A haunted hotel in a ghost town, what could be more...cliché?
How about a hotel that doesn't have a ghost, but wants to score one?
After all, ghosts put hotels ON THE MAP, especially when this hotel was once a hospital for miners.
And we all know...
George March sat kicked back in a chair, bare toes linked through the wrought iron lattice of a long, low balcony. He had a bitch of a hangover, and was nursing his second cup of coffee.
Wispy fog thinned as the sun oozed over the horizon, drawing darkness out of the steep ravines and buttes, replacing it with purple- and peach-colored fingers of light. Across the valley, Sedona and its famed red rocks. Below him, a steep drop into the ripped ground of an abandoned copper mine. Around him, the sights and sounds of a ghost town being resurrected.
Originally, the Jerome Hotel was a hospital built for miners. Newly renovated, this slice of Americana had become the latest tourist trap, with George as its first guest.
A history buff-slash-armchair adventurer, George found ghost towns irresistible. Not the wailing, warring, shrieking kind claimed to inhabit such places, but the sense of history that people left behind, the mark they made on their world and on each other.
Yesterday the front desk clerk, sporting a white dress and the beginnings of a summer cold, shared the best stories about the old structure. Working a hand-cranked telephone switchboard, she went on at length about the original layout, treatment capabilities, which rooms had the best view.
"Jerome was a boom and bust kind of place. It got its start as a copper mining camp in 1876. A few fires, a few badly placed charges of dynamite and the whole village started sliding down the side of the mountain." She waved her hand. "Up here's about 5,000 feet elevation, but that's not what did it. We're on a 30-degree slope, so things have a tendency to slip and slide," she explained cheerfully. "By the early 1950s, Jerome was largely abandoned, a ghost town."
Leading him to the elevator, she explained how it had been in continuous operation since 1927. "It's only been out of service 15 minutes the entire time! That's better than some of those fancy elevators we have today."
George listened dutifully. Normally he'd take the stairs, but on second thought he stepped inside. The simple caged affair with its two sliding doors, faded Oriental carpet and embossed gold tin ceiling, was the perfect vehicle for a trip back in time.
Before the elevator began its ascent, she called to him again. Did he know the hotel was haunted?
A/N: The photo below is of an abandoned copper mine. It's not like coal mining, but equally dangerous and just as bad for the environment.
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