CAPITALIZING ON CREEPINESS
Hotels turn horror into cold cash
Things to do in Deadwood when you’re dead include shooting whiskey alone and basking in the pale blue light of five-cent slot machines. Activities for the living are similar, though there’s also a lovely Chinatown tour.
A few years ago, I took this tour, and then spent the night in a pretty, historic hotel on this South Dakota town’s main drag. A 19th-century mining town swathed in American frontier lore, the city’s contemporary economy is driven primarily by Wild West nostalgia. As I checked into my hotel, the concierge shared both Wi-Fi rates and the best places to see the ghost of sharpshooting Sheriff Seth Bullock, who built the hotel in 1894. She also recommended a dinner theatre in which local players re-enacted the deaths of frontiersmen murdered on this very spot. Hours later, I spotted the actor cast as slain villain Wild Bill Hickok drinking alone at the hotel bar, the glow of nearby nickel slots his only witness. A phrase from the hotel casino’s marketing material — “Seth will be watching” — rang all too true.
Unsubtle, yes; but those South Dakotans are onto something. Hotels around the world are capitalizing on creepiness, offering ghost tours and on-site psychics, starring in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, and redesigning grounds to fulfil the expectations of horror-movie pilgrims.
The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo., is a 1909 architectural marvel listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. But it is perhaps best known as the inspiration for The Shining, the Stephen King novel and Stanley Kubrick cult film. King wrote his creepy classic, about a caretaker who goes mad in a remote mountaintop hotel, while staying at The Stanley.
The hotel commemorates its legacy by staging theatrical seances with an illusionist from NBC-TV’s America’s Got Talent (tickets start at $20), plus paranormal investigations ($55), scary storytelling sessions ($8), and evening ghost tours ($25).
This summer, John Cullen celebrated his 20th anniversary as hotel owner by installing a hedge maze that recalls the topiary in The Shining’s climactic finale. The hotel never had one — Kubrick filmed those icy scenes in an English studio — but the fictitious structure loomed large and leafy in the minds of visitors.
“For so many years, so many people have shown up and said, ‘Where’s the maze? I wanna go walk through the maze,’” says David Cianci, general manager of The Stanley.
Cianci estimates that about 15 per cent of hotel guests are there because of The Shining, and 20 to 80 people attend the hotel’s nightly ghost tours. Paranormal programming may constitute nearly a third of the hotel’s annual million-dollar tour revenue.
The Fairmont Banff Springs, a Alberta castle hotel with a staff historian and two rumoured in-house ghosts, wants in on the action. It recently debuted overnight packages that celebrate its haunted heritage. Packages start at about $300 a night and include an in-depth walking tour based on the hotel’s two central ghost stories: former bellman Sam and the evocatively named Doomed Bride.
It’s always ghost season in Savannah, Georgia, a city whose tourism
department runs on Spanish moss and scary stories. Marketing executive-turned-paranormal investigator Timothy Nealon launched Ghost City Tours in 2012, and today the company escorts more than 100,000 guests each year to sites that include Savannah’s proudly “haunted” 17Hundred90 Inn. He expanded to New Orleans in 2014, and will debut in San Antonio next year.
Thrill-seeking travellers are hardly limited to those cities, though. Ghost-tour operators exist from New York City (Boroughs of the Dead) to San Diego (Ghosts & Gravestones, San Diego Frightseeing Tour) to the umpteen haunted history walks in medieval Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Fairmont Banff Springs and
Ghost City Tours focus on cultural histories of haunted places. Other operators simply peddle strange.
The Clown Motel, a creepy curiosity in the Nevada desert, 320 kilometres north of Las Vegas, is a collection of 28 rooms filled with an unholy number of clown figurines, terrifying even if you don’t suffer from coulrophobia. Portraits of famous clowns such as Pagliacci line its walls and it overlooks a Gold Rush-era cemetery. Yes, a hotel, with clowns, in the desert, next to a cemetery.
Margee Kerr, a remarkably personable sociologist who specializes in fear and teaches at three universities in Pittsburgh, Penn., assigns the existence — and success — of such operations to a simple human urge: some people like to be scared.
“The big appeal of voluntarily engaging with scary material is it gives us a self-esteem boost,” Kerr explains. Your body responds to staged scares, like those in horror movies or haunted houses, the same way it does an actual threat, she says.
“It’s almost like training wheels for real-life challenging situations,” says Kerr. “When the threat is real, you know you can handle it.”
And some people are just made for the Clown Motel: those who enjoy a good scare actually differ genetically from those who don’t. The former have highly efficient dopamine systems, which means their brains get multiple hormone boosts during scary situations.
Savvy hotels aim to appeal to both.
“People come here to enjoy their anniversary, to get married, to experience
the Rocky Mountains — not necessarily for a spookfest,” says Tara Goucher, public relations director at Fairmont Banff Springs.
Bill Ott, marketing and communications director at Arkansas’s Crescent Hotel, agrees. In addition to a historic chapel and spa overlooking the Ozarks, the 1886 mountaintop resort has two rooms (218 and 419) reputedly haunted by former guests, and a former morgue in the basement.
“Our No. 1 source of revenue is weddings, followed by romantic travellers. There’s our bread and butter and our steak,” Ott says. “And that little thing, over there on the corner of the plate? Well that’s not parsley; it’s ghosts.”
The Crescent, in Eureka Springs, hosts three to four ghost tours per night for groups of 25 hotel guests and local travellers, all year long. Tickets cost $21.50 per person. On a slow night, the Crescent brings in more than $1,600 on ghost tours alone.
Fear is big business. California’s Queen Mary, a glamorous 1937 ocean liner now docked in Long Beach, found success in later life as a hotel, museum, and popular pilgrimage site for hundreds of annual paranormal enthusiasts hoping to spot one of its rumoured 150 resident ghosts. The Lizzie Borden Inn, Massachusetts home of the infamous child murderer, appeals to history buffs with a taste for the macabre. And the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is as famous for rumoured apparitions of Marilyn Monroe as it is its 1927-era swinging pool parties.
Other hotels ignore their paranormal legacies entirely.
The Langham London declined to comment when several members of England’s cricket team reported ghostly bumps in the night. And Oregon’s Timberline Lodge would really prefer you forgot that a scene from The Shining was filmed there.
“Timberline is not haunted. You can quote me on that,” public affairs director Jon Tullis says.
The hotel, built in the late 1930s, appears briefly in the establishing aerial shot of the fictional Overlook Hotel at the beginning of the film.
The Clown Motel, a creepy curiosity in the Nevada desert, is terrifying even if you don’t suffer from coulrophobia.