Run a ghost tour long enough and the stories start coming to you. Guests, bartenders, work crews, all of them want to tell somebody what they saw. As the 2022 season wound down, we looked back at the eeriest accounts that landed on our radar, and the two big ones both came out of Flagstaff's historic hotels.
The Weatherford's ghosts came back to work
Locals have long reported paranormal experiences inside the Weatherford Hotel's bars and restaurants, and the Zane Grey Ballroom, home of the hotel's famous White Lady, is atmospheric enough that new sightings never surprise us. For a decade, though, the reports were sporadic, many of them retellings from the 1990s. Not in 2022. Whether it was the end of the pandemic or a renewed appetite for the paranormal, the upstairs got busy again.
One woman, who had toured with us earlier in the evening, went back to the Zane Grey with her group and stepped into the bathroom. Washing her hands, she looked up into the mirror and saw the clear outline of a female figure standing behind her, a wispy shape that did not dissipate when she turned around. She tried to take a photo and her fingers would not work. She hit call to reach her mother instead. That did not go through either. Around the same time, another woman was positive someone had followed her into the same small bathroom. When she finished, no one was in the room or anywhere down the hallway.
The staff had their own season. One bartender told us she has always felt a female presence in the upstairs bar, and that its antics, ice throwing, doors closing, glasses migrating, ramped up as patrons returned in force. The downstairs bars, Charly's and the Gopher Hole, reported shadow figures and falling bottles of their own.
What did the Monte Vista find in the wall?
The story goes that a renovation crew found a bloody nightgown sealed inside an original wall. This one came to us from a reliable source and reportedly happened around the end of 2021, when the Hotel Monte Vista used the pandemic lull to renovate rooms near Room 220, the room locals call the Meat Man room. The crew opened a wall for what should have been a two-day job, and the hotel promptly misbehaved: TV reception died across the wing, the front desk fielded calls with no one on the line, lights flickered, and strange noises carried down the halls. Then came the nightgown. Once the work wrapped and the wall closed, everything calmed down. Make of that what you will.
The Monte Vista has plenty of company in its cast of regulars, from the phantom bellboy of Room 210 to the bank robber who bled out in the cocktail lounge. Both hotels feature in Flagstaff's haunted history, and the reports kept coming; we collected the next batch in More Hauntings from the Season.
Drink where the stories happened
Both of these hotels pour drinks in the very rooms the reports come from, which is why our haunted pub crawl exists. Spirits With The Spirits is a 21+ walk through three historic bar stops, two hours, equal parts ghost stories and happy hour, and it now runs as a private booking for groups. If you would rather keep both hands on your camera, the haunted pub crawl has a sober sibling in our nightly 7 PM ghost tour.
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Boo.
