Dreadful Places

by Aaron Mahnke

  It seems that the LaLauries had been experimenting on their slaves. Anyone who defied them, disobeyed them, or failed to serve in an appropriate manner would be brought to this room and punished. And none who entered the room had ever returned alive.

  Local legend goes into horrible detail about the extent of those experiments, although there’s little documentation to support the claims. One story tells of how the firemen found a young woman in the room whose limbs had been broken and reset at odd angles, causing her to walk like a crab on all fours. Another story mentions a man, still living when they found him, with a hole in his skull that was full of maggots.

  But even without the sensational stories, the core truth was horrifying enough. The LaLauries possessed such a low regard for the lives of their slaves that they treated them like laboratory animals. No sane, caring person would have been capable of what these two social elites had done. And when the city caught wind of it, the public was outraged.

  The LaLauries hadn’t been home when the room was discovered, and somehow they managed to slip out of town before the consequences could catch up with them. Stories tell of how the family fled to Paris. Others say they changed their names and blended into a community outside New Orleans. But while the criminals might have escaped, the scene of the crime remained behind. And it kept telling its story, over and over.

  Bodies continued to be found under the floors and inside the walls of the house for nearly a century. Some historians put the death toll in the neighborhood of three hundred slaves, although that seems like a bit of a stretch for a highly public mansion in the middle of the busy French Quarter. But death did take place there, and it left its mark.

  Today, there are still reports of sounds from inside the house. Some have heard pained moaning, while others claimed to have heard cries for help. Those who have lived there speak of the sound of chains and the smell of fire. And some have seen things.

  Specifically, people inside and outside the house have seen the same ghostly image over and over throughout the past century and a half. It’s the vision of a girl dressed in the rags of a slave, falling to her death from the third floor. Over and over again.

  SOMETIMES, NO MATTER how hard you try to move on, the past manages to stay right behind you, chasing you like a shadow.

  It’s not that all of Mary Gray’s life was difficult, but a lot of it certainly was. She and her husband, Andrew, had been part of that early wave of settlers in central Illinois who tried to make a life for themselves in newly formed Peoria County. Peoria was the name of a local tribe of Native Americans, and most likely meant something along the lines of “dreaming with the help of a bad spirit.”

  But this frontier life wasn’t for everyone. It was hard work, each and every day. The trade-off, though, was the beauty of the countryside. So despite the challenges, life seemed to be all right for Mary and Andrew Gray. And then Mary’s brother died.

  He had lived in the area, so his grown son was able to travel to Peoria and move in with the Grays. That’s not the sad part; family should always stick together, I think, so there was the potential here for a good change. But the nephew brought a laundry list of problems with him.

  He was lazy and had a knack for getting into trouble. He also loved to drink, and was drunk so often that sobriety was the less common state for the young man. Which of course led to all sorts of bad relationships and troubles with the law. Mary Gray’s nephew, it seems, made a hobby out of getting arrested.

  It’s easy to look at someone like that young man and say, “That’s a quick way to ruin your life, son.” And I can agree. But behavior like that has a way of damaging the people around a person. For the Grays, that damage was financial. Every arrest led to a court date and a lawyer. And lawyers need to be paid. So as the arrests added up, what little money Andrew and Mary Gray had managed to save slowly began to vanish. But it was clear their nephew wasn’t going to stop just because they ran out of money, so Mary made a foolish decision.

  A young lawyer had recently moved to the area and set up shop in a small shack at the edge of town. His name was David Davis, and while he lacked a lot of experience, he was friendly, bright, and eager. Mary approached Davis with a proposal: take on the criminal defense of her nephew, and if she failed to pay the fees, her house and property would be his.

  Davis wrote up the necessary paperwork for the agreement, and they signed it on November 10, 1847. And then they crossed their fingers. Which never works, by the way. The Grays’ nephew was soon arrested again, the Grays failed to pay the fees, and the attorney took possession of the house and land.

  Rather than admit defeat, Mary played dumb. “What agreement?” she said. I don’t know what her strategy was here. Maybe she thought she had the only copy of the agreement. Perhaps she had failed to tell her husband about the shady deal and didn’t want to admit guilt in front of him.

  Whatever the reason for protesting it, though, she lost, and the Grays were asked to move out of their home there on Monroe Street. That’s when things got even worse. Mary told her nephew to leave and never come back. A few days later, his body was found floating facedown in the Illinois River.

  That was enough for the Grays. They packed up what little they still possessed and left town forever. But not before Mary stepped outside of the home she no longer owned and raised an angry hand to the sky. “May this land turn to thorns and thistles,” she screamed, “with ill luck, sickness, and death to everyone who lives here.”

  TENANTS OF DARKNESS

  Davis tried renting the house out for a while, and soon after the Grays left, a new couple moved in. Legend says that the husband was Thomas Ford, who had recently finished a four-year term as governor of Illinois. Legend also says that Thomas and his wife, Frances, died of grief, but in reality it was cancer that took her life in 1850, and her husband followed her three weeks later, a victim of tuberculosis.

  Neighbors were quick to notice their ominous deaths. Mary had called for “ill luck, sickness, and death” for anyone in the house, and the Fords certainly seemed to fit the bill.

  After the Fords died, Davis decided that life as a landlord was a lot of work, and he was already a busy man. He left the house empty, and it eventually became overgrown and run-down. The legend says that the yard was filled with thistle bushes, fulfilling another element of Mary Gray’s curse.

  It’s hard to believe, but it seemed as if Mary’s words had a deathly grip on the place. Sadly, the curse wasn’t ready to let go just yet.

  Davis soon abandoned his claim and moved out of town. In 1865, a local business owner bought the property from the township and then gifted it to one of his former slaves, a man named Tom Lindsey. Lindsey worked hard to improve the house and property, but after lightning struck the home and the resulting fire burned it to the ground, neighbors approached him and told him of the curse.

  When he rebuilt the house, it’s said that he buried a charm beneath the front doorstep and hung horseshoes throughout the home, which seems to have worked. For the next twenty-five years, no new tragedy fell on the house there on Monroe Street.

  After Lindsey passed away, a local banker bought the property and immediately tore down the modest home, the horseshoes with it. He wanted something grand, and so he built a large Victorian mansion there. He married a younger woman and they settled into life, completely unaware of the words that old Mary Gray had uttered fifty years before.

  Eighteen months later, the man’s wife and newborn child tragically died. He mourned them, then lived alone for a time before eventually marrying again. Soon after, he and his new wife welcomed a son, but when the child died of illness, the banker’s wife became so sick with grief that she was sent to a hospital to recover. She never came home.

  The house became a boardinghouse for a while, but after a number of deaths there, it was eventually abandoned. Finally, in 1895, the property was bought by th
e town for the construction of a new public library. The banker’s mansion, along with all of those dark memories and the echoes of his tragic loss, was torn down and covered with earth.

  But remember, that was cursed earth. Mary had uttered powerful words that day in 1847. In a town whose name literally meant “dreaming with the help of a bad spirit.” It’s hard to ignore the connection. But you would think that all those decades had put some space between the curse and the people who chose to live there.

  Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

  By 1924, the library had lost three directors to tragedy. The first, E. S. Wilcox, was killed when he fell in front of a moving streetcar in 1915. His successor died of a heart attack right inside the library during a board meeting. After him, Dr. Edward Wiley took over, but he died in 1924 after intentionally swallowing arsenic.

  Not everyone suffered so much, though. That young attorney, David Davis, went on to become a U.S. senator, and then became an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He even worked for a time as campaign manager for Abraham Lincoln.

  Today, the original Peoria Public Library is gone. It was replaced in 1966 with a more modern structure. Still, even with all that glass and steel, some echoes of the curse remain. No one else has died, but past employees have reported hearing voices after the doors are closed, cold drafts when none of the windows are open, and the occasional appearance of a man—dressed in turn-of-the-century clothing—staring back at them from a basement doorway.

  As I said before, no matter how hard we try to move on, sometimes the past manages to stick around, following us like a shadow. And for the people who have lived and worked on Mary Gray’s Monroe Street lot for the last century and a half, it seems there will be no escape.

  ASK ANY GROUP of people where they feel the safest, and the answer is almost universal: their own house. It’s a place they know well, where they have built a life and crafted wonderful memories—home sweet home.

  But what happens when we leave the safety of our homes and travel? Once outside our comfortable safe haven, we often find ourselves exposed to whatever awaits us. Some people are more courageous than others, of course, but travel can be a source of fear for many.

  Hodophobia is the fear of travel, and while the vast majority of people don’t necessarily suffer from a clinical fear of being away from home, many do struggle with strange places. And no place can feel more foreign and strange to a traveler, in my opinion at least, than the places where thousands upon thousands of guests have stayed.

  Perhaps it’s the well-worn carpets that make us feel uneasy, or the imperfect walls and ceilings. Noisy plumbing, finicky lights, and the sounds of a settling structure can leave even the best of us feeling a bit out of our element.

  No other place in the United States can cause that uneasy feeling more than an often-forgotten mountain lodge built over a century ago in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains. Despite its classic architecture and lavish decor, there is very little inside that feels safe.

  And I’d like to take you there.

  A STEAM-POWERED FORTUNE

  They were twin wonders. Freelan and Francis Stanley were born in Maine in 1849. They had five other siblings, two of whom were also twins. But something was different about Freelan and his brother. They were exceptional students, quick learners, and gifted with an unusual mechanical aptitude.

  As nine-year-olds, they were using their father’s lathe to craft wooden tops, which they sold to their classmates. At the age of ten, they were taught how to make violins by their paternal grandfather. It was said that their instruments were concert-quality. Those early experiments helped fuel a lifelong passion for building things.

  After a short career as a teacher and principal, Freelan Stanley went into business with his brother, refining and marketing a photographic process known as dry plating. It was a revolutionary change, allowing even amateur photographers to take quality images. So revolutionary, in fact, that the Eastman Kodak company purchased the technology in the late 1800s, making the brothers very, very wealthy.

  From there, the wonder twins moved into the world of motor cars. Their first automobile was built in 1897, and by 1899 it was the best-selling motor car in the country. Because of its unique steam-powered engine, the automobile was called the Stanley Steamer. It was the Steamer, along with a few other smaller businesses, that helped turn the twins into tycoons in their own right.

  In 1903, Freelan was diagnosed with tuberculosis, sometimes referred to as the “wasting sickness.” At the age of fifty-three, he had dropped to just 118 pounds, and his doctors told him that he had six months to live, at the most. So like many people of that era, Stanley traveled west, to the clean mountain air of Colorado. And that’s where he discovered Estes Park.

  Freelan and his wife, Flora, instantly fell in love with the setting. They built a home there almost immediately, and after Freelan somehow shook the tuberculosis, the couple returned every summer thereafter, he in his tailored suits and pointy gray beard, she in her high-collared floral gowns.

  But it was another building they constructed there—a massive, grand hotel—that has left the most lasting mark. Built at the cost of nearly half a million dollars, the Stanley Hotel opened its doors in 1909 and has been serving guests ever since.

  The Stanley Hotel was a modern marvel in its day. It featured a hydraulic elevator, electricity throughout, running water, telephones, and even a fleet of Stanley’s own steam-powered Mountain Wagons to ferry guests straight from the train station to the front door of the hotel. It had nearly three hundred rooms, 466 windows, a music room with a grand piano, a billiard room, a restaurant, a ballroom, and three floors of guest rooms.

  And that’s just inside the hotel. Outside, scattered around the property, were staff dormitories, a concert hall, the ice house, a carriage house, the manager’s home, and many others. A private airstrip was even built on the property at some point, although it’s been abandoned for decades.

  Over the years, the Stanley Hotel has played host to a number of famous guests. John Philip Sousa not only stayed there frequently but would tune the piano in the music room and record the dates inside the lid. Other guests have checked in there, including Titanic survivor Molly Brown, President Theodore Roosevelt, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Barbra Streisand.

  And Freelan Stanley? The tuberculosis never got him. He died in 1940 at the age of ninety-one, just a year after his wife, Flora, passed away. But while the couple was no longer there to oversee the hotel’s day-to-day business, one thing has been very clear to those who work there today: the Stanleys, it seems, never checked out.

  ECHOES OF MUSIC

  In July 2009, a tourist in the lobby of the hotel approached her friends with complete shock. She had been shopping for postcards in the gift shop and had exited the shop while reading the backs of the ones she bought. According to her story, she still had her head down when a pair of pant legs came into view.

  She did the polite thing and stepped to the side to allow the man to pass, but when she did, she claimed, the legs moved to block her new path. Taken aback, she raised her head to scold the man for his rudeness, but stopped when a wave of cold air washed over her. The man, according to the woman, was dressed in clothing that seemed out of place, and his pointy beard had an old-fashioned look to it. She then watched as the man walked away toward the lobby fireplace, where he vanished out of sight.

  After rushing over to her friends to tell them what had happened, she was approached by another woman who had happened to overhear the conversation. This woman led the tourist toward the antique Stanley Steamer automobile that sits in the hotel lobby and pointed toward the photo of Freelan Stanley on the wall behind it.

  The tourist was astonished. The man she had just seen with her own eyes had been dead for over sixty years.

  Mr. Stanley has also been seen in the billi
ard room, a favorite location of his during his time at the hotel. According to one report, a group of tourists were once being led through that room when a vision of Stanley appeared behind one of the tourists.

  Mr. Stanley also seems to have a soft spot for his beloved rocking chair on the front porch. Visible from the front desk through the large lobby windows, it has been witnessed by many to be rocking of its own volition. But if Mr. Stanley really has remained behind in the hotel after death, then he is apparently not alone.

  In February 1984, the night bellman was working the front desk when he heard footsteps coming from the direction of the hotel bar, known as the Cascades. The bellman leaned over the counter to peer around the corner, and in the reflection of the lobby windows he was able to see the figure of a woman. She wore a pale gown that he described as off-the-shoulder, in a southern belle style.

  The bellman quickly exited the front desk area through the back doorway, but when he arrived in the side hall near the windows, no one was there.

  During an overnight shift in 1976, the clerk at the front desk reported hearing piano music. She left the desk and entered the music room, where the sound was coming from, but found it empty. According to her, however, the piano keys were still moving on their own.

  In 1994, a guest heard similar music from the direction of the music room, and stepped inside. He claimed to have seen a young woman sitting at the piano, and he approached so he could watch and listen as she played. As he walked across the room, though, the girl transformed into an elderly woman before disappearing completely.