Hotel Claims Uninvited Guests: Ghosts

BAKER CITY, Ore. - Every night at the Geiser Grand Hotel is Halloween.

Ghosts are said to haunt the rooms full of mahogany columns, sparkling Viennese crystal chandeliers and marble-topped antiques.

Acknowledged as the finest hotel between Portland and Salt Lake City when it was built in 1889, the Geiser Grand reopened in the summer following a three-year, $6 million restoration.

Barbara Sidway and her husband, Dwight, the owners of Sidway Investment of Hillsboro, Ore., began renovating the Geiser Grand after restoring the 18-story Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla.

"The Biltmore was the most-haunted building we ever worked on, bar none," Dwight Sidway said. "On that project, we actually had men run out of the building and never come back."

The Sidways say the spirits that haunt the Geiser Grand are generally more congenial. They throw noisy parties in vacant rooms, toss things about, blink the lights off and on, rearrange furniture and tie knots in curtains.

The couple say they tried to sleep in a second-floor room one evening as loud music and shrill laughter got under way on the floor above.

"I could put my hand to the wall and feel the vibration of the music," Barbara Sidway said.

Dwight Sidway rushed up to quiet the noisy guests, but the sounds led him to an unused room that suddenly turned silent as a tomb. "There wasn't a soul up there," he said.

Still, during the renovation, while crews worked seven days a week in three shifts to finish in time for the 1997 summer season, a dozen workers quit, claiming they had encountered ghosts.

Bill Harp, a hotel cook, says he and another employee watched a large carton of glassware rise into the air, float about four feet and crash to the floor.

"I never believed in ghosts until I started working here," Harp said.

A century ago, people marveled at the Geiser Grand's Italian Renaissance Revival architecture, French menus, white-gloved waiters, potted palms and one of the first Otis elevators in the frontier West.

But the hotel later fell on hard times and became a brothel, a veterans hospital and a casino before it finally closed in 1969.