With Halloween right around the corner, I decided I wanted to put my questions about ghosts to rest. Do they exist? In a quest for truth, I sought out two haunted inns in Vermont to talk to staff members about the mysterious happenings they have witnessed. Put down your spiked cider and decide for yourself if you believe.
The first inn that I ventured to was the Quechee Inn in Quechee, Vt., which is known for its numerous ghost sightings. Upon stepping in the rustic inn, I was first greeted by Cindy, the front desk manager. When I told her I was interested in the inn's ghost stories, she looked at me eagerly behind wire glasses and told me the weirdest thing she had experienced.
"A few months ago I was sitting by myself at eight at night," Cindy said. "Everything was quiet and there were no sounds coming from anywhere." She looked to her right at the round clock that was nailed to the wall and then looked back at me. "All of the sudden the clock went flying off the wall onto the floor. I looked at the wall and the nail was completely intact."
Cindy handed me a booklet that had a record of some ghost accounts from staff members and guests. She then invited me to look around the house, specifically the old part of the house, which was where the owners had lived and died. Walking down the narrow hallways that were dimly lit by old lights and adorned by eerie portraits, I felt this could truly be a place with ghostly inhabitants.
Around the corner, I saw a man with a tool belt climbing the stairs, and I walked fast to catch up with him. Dolor Jambert, who has been a maintenance worker at the inn for four years, was excited to tell me about the strange events he has witnessed at the Inn.
"I have seen weird things," Jambert said. "I'm a person who normally can explain things by a draft in the room or sunlight shining a weird way. But there are things here I have seen that I can't explain."
One of these things happened during his first year at the Inn when he was in a room with a housekeeper. "We both saw the remote move from the TV to the bed," Jambert said. "She looked at me and said, 'Am I seeing things?' But I had seen it too. When you see something just go from one place to another, it is not explainable."
Knowing that I might not believe him, Jambert was quick to qualify his descriptions. "To me, I believe that people see stuff at the inn because they believe it can happen," Jambert said. "I think people who don't believe in the hereafter won't see it. I do believe in it. I've seen strange things happen here that can't be explained."
According to the booklet that Cindy gave me, "No guest has ever left the Inn because of these events, or others similar to them, and only one employee has quit." Jambert, however, described to me how last year a waitress thought she was going insane.
"She asked if I saw a guest come to the inn at seven in the morning," Jambert said. "She said she had talked to a woman who was dressed in a long costume dress. I said, 'I hate to tell you, but there haven't been any guests here this morning.' I told her she might want to go around and look at the portrait of Jane Porter in the dining hall. She saw the portrait and was positive that it was Jane who she had talked to."
Jane Porter owned the Quechee Inn in the mid-1800s with her husband John Porter. She died in the inn in 1900 and is said to be the ghost who appears the most frequently. I was curious to take a look at the portrait that Jambert described, so I stepped over the squeaky wooden floor boards and walked to the back of the dining hall.
Large black-and-white portraits of John and Jane Porter hung on the wall, but it was Jane's picture that I was drawn to. Her eyes had a mischievous glare that made her almost look like she was smirking. But the most unnerving part was when I turned my back to the portrait on the way out of the dining room: I looked up and Jane's eyes were staring right at me through the mirror on the opposite wall. I hurried out of the Inn as fast as I could.
Next I visited the allegedly haunted Norwich Inn in Norwich, Vt. Legend has it that room 20 is haunted by Mary Walker, a former owner of the hotel who died in that room.
According to "A Brief History of the Norwich Inn" which I was given by the woman at the front desk, Mary Walker would feel right at home in a fraternity basement: "Though Prohibition had just begun, rumor has it that Ma Walker maintained the Inn's tradition as a tavern by selling bootleg from the basement ... It is perhaps for these sins that the ghost of Mrs. Walker is said to be condemned to walk the halls of the upper floors."
The staff members I spoke with, however, had only worked at the inn for a few years and had not witnessed many strange events. Ward Watson, the current innkeeper, was the only staff member to share an unsettling experience. "I was downstairs and I saw a dark shadow in the dining room," Watson said. "I looked around but there was nothing in the dining room that could have cast that shadow."
When I went upstairs and stood in front of room 20, I waited for a sign of something -- a cold feeling, a dark shadow, a whisper, a shout. But nothing came and I abandoned the hallway feeling resigned to the not-so-supernatural.
In a final attempt to find another firsthand account, I approached the bartender. Though she had no personal experiences to contribute, the lone man at the end of the bar, stirring what looked like a Long Island Iced Tea, had an interesting piece of information to share: "I'm the town drunk, but I've seen Mary Walker," he said. "I've slept with her, and she was good." He laughed and looked back down at his drink.
