Clark Hays's Blog - Posts Tagged "ghosts"
The Lady of the Lake: A Ghost story
In the mood for a ghost story? Here's a post we wrote for Embrace the Shadows, a paranormal book review blog. It's a true story. Well it's based on a true story, and we truly stayed at the lodge where the Lady of the Lake worked before she was murdered and dumped in the water. It all starts with a definition...
Saponify: to convert a fat into soap by treating with an alkali
Thankfully, few of us know much about the process of saponification. A pair of fishermen in 1940 found out the hard way that when a human body is exposed to sufficient amounts of alkali and pressure, and refrigerated to prevent decay, naturally occurring fat turns into a soap-like substance. When they noticed a woman’s body (recognizably female and wearing slightly outdated clothes) bobbing on the surface of Lake Crescent, the flesh slipped and oozed off like soap as they wrestled her to shore.
Thus began the legend of the Lady of the Lake.
Fast forward 72 years. After a long few months leading up to the release of Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, we decided to take a week off and booked a cabin at Lake Crescent in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The Olympic National Park is a vast swath of wilderness about as far north and west as you can get in the lower 48 with mossy, old growth rain forests, the soaring, snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains, an amazing stretch of rocky, undeveloped coastline, milky blue glacier-fed rivers and a series of historic lodges.
We stayed at Crescent Lodge, a turn-of-the-century building with a delightful solarium, dusty, glassy-eyed elk heads on the walls and, naturally, ghosts. During the 1920s and perhaps beyond, the Singer Tavern, as the lodge was then known, served double duty as a house of ill repute. Like any good creaky, historic and now-defunct brothel, it has its share of spirits unwilling to leave this mortal plane.
One such spirit is the Lady of the Lake. Her real name was Hallie Illingworth and she was a rough-around-the-edges beauty, a waitress at the tavern and married (the third time was not a charm) to a louse. He was a beer truck driver and incorrigible ladies man, even after marrying her, and they were prone to violent arguments and fist fights – with each other or other inhabitants of the bar. She disappeared one cold night in December, not to be seen again for four years.
That’s when her saponified corpse popped up out of the icy depths of Lake Crescent — 600 feet straight down in some places — and into the local legend. She had been bound in rope to which weights had been affixed. Her husband was convicted and served his time unremarkably. She, poor soul, continues to mope about the lodge much to the terrified delight of guests and staff.
On a tour of the building, our guide told us one of the newbies heard her clattering up and down the stairs in the wee hours just the night before. Other staff spoke of lights flickering, doors banging shut and music suddenly getting louder in the lounge. She had a reputation for hard drinking, so that makes sense. Others had seen her, or knew someone who had seen her, drifting along the shore and over the water, glowing in the darkness, pale and translucent and a little bit sudsy.
Sadly, we had no paranormal experiences save for an otherworldly stiffness inhabiting our bodies after a night on those historic mattresses. We did take a canoe across the lake to the vicinity where her body was found and stared down into the blue-green depths, half expecting to see her just under the surface of the water — so cold, so deep, and so high in alkali sluiced off the steep peaks surrounding the lake. But we only saw two trout. And an eagle. And later a purple butterfly that landed on Kathleen’s toe. But no ghosts.
It was too sunny for ghosts during the day, and we were far too tired for much to wake us up at night. The canoeing and hiking left us sleeping like the dead. Still, we felt her as we walked the trails around the lake where she died, felt her sorrow in the waters she haunted and felt the sadness that still haunted her all those years later.
There are no ghosts in Blood and Whiskey, but there are plenty of vampires. Check it out.
Saponify: to convert a fat into soap by treating with an alkali
Thankfully, few of us know much about the process of saponification. A pair of fishermen in 1940 found out the hard way that when a human body is exposed to sufficient amounts of alkali and pressure, and refrigerated to prevent decay, naturally occurring fat turns into a soap-like substance. When they noticed a woman’s body (recognizably female and wearing slightly outdated clothes) bobbing on the surface of Lake Crescent, the flesh slipped and oozed off like soap as they wrestled her to shore.
Thus began the legend of the Lady of the Lake.
Fast forward 72 years. After a long few months leading up to the release of Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, we decided to take a week off and booked a cabin at Lake Crescent in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The Olympic National Park is a vast swath of wilderness about as far north and west as you can get in the lower 48 with mossy, old growth rain forests, the soaring, snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains, an amazing stretch of rocky, undeveloped coastline, milky blue glacier-fed rivers and a series of historic lodges.
We stayed at Crescent Lodge, a turn-of-the-century building with a delightful solarium, dusty, glassy-eyed elk heads on the walls and, naturally, ghosts. During the 1920s and perhaps beyond, the Singer Tavern, as the lodge was then known, served double duty as a house of ill repute. Like any good creaky, historic and now-defunct brothel, it has its share of spirits unwilling to leave this mortal plane.
One such spirit is the Lady of the Lake. Her real name was Hallie Illingworth and she was a rough-around-the-edges beauty, a waitress at the tavern and married (the third time was not a charm) to a louse. He was a beer truck driver and incorrigible ladies man, even after marrying her, and they were prone to violent arguments and fist fights – with each other or other inhabitants of the bar. She disappeared one cold night in December, not to be seen again for four years.
That’s when her saponified corpse popped up out of the icy depths of Lake Crescent — 600 feet straight down in some places — and into the local legend. She had been bound in rope to which weights had been affixed. Her husband was convicted and served his time unremarkably. She, poor soul, continues to mope about the lodge much to the terrified delight of guests and staff.
On a tour of the building, our guide told us one of the newbies heard her clattering up and down the stairs in the wee hours just the night before. Other staff spoke of lights flickering, doors banging shut and music suddenly getting louder in the lounge. She had a reputation for hard drinking, so that makes sense. Others had seen her, or knew someone who had seen her, drifting along the shore and over the water, glowing in the darkness, pale and translucent and a little bit sudsy.
Sadly, we had no paranormal experiences save for an otherworldly stiffness inhabiting our bodies after a night on those historic mattresses. We did take a canoe across the lake to the vicinity where her body was found and stared down into the blue-green depths, half expecting to see her just under the surface of the water — so cold, so deep, and so high in alkali sluiced off the steep peaks surrounding the lake. But we only saw two trout. And an eagle. And later a purple butterfly that landed on Kathleen’s toe. But no ghosts.
It was too sunny for ghosts during the day, and we were far too tired for much to wake us up at night. The canoeing and hiking left us sleeping like the dead. Still, we felt her as we walked the trails around the lake where she died, felt her sorrow in the waters she haunted and felt the sadness that still haunted her all those years later.
There are no ghosts in Blood and Whiskey, but there are plenty of vampires. Check it out.
Possessed: Evil Dolls and Mojitos
Discovering the Dark Side of a tropical paradise
One of the great things about writing paranormal fiction (The Cowboy and the Vampire, Blood and Whiskey and the soon-to-be-released book three, which is getting closer) is that we get to do fun, weird stuff on a regular basis.
Case and point: We were recently in Key West on a well-deserved vacation. The weather was beautiful, the booze was flowing on Duval Street and while most people were dancing and laughing and enjoying another perfect sunset, we were on the “trolley of the doomed” touring the most haunted places on the island. And for a tiny island, there are a LOT of haunted places.
As a general rule, places get haunted because of some horrible event that occurred there in the past like murders or mass graves — there’s not a lot of ghosts skulking about the site of the “happiest tea party ever.” But one of the scariest stories we heard had nothing to do with crimes of passion — it was about a doll. Robert the Doll, to be precise — a creepy little life-sized figure in a sailor suit possessed by evil spirits that has become a local celebrity for his ghostly hijinks.
The doll was given to one Robert Eugene Otto, a little boy in Key West, when he was four. The year was 1906 and the doll was made for him by his nanny, a woman from the Bahamas said to be skilled in the black arts. She gave dressed the doll in a suit of Roberts’s clothes and gave it to him just about the time she was fired from the family. Perhaps because of the termination, she probably added a curse as well.
The boy quickly bonded with the doll and even officially gave it his own name, Robert, going by Eugene for the rest of his life. It was no biggie, boys play with dolls all the time — GI Joe was a doll, when you think it about it — but then things got weird.
His parents overheard their son conversing with someone, and that someone had a high, unfamiliar voice, but when they entered the room there was no one was there but the boy and the doll. When they asked, Eugene freely admitted Robert talked to him all the time.
Then furniture started breaking and of course, Eugene blamed it on Robert the Doll. They would find clothes mysteriously be strewn across the floor in all the rooms, and again Robert got the blame. They even heard footsteps, tiny footsteps, in empty rooms … empty save for Robert, who seemed to glare at them from wherever he was propped.
One day, Eugene’s mom came home and all the servants were locked out and a tearful Eugene told her Robert did it. She’d had enough. She locked Robert the Doll away in an unused turret in the house (we drove by it and it actually looks like a turret). Eugene seemingly forgot about the doll and went off to Europe, married a beautiful young lady and brought her back to Key West where he was developing a reputation as an author and a painter. And, as it turned out, as a kook.
He informed his wife that Robert the Doll would be seated at the dining table with them for meals, and had a bed placed into their bedroom so Robert could sleep next to them. Things get a little hazy after that, the intimacies of their peculiar marriage — and details of possibly the creepiest ménage a trois of all time — remain shrouded from history.
But the story picks up again years after Eugene dies. A new family buys the house, Robert the Doll is rediscovered in a dusty closet and a little girl, initially delighted, is probably scarred for life when her doll soon gets up to his old tricks — creating mischief, running around, talking to her and, it would seem, threatening to kill her in her sleep. (She’s been interviewed many times sense and swears the doll was alive.)
Her family was much quicker to act, donating Robert the Doll to the Key West historical society. The armchair historians were happy to accept such a well-preserved relic of the past. Only Robert the Doll refused to stay still. They locked him up safely under glass, but according to the staff, they sometimes find him in different positions inside his transparent prison. Impossible, of course, they admit, but it’s happened. Some have even heard him scampering around the old building late at night and have seen tiny, improbable footprints on the dusty floor or tiny smudges as if from ill-formed hands inside the glass.
One thing is clear, they said — folks who take his picture without asking first his permission are almost certain fall victim to his curse. The wall behind his exhibit is papered with letters from folks around the country and the world attesting to the misfortune that befell them after snapping his picture without asking.
We took no chances on the picture we took.
There’s one more thing. The tour guide handed out EMF meters so we could test the area for paranormal activity. There were six meters and five of them registered absolutely nothing. The sixth, however, was lighting up like a Christmas tree whenever the woman carried it to close to Robert.
An hour later, we let the spirits in our mojitos possess us and tried to get the image of that creepy little doll out of our minds. It took several before we were successful.
If you are ever in Key West, be sure and visit Robert the Doll. But be respectful. And try a mojito.
(You can check out a picture we took of the creepy little bastard on our website: http://cowboyandvampire.com)
One of the great things about writing paranormal fiction (The Cowboy and the Vampire, Blood and Whiskey and the soon-to-be-released book three, which is getting closer) is that we get to do fun, weird stuff on a regular basis.
Case and point: We were recently in Key West on a well-deserved vacation. The weather was beautiful, the booze was flowing on Duval Street and while most people were dancing and laughing and enjoying another perfect sunset, we were on the “trolley of the doomed” touring the most haunted places on the island. And for a tiny island, there are a LOT of haunted places.
As a general rule, places get haunted because of some horrible event that occurred there in the past like murders or mass graves — there’s not a lot of ghosts skulking about the site of the “happiest tea party ever.” But one of the scariest stories we heard had nothing to do with crimes of passion — it was about a doll. Robert the Doll, to be precise — a creepy little life-sized figure in a sailor suit possessed by evil spirits that has become a local celebrity for his ghostly hijinks.
The doll was given to one Robert Eugene Otto, a little boy in Key West, when he was four. The year was 1906 and the doll was made for him by his nanny, a woman from the Bahamas said to be skilled in the black arts. She gave dressed the doll in a suit of Roberts’s clothes and gave it to him just about the time she was fired from the family. Perhaps because of the termination, she probably added a curse as well.
The boy quickly bonded with the doll and even officially gave it his own name, Robert, going by Eugene for the rest of his life. It was no biggie, boys play with dolls all the time — GI Joe was a doll, when you think it about it — but then things got weird.
His parents overheard their son conversing with someone, and that someone had a high, unfamiliar voice, but when they entered the room there was no one was there but the boy and the doll. When they asked, Eugene freely admitted Robert talked to him all the time.
Then furniture started breaking and of course, Eugene blamed it on Robert the Doll. They would find clothes mysteriously be strewn across the floor in all the rooms, and again Robert got the blame. They even heard footsteps, tiny footsteps, in empty rooms … empty save for Robert, who seemed to glare at them from wherever he was propped.
One day, Eugene’s mom came home and all the servants were locked out and a tearful Eugene told her Robert did it. She’d had enough. She locked Robert the Doll away in an unused turret in the house (we drove by it and it actually looks like a turret). Eugene seemingly forgot about the doll and went off to Europe, married a beautiful young lady and brought her back to Key West where he was developing a reputation as an author and a painter. And, as it turned out, as a kook.
He informed his wife that Robert the Doll would be seated at the dining table with them for meals, and had a bed placed into their bedroom so Robert could sleep next to them. Things get a little hazy after that, the intimacies of their peculiar marriage — and details of possibly the creepiest ménage a trois of all time — remain shrouded from history.
But the story picks up again years after Eugene dies. A new family buys the house, Robert the Doll is rediscovered in a dusty closet and a little girl, initially delighted, is probably scarred for life when her doll soon gets up to his old tricks — creating mischief, running around, talking to her and, it would seem, threatening to kill her in her sleep. (She’s been interviewed many times sense and swears the doll was alive.)
Her family was much quicker to act, donating Robert the Doll to the Key West historical society. The armchair historians were happy to accept such a well-preserved relic of the past. Only Robert the Doll refused to stay still. They locked him up safely under glass, but according to the staff, they sometimes find him in different positions inside his transparent prison. Impossible, of course, they admit, but it’s happened. Some have even heard him scampering around the old building late at night and have seen tiny, improbable footprints on the dusty floor or tiny smudges as if from ill-formed hands inside the glass.
One thing is clear, they said — folks who take his picture without asking first his permission are almost certain fall victim to his curse. The wall behind his exhibit is papered with letters from folks around the country and the world attesting to the misfortune that befell them after snapping his picture without asking.
We took no chances on the picture we took.
There’s one more thing. The tour guide handed out EMF meters so we could test the area for paranormal activity. There were six meters and five of them registered absolutely nothing. The sixth, however, was lighting up like a Christmas tree whenever the woman carried it to close to Robert.
An hour later, we let the spirits in our mojitos possess us and tried to get the image of that creepy little doll out of our minds. It took several before we were successful.
If you are ever in Key West, be sure and visit Robert the Doll. But be respectful. And try a mojito.
(You can check out a picture we took of the creepy little bastard on our website: http://cowboyandvampire.com)
