by JL Bryan
“Stabby Abby,” I said.
“A flip nickname for a woman who murdered seventeen wounded Union soldiers. The occupying army hanged her from an oak tree on the property. I found no images of her, but she was described as quite comely. At times, she's been treated as just a tiny bit of a folk hero among the Daughters of the Confederacy crowd.
“In any event, she was a local girl, eighteen years old when she was executed. She'd been working as a nurse for two years. Her body was tossed into an unmarked grave in the Potter's Field area of the Colonial Park cemetery, but her spirit is rumored to haunt her old room at the hotel, which she likely shared with other hospital workers.”
“I've seen her there,” I said.
“I would be disappointed if you had not,” Grant said. “Guests in that room frequently report an apparition of a young woman. Sometimes they awaken to find themselves being touched, their arms extended as though she were checking their pulse. I'm sure you're familiar with the popular legends.”
“Very much.”
“After the war, the hotel continued in operation, though its glory days were past. The city and the entire region were war-torn and dominated by Reconstruction policies that hampered what remained of the economy. High times were not to be so easily had, and of course most of the wealthy patrons had lost their fortunes to war and emancipation.
“The hotel limped along until the yellow fever epidemic erupted in the summer of 1876, killing thousands.” Grant also had sad pictures of this, including sick children bleeding and dying on wooden cots, probably the same cots where soldiers had squirmed in agony about a decade earlier. “The hotel again became a hospital, with Dr. Lathrop attempting to cope with the flood of victims. Thousands died, and thousands more fled the city, but the Lathrops remained, giving what comfort and treatment they could. Dr. Lathrop fashioned an early surgical mask meant to guard against yellow fever, though it was more of a latter-day plague-doctor mask from the medieval period, with air filtered by herbs and such. Lathrop dabbled in inventions beyond his capability, indeed beyond the capability of the technology available to him. He filed patents for the mask, as well as crude attempts at medical prosthetics during a time when the U.S. government was doling out large postwar contracts for them, but none of these inventions took off in any commercial sense. In those days, it was widely believed that the yellow fever arose from 'bad air,' from miasmas of infection spread from trash dumps and the river.
“Unfortunately, the yellow fever mask did nothing to block the mosquitoes that actually spread the disease. Dr. Lathrop himself contracted yellow fever and died during the epidemic. His wife Mabel kept the hotel open until her death in 1884, and then it closed down and remained in that state for another ten years. Locals avoided the place, reporting strange sounds and visions when they passed near—bloody-faced children or soldiers with missing arms, for instance, looking out the windows.”
“Then Ithaca Galloway moved from Boston and bought the place,” I said.
“After hearing of the haunted hotel and visiting, yes,” Grant said. He went over what I already knew—that she'd gained a reputation as a medium and traveled the circuit that existed at the time, giving demonstrations and allegedly helping audience members speak to their dead relatives. He offered a picture of her in her younger years, a square-jawed woman with dark eyes standing on a wood-plank stage in front of a crowd in Hartford, Connecticut. Then Grant recounted her marriage to the much older industrialist Archibald Galloway, finally catching up to her purchase of the hotel in 1895. “She remodeled the entire fourth floor as a private apartment for herself and her entourage. I can tell you very little about what happened up there during her tenure...and that is where this particular book comes into play. Shall we have a look?” Grant touched the plastic-wrapped book and raised his fluffy white-sheep eyebrows in a questioning fashion, as if there were any chance I would decline.
“Let's see what you've got,” I said.
Grant opened a drawer in the work table and pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves, moving like a surgeon preparing for a delicate procedure. Then he slowly removed the layers of plastic.
The book's leather binding had crumbled significantly, and the spine was cracked. Grant used great care in lifting the front cover.
“This item was published by a company in Dublin, Georgia, now long out of business,” he said. “The author was a young woman named Katherine Moore. Apparently, she worked at the Lathrop Grand for some time...this book was an attempt to reveal to the world what occurred there.”
“The Forbidden Secrets of the Lathrop Grand Hotel: Recollections of One Woman's Journey into the Mysteries of the Spirit by Katherine Croghan Moore,” I read. “They weren't into punchy titles in those days.”
“Certainly not,” Grant agreed.
“So why was this book locked inside the treasure vault?” Stacey asked.
“Because, as far as can be determined, this is the only remaining copy in existence,” he said. “The others, we believe, were deliberately tracked down and destroyed, possibly by one or more of the people named within or their descendants, most likely to avoid scandal. I have been eager to read it myself, but have not taken the time to do more than examine it briefly, because it has not yet been scanned and digitized. We have the necessary planetary scanner, if someone skilled in photography wished to provide the labor...”
Grant and I both looked at Stacey.
“Fine,” she sighed. “Let's do it.”
We brought the book to another room adjacent to the book-binding area. The scanner occupied a large section of one wall, and Grant demonstrated how to line the delicate old book inside the V-shaped cradle. An overhead camera took images of the open pages, and a digital monitor on the back displayed the camera's viewpoint so the book could be properly aligned. Stacey nodded and got to work.
Grant and I sat at a nearby table, and he continued his story.
“The Lathrop Grand faced another decline in 1921, with the death of Ithaca Galloway. According to court documents, she appears to have been fairly destitute by then, owing back taxes and leaving very little in the way of an estate, aside from the luxurious furnishings and art inside the hotel. It was sold at auction and changed hands. The front entrance to the old saloon area was walled off and the saloon officially closed, but apparently it remained in business as a speakeasy, accessible from a hidden doorway.”
“There are plenty of those in the hotel,” I said.
“Unfortunately, the new owners had little interest in maintaining the hotel, much less renovating or modernizing it. The top two floors of the hotel were closed off and left in disuse. The crowd became rough, and eventually the hotel fell out of business amid the Depression.
“In 1959, amid a general fervor for preserving and restoring the historical areas of the city, a group of local businessmen purchased and partially restored the hotel. The top floor was never opened to the public. The hotel experienced a resurgence for a decade, but closed again. A group of vagrants—flower children, by their descriptions—was arrested in 1971 for squatting inside the old hotel.
“Attempts were made to re-open the hotel, but it wasn't until 1993 that a local company, Warren Real Holdings, made the investment to bring it up to modern codes so that it could operate once again, though again the fourth floor was apparently left alone. The Halloween balls began a few years later under the management of Gary Schultz, capitalizing on the hotel's haunted reputation. Very recently, it was sold to Black Diamond Properties, and here we are.”
“Here we are.” I checked Stacey's tablet, where she was sending the pages as she scanned them. “Should we look into Katherine Moore's book of secrets? Find out what Ithaca and her psychic friends were up to on the fourth floor?”
“Please,” Grant said, leaning forward a little, eager as a kid preparing to dig into his candy basket after trick-or-treating.
The book began with Katherine's declaration “before the Almighty Powers That Be” that each word
in the text was true, and that she presented her account “for the Enlightenment of the World.”
We soon read of her difficult childhood in Ireland, her mother a maid, her father an apparent lowlife who died in a gambling dispute. Katherine had departed on a ship for America, along with her mother and her little brother Gilby, largely to escape her deceased father's gambling debts. Her mother and brother both died of illness on the way. Katherine arrived in Savannah in 1899, fourteen years old in a strange land with no family and no money.
“That's a nineteenth-century story for you,” I said, shaking my head.
The book recounted how she'd worked whatever jobs she could find, cleaning and cooking, before she finally landed a position in the Lathrop Grand kitchen.
It was there I saw shadows about the corners, and often a strange woman in a large skirt. One of the cooks told me it was the Spirit of Mabel Lathrop, the hotel's founder, who made appearances in the kitchen and the dining room from time to time. She was many years deceased but had not left the hotel.
Mabel gave a kindly and gentle presence, but in time I saw more and more figures, horrible shapes of children bleeding from the eyes and of men missing arms and legs. Each man or woman employed by the Lathrop Grand saw spirits on occasion, but I saw them always, ceaselessly, everywhere. It was for this reason that the lady and master of the house, the Widow Galloway, gained an interest in me.
The text recounted how she was transferred to service on the forbidden fourth floor, serving and cleaning in the apartments of Ithaca Galloway and her entourage.
Madame Galloway sought for me to serve, but also wished for my education, and to this end assigned a young Scottish gentleman, Edward Fletcher, to tutor me. He was an established part of the household, knowledgeable in the arts of divination and medieval sorcery. A devoted and attentive teacher was Edward, his eyes brighter than any I'd ever seen, and in our hours together we became close. He taught me well, and in time I could read the books in the hotel's two libraries. On the first floor I came to know Homer and Virgil, Plato and Emerson. On the fourth, I read rare and forbidden texts by Johannes Trithemius, Collin de Plancy, Zosimos of Panopolis, and other scientists of the occult and dark arts.
I grew fond of Edward, thinking of him in a husbandly way and of marriage and children, but Gregor Zagan, in his role as Madame Galloway's intimate companion and chief adviser, warned me that any such involvement could dispel our developing powers, and urged chastity.
“Gregor Zagan?” I said. “Sounds like a fake name to me.”
“Perhaps a magician's stage name,” Grant said.
The author's further description of Zagan made me realize this was our guy, the long-bearded one seated next to Ithaca Galloway in the group portrait on the fourth floor. Apparently he was always at her side, whispering into the woman's ear. He was about a decade younger than Ithaca but sounded fairly dominant in their relationship.
“We found Rasputin,” I told Stacey.
“Sounds like some great reading,” Stacey said, gently turning a delicate yellow page to prepare for the next scan. “Wish I were involved.”
“I'll give you the Cliff's Notes later,” I told her. “Right now she's in love with a cute young Scottish guy, but the Rasputin guy is warning her to stay chaste.”
“Ugh, and I'm missing it?”
“Shh,” I said. “We're trying to read over here.”
Katherine recounted her integration into the cult-like atmosphere of the fourth floor. She shared a room with an older Frenchwoman who could allegedly channel spirits. She described how “all things were done in common, our meals, our bathing, and various rituals meant to strengthen our spiritual capacities. Mme. Galloway and Mister Zagan insisted such practices constructed an 'Over-Mind' that was powerful for our magical purposes.”
Séances were frequent, sometimes trying to reach people that had been known to those present, other times trying to contact long-spirits of occult masters. Automatic writing, spirit boards, and crystallomancy were also among the group's activities. All of this was done in the dark temple room on the fourth floor, decorated with hieroglyphs and occult symbols. Ithaca and her psychics referred to it as “the necromantium” after the oracle of the dead in ancient Greece.
“The chief concern of Ithaca and Gregor was the construction of the Mortis Ocularum, a machine for summoning and speaking with the spirits. To this end were hired metalsmiths, glassmakers, and men knowledgeable in electricity, magnets, kinetoscopes, and so on. One monstrous machine after another was constructed at great expense in the necromantium, each one destroyed in turn when it proved a failure.”
I thought of the deep holes in the floor of the temple. Maybe they'd anchored the experimental machine. I couldn't be sure, because Katherine seemed to have little interest in it and quickly moved on, giving no description beyond “monstrous.”
“All done over here!” Stacey asked. “Did she hook up with Cute Scottish Boy yet?”
“No hook-ups so far.” I checked the time. “We'd better get going soon. We need to make an extra stop before we go back to the hotel.”
“No time for a game of cribbage?” Grant asked.
“I'm afraid not. Thanks for your help, Grant. This should help us identify which ghost is the dangerous one, once our psychic has a look at the house. Any chance you could find out more on Gregor Zagan?”
“I will do my best,” he said, standing to escort us out. “Does this mean our city will be losing one of our most famous resident ghosts?”
“I don't know that Abigail is our target. There are a few possibilities,” I said.
“Will you let me know the results?”
“We're kind of under a nondisclosure agreement,” I said. When he frowned, I added, “I'll let you know if we learn anything of purely historical value.”
“That is the tune I wanted to hear.”
Stacey and I left the Association mansion and climbed back into the van before she asked about our extra stop.
“We just need to do a little detective work,” I said, starting up the engine and pulling out into the road.
Then I actually explained where we were going and why, because me being vague and mysterious wasn't going to help Stacey prepare.
Chapter Eleven
Gary Schultz lived in The Landings, a gated community on Skidaway Island, in a two-story cubic house with steeply slanted roofs that screamed 1970's. A red Chevrolet convertible sat in the driveway. It looked as though the Lathrop Grand had paid him well, though not extravagantly, during his tenure as general manager.
I approached his front door alone, dressed in my stupid black pantsuit, glasses on, hefty briefcase in one hand. He came a minute or so after I rang the bell, a balding, frowning man in his fifties, unshaven in recent days, his outfit a hodgepodge of crumpled dress-suit pants and a shirt depicting Big Al, the elephant mascot of the University of Alabama.
He was very guarded as he opened the door, giving me a quick look-over and a gruff “Hello?”
“Mr. Gary Schultz?” I asked.
He nodded, glancing at my briefcase. “Who are you?”
“My name is Ellie Jordan. I'm a private investigator looking into Black Diamond Properties, the new owners of the Lathrop Grand, in preparation for a legal action.”
“Are you working for Black Diamond or against them?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
“Against them.”
“Those pig-kissers that fired me? Someone's suing them?” He stepped aside, smiling now, and gestured into his bright, square-shaped foyer. “Best news I've heard all month. Come right in, and don't spare any gory details. Who's after them?”
“I'm bound by a nondisclosure agreement, so I can only say it's a wrongful death lawsuit by a contract employee. Well, his family.”
“Get you a beer?”
“No, thank you.” I followed him to a boxy living room with a pair of skylights in the ceiling. He paused an old James Bond movie on the big flatscreen that dominated one wall, then
picked up a bottle of Heineken. Several empty bottles were scattered on the coffee table, as if he didn't know what to do with himself besides drink and watch television. I wondered if it was a coincidence that the two longest-term employees of the hotel I'd met, Earl and now Gary, both seemed to have drinking problems.
A framed, autographed picture of legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant hung on one wall, surrounded by commemorative posters of the stadium in Tuscaloosa and team pictures from various championship seasons.
“I'm guessing you went to Alabama?” I said, thinking that maybe I should have let Alabama native Stacey do the interrogation while I sat out in the van as backup.
“Florida State, actually, but I've always been an Alabama man. I grew up in Philadelphia, you see.” He dropped onto his couch and motioned toward a recliner. I dusted what looked like Funyuns crumbs off the cushion and sat down to face him.
“Philadelphia?” I asked, unable to summon the connection I was obviously supposed to make.
“The one in Mississippi. Just over the fence from Tuscaloosa. So what can I do to help you with those piles of trash bags full of horse manure that call themselves Black Diamond Properties?” he asked. “Are you gonna bleed them dry?”
“If possible. They do have deep pockets.”
“Good.”
“I'd like to start by reviewing the basic security and safety procedures that were in force under your management,” I said. “That will help us find any area where Black Diamond's new policies varied from yours, creating hazards for hotel workers and guests.”
I put him at ease with very dull and easy questions that could have been answered by the hotel's operations manual, like the existence of emergency escape routes and a disaster plan, very standard things. He was chatty, as if he'd hadn't spoken with anyone in weeks and was desperate for human contact.
Finally, we reached the nub of the matter.
“Did you ever hire contract workers for any kind of work on the fourth floor?” I asked.
“Oh, the owners tried that in the early days. By the time I got there, they'd just about given up. The policy was that nobody was allowed upstairs except for critical maintenance like roof and sprinkler system work.”
