever told the Elizabeth story. None have ever claimed that the child was killed. They all describe the same thing. A young girl with long blonde hair…She is chained to a bed and there’s her little belly.”

  Who can say when or where the tale got its start? Because it is the most often told of the hotel’s ghostly legends, I’ve included it.

  The favored version takes place in 1908. Like thousands of others who came to this desert city during its 1903 gold rush, Elizabeth dreamed of untold riches. At the very least, she hoped that her beauty might ensure marriage to a wealthy man.

  But jobs were not that plentiful, especially for a woman. Rather than beg or go hungry, Elizabeth went to work in the city’s red-light district. Certainly, this was not the sort of job one told her family about, but it kept starvation at bay. There was always the possibility of being lucky enough to snag a man of means, marry him and move into more respectable circles.

  Perhaps Elizabeth thought she had found just such a man for herself when she caught the eye of George Wingfield. Not only was he rich beyond her wildest dreams, but she also thought him one of the most handsome men in town. According to a long-told local legend, Wingfield was so smitten with the lovely young prostitute that he moved her into Room 109 of the Goldfield Hotel. Wingfield may have been infatuated, but the astute businessman had no intentions of marrying a woman like Elizabeth. His power and wealth were steadily increasing; he had moved from his rough circle of gambling friends and was beginning to associate with a more refined group of men. Marriage to a prostitute would not be advantageous to him. If she realized that Wingfield wasn’t going to marry her, Elizabeth wisely never let on. When he married another woman, she finally saw the truth. Her lover had never considered her worthy of being his wife. Hurt and angry, Elizabeth waited for Wingfield to visit her in Room 109 and then sprung her news: she was pregnant with his child. What would his wife say? More importantly, what would become of his carefully cultivated friendships with Goldfield’s elite upper class? Enraged, Wingfield made a terrible decision. He would keep Elizabeth prisoner there in Room 109 and starve her to death.

  Another bizarre version of the story has Wingfield chaining the hapless young woman to the radiator and choking her to death. Yet another has her giving birth only to see her child murdered in cold blood by Wingfield, who later killed Elizabeth as well.

  Room 109 with orbs. Photo by Sharon Leong.

  Even if there were any truth to these stories regarding how and why the ghostly Elizabeth came to haunt Room 109, it is highly doubtful that George Wingfield was the culprit. With plenty of money and power at his disposal, Wingfield could easily have paid others to do his dirty work; for that matter, he could even have paid Elizabeth to leave the city.

  George Wingfield’s name may have come to be associated with that of the ghostly Elizabeth because of his common-law wife, Mae Barric. At a divorce hearing in which she sought support from Wingfield, Barric accused him of verbally and physically abusing her. Certainly, these aren’t stellar qualities; perhaps it was his very behavior toward Barric that indicates how Wingfield might have handled the problem of a pregnant prostitute. In the days before DNA testing, and given Wingfield’s power, there is no doubt that his denial would have been all that was necessary to sway public opinion.

  For argument’s sake, let’s assume for a moment that a young woman was held against her will in Room 109; who was her captor, and why did he hold her prisoner? The rooms on the first floor were generally kept for hotel employees’ use, so it’s very possible that the captor was either an employee of the Goldfield Hotel or an owner—and that brings us back to George Wingfield, who owned the hotel from 1908 until 1923.

  But Wingfield was a popular man about town. Too many eyes were on his every move. It would have been risky, even for him, to have kept a secret like Elizabeth in Room 109. The captor was, in all probability, an employee of the hotel. But why didn’t Elizabeth scream for help?

  The room is located near the billiard parlor, a very popular area in the hotel’s early days. Building standards of the early twentieth century were not what they are today. The inside walls of the hotel probably didn’t have much insulation. If Elizabeth had screamed, someone might have heard her. Why didn’t she try to summon help? There are a number of reasons; perhaps she wasn’t a prostitute but an errant wife. When her husband discovered that he had been cuckolded, he might have kept her prisoner in the room until—and if—his anger subsided. Given the social mores of the early twentieth century, his co-workers may have thought that he was well within his rights to deal with his wife in such a way.

  Keeping her quiet
would have been easy. By regularly administering morphine or opium to his prisoner, Elizabeth’s captor could have ensured her complacency and her silence.

  Was a young woman held against her will in this room so long ago? Is there any truth to the story of Elizabeth? Or is it merely a story told to explain the strange occurrences that go on in Room 109?

  There is no denying that there is paranormal activity in Room 109. Too many witnesses have seen the ghostly young woman, known as Elizabeth, in the room or walking in the front hallway. Clad in a long white nightgown, the beautiful apparition seems to be searching for something. Perhaps it is her child who was so cruelly taken from her.

  Would Wingfield—or anyone one else—have risked it all by keeping a woman chained up in such a public place? According to one story, Wingfield was angry with the young woman and kept her chained in one of the rooms until she and her unborn child died of starvation. For this terribly heartless act, the ghost seems to have no remorse. Those who’ve felt his icy presence can also sense his anger and hostility. He is said to roam the hotel freely, particularly the lobby and the staircase.

  His victim has also been seen a few times, cowering in the room where she died. There is a heartbreaking sadness about her. Perhaps the pitiful ghost is still seeking justice and attempting to point out her murderer.

  Some people tell the story as having happened in the 1930s rather than 1908. Other than the era when it took place, the tale is basically the same bizarre scenario. Wingfield was infatuated with a young prostitute and for whatever reason kept her hostage in room 109 where she eventually died.