Spooky stairs at the Gadsden

I came into tiny Douglas, Arizona this afternoon looking for a couple of people who didn’t particularly want to be found: such is the news business sometimes. Before I could find them, I needed to find a hotel so I could set my gear down, look up a few addresses online, and get stalking.

Fortunately, Douglas is not blessed with a dizzying set of choices for lodging. There’s the Best Western (fairly well rated), the Super 6 (less so), and the creaky Gadsden Hotel, a faded jewel of a hotel and saloon on what used to be the town’s main street, before all the people showed up to nail plywood over half the storefronts and open quinceañera frilly dress shops in the others.

I am, in my third day of this trip, already sick of chain motels/hotels, so that left the Gadsden. The only drawback is its quite low rating on Yelp, just two stars. Why? Because it’s haunted.

Yes, I know, in the Southwest, ghosts are marketing gimmicks, just like the hokey billboard I passed outside of Tombstone that advertised “OK Corral. GUNFIGHTS DAILY!” (I think the Bronx borough president should post something similar on the 135th St. Bridge).

But these guys seemed quite serious about it. They had a plaque saying they were the most haunted hotel in the West or somesuch. They even had a Ghost Book, a curious ledger of first-person reports of the hauntings. But what really got me is how, after I finished an interview, the matriarch of an old ranching family told me about the ghost.

“So you’re staying at the Gadsden?”

“Did you see her yet?”

“Who?”

“Her.”

“The ghost?”

“Yes.”

“So she’s for real, eh?”

“Don’t worry, she just comes in your room and sits on the edge of your bed.”

“OK.”

So here I am. The light is failing, the wind coming through the valley is picking up and creaking much of what can be creaked, and I’m tucked away on the last room at the end of an empty hall, waiting for… I don’t know.

I don’t believe in ghosts. I try not to believe in anything I can’t see. But especially since my uncle was killed, I’ve been thinking I might want to believe in ghosts. If they actually existed, it would of course be proof of some kind of afterlife, not just for poor Al, but also, not incidentally, for me too. Who cares if it’s a horribly repetitive afterlife, the same moaning and rattling of chains down the same corridors for eternity? Who cares if it’s essentially one big OCD freakout, trying over and over again to open the same doorknob until the End of Days, just because it was the doorknob you failed to open while you were being murdered? Even something petty and small beats my current Best Guess at the Afterlife: pure black nothingness.

My daughter’s relationship with her imaginary friends has me thinking that maybe there’s some middle ground between believing in ghosts and disbelieving. I think she knows her imaginary friends (who have their own mortality issues) are not real, but she still has a deep and complex relationship with them, one that satisfies some concrete emotional needs.

So maybe it can be the same with my bedside visitor tonight. Even if she doesn’t show, I’ll let myself hear her in the rattling window or the sagging floorboard. And in that way she’ll calm me and tell me what I really want to hear: that ghosts are real, but death is not.