G & C Summer 2017
Blogpost 018
July 20th, 2017
Ghost Stories
of Jerome: #1
“The Connor
Hotel”
Standing tall across the street
from the stone and iron vault was the famous Connor Hotel, a slim two-story
structure made of brick that had been built as the town of Jerome was just
settling in. Now before I get more into the hotel itself I should mention that
it is impossible to delve any further without first addressing a little about
the town’s history which was this;
Before Jerome was a city, town, or
settlement it was just a patch of mountain that was considered to be of no
importance to anyone and was therefore bothered by no one. That was until two
bushwhacking brothers traveling far from home had heard rumors that the natives
had hordes of secret gold and wealth beyond their naive imaginations. This was
of course a lie. A distant cousin of the whole El Dorado misapprehension
with the Conquistadors. Regardless, the gullible brothers devised a plan to
find some natives, track them home, kill them, and plunder their horde of gold.
Hannibal of Carthage couldn’t have planned a better raid with all the elephants
in the world. So, armed with a couple of riffles and sacks with what I assume
must have been $’s painted on like the Hamburgler they traverse the Arizona
wild and discover tracks. They followed them to what is now Mount Mingus and
start climbing. There was just one problem; the tracks they were following did
not belong to any north American tribe. They were deer tracks. The bushwhacking
brothers never found any natives to slaughter. They did, however, strike gold.
Turns out, Mount Mingus was a literal gold mine and nobody knew about it,
except the two brothers. They load up their money sacks with as much gold as
they can carry and haul themselves back to the nearest town to celebrate their
sharp vicissitudes of fortune.
How
do you suppose a pair like that would celebrate? Well, it was the Wild West so
they went to a saloon and there they drank through every saloon they can find.
As the brothers became progressively drunker they also became progressively
friendlier, and who doesn’t feel like talking when one’s feeling drunk and
friendly? The bushwhacking brothers certainly did and told everybody who would
listen about their newfound wealth, where they got it, and how to get there.
Before either brother felt the first agonizing cranial sting of a hangover the
mountain was under siege of a gold rush.
Back
then, in American territories, if someone wanted to stake a claim they’d have
to find a stick, write their name on it, and stick it in the land and whatever
land you could see from your stick was your land. This was not a flawless
system as anyone could burn a rival landowner’s property stick and claim they
never saw it. Of course that would then initial the previous owner to exact
justice for usurping his property and justice in the West was typically found
at the end of one’s gun. In the midst of this chaos, and gold fever, there was
one fortune-seeker among hundreds who was responsible for the gneiss of the
city of Jerome, in a way.
He
was a gold-panner by trade but the gold of the mountain was inside in the earth
and needed to be exhumed physically. All he had was a shovel and pickaxe. He
picks a random spot in the diameter of his stick and starts digging down. A
little known fact about mining is that after a certain number of feet you need
to insert bracers so that the mine does not collapse on you. A gold-panner does
not concern himself with bracers for he doesn’t even know what they are. The
novice minor made it 15 feet down before he was buried alive.
There
was a silver lining to this tragedy (as there often is with tales of great
fortitude) and that was the man’s wife had then inherited the mine and with it
(and hired help that actually know what they’re doing) she finds copper. She
sends it to the federal government, as it was a legal requirement to register
one’s mine with a sample of what it was they were to extract from the earth. At
this time, the White House had just become electrified by Tomas Edison, and copper
had just become a must-have mineral for the electric-revolution and this copper
was tested at 30% purity. To put in perspective the average purity of modern copper,
it is normally just over 2%. It wasn’t long until Jerome had fully blossomed
into the booming one-guarantied-fatal-mining accident-a-day copper-mining
community that put it on the map. It’s no wonder that the more “successful”
hubs of industry are bred out of incalculable bloodshed for a great white can
smell it from a mile away.
David
Connor was just the kind of shark a place like Jerome needed. He build the
Connor Hotel in 1898 in the center of town; a one-of-a-kind luxury resort with
cards, hooch, and billiards dedicated to the first floor and 20 habitual rooms
for the next three floors marked at a dollar a night. David Connor spared no
expense.
David
Connor wanted his establishment to be the beacon of light in the vast emptiness
that was the American west so he bought a phone for the building back when a
collect call could bankrupt a sad drunk if not careful. The hotel’s phone
number was 8. The hotel’s structure was made primarily out of timber.
The
first time the Connor hotel burned was the result of another fire in town, the
Catholic Church specifically, which was further up the mountain thus resulting
in embers fluttering destructively down over the rest of the town. As everyone
knows wood is flammable, and so the entire building became engulfed in minutes
leaving its patrons no time to escape.
Ordinarily
conflagrations like this would ruin most businessmen but David Connor was one
of two business owners in the whole of Jerome to have invested in property
insurance. He received a check for $14,500, enough to rebuild his hotel
forthwith. David Connor spared no expense.
The
Connor hotel opened its doors again in the summer of 1899 and switching out
lumber for concrete… on the first floor, the remaining upper floors were still
made of wooden planks. Lo and behold, the hotel burned again, but this time
those on the first-floor survived so there was progress, legally
speaking!
Again
Connor had taken the liberty to buy insurance a second time, which he did, and
used the money to rebuild the hotel again but this time he’d have to remake the
entire building out of non-flammable material if he wanted to buy insurance for
a third time in less than a decade. Begrudgingly David Connor complied and
agreed to switch to brick at the cost of two-fewer floors. David Conno
Thankfully,
this seemed to work, as the Connor hotel still stands to this day and still
open to the public though now with the proud proclamation it’s cohabited with a
plethora of phantoms. There have been numerous reports from staff members and
hotel guests of witnessing ghastly apparitions and unexplainable disturbances.
One
such report my fiancé and I were told had apparently happened not too long ago
with a husband and wife who were staying the night. The husband was lying in
bed and felt his wife get in next to him. According to the husband’s report he
heard his wife say, “don’t be scared, everything’s going to be alright,” which
is always a disturbing thing to hear while half-asleep regardless of the
context. The husband turned over to ask his wife what the hell she was going on
about and finds himself alone in the bed and his wife in the bathroom. The
husband naturally asks his wife what she’s playing at but she’s been brushing
her teeth so it wasn’t her. He checks the hotel door to see if someone had just
snuck in and snuck out having pulled a fast one on him and of course the door’s
locked from the inside.
Our
guide speculated that the husband had been visited by a semi-living memory, a
spiritual snapshot of one of the hotel’s victim’s in their final moments;
consoling a loved one as the fire claimed them. I suppose in such an inexcusable
situation as imminent immolation what else could one do apart from imitating
the run of a headless chicken followed by autodefenestration in a blaze of
fiery glory?
Ghost Stories
of Jerome: #2
“The Blue
Movie Starlet”
The next stage in out tour of
Jerome’s walking tour of death brought us to the historic Liberty Theatre,
which was the town’s stage for vaudeville and silent pictures. Today it is a
time-capsule of that long-forgotten era; standing forty-feet tall and made out
of concrete though over the years it’d lost it’s paint, sign, and awning
rendering it as a grey, faded slab.
The Liberty Theater
Our
guide ushered us through the first floor which once served as a lobby but has
since become a gift-shop selling off-season Halloween decorations and
second-rate gifts for family members with nonspecific interests. A stairwell led
towards the back of the shop, which led into, the actual theatre part of the theatre,
which was kept perfectly, preserved.
The
stairs led through a gaping rectangular-shaped hole in the second-story floor
in front of where the skinny vaudevillian stage was kept, above it was the
giant square-screen used for films. A digital projector was playing a slide
show of the theatre’s history and (keeping with tradition) was muted. On the
other side of the stage were rows of seats stretching up two more stories. The
seats were in their original condition, which made them tiny and cramped to
which no modern American could sit in comfort. Despite this we were brought to
a row in the lower stage-left side and told to take our seats as our guide told
us the story of Jerome’s first murder victim, Betty Gotly.
Inside the Liberty Theater
Betty’s
story follows a trend that’s all too familiar in the world of stage and screen.
She was a pretty girl in Germany who made ends meet in the European “Blue
Movie” industry. Blue movies were pornographic flicks of the “tame” variety,
mostly showcasing women and girls performing silly acts of athleticism while in
the buff. Betty’s movies primarily involved her skipping rope or jumping up and
down on a trampoline. Not much to call home but Betty found minor success when
the camera was on her and decided to take it to the next level. She immigrated
to America and started her journey into becoming the next big Hollywood
scarlet.
Betty
quickly discovered that hopping up and down nude was drastically different from
actual acting, bombing auditions left and right until she finally caved in and
found herself in the mountain town of Jerome. She got a job as an entertainer
more in line with her previous method of employment but this time for a live
audience.
Betty
became known as the Dirty Hurdy Gurdy girl, for her “act” involved an
organ grinder cranking away at his music box while Betty immured on stage naked
doing the Hurdy Gurdy which and if you’d like to see how it is performed ask a
granny.
One
day while Betty’s on the job, a man in the audience recognizes her from her
blue movies in Germany. He was a German himself and saw Betty as a famous film
star and proposed to her that night. She refused at first but after weeks of
persistent pestering caves in again for he was well off enough to save her from
a life of the Hurdy Gurdy. In no time they became an unhappy couple of married
alcoholics who developed a reputation for their excessive partying and
obnoxious belligerence.
Sooner
they start fighting as couples are known to do and their fights become
frequent. Eventually they have a fight so bad Betty leaves and retreats to the
only place she feels happiest, the theatre. She does in for the night and
watches whatever’s playing. Betty stays in her seat until the Liberty Theatre
closes. All the other patrons exit except for Betty so an usher boy tells her
to leave.
Betty
doesn't move. Naturally the usher believes Betty has fallen asleep and proceeds
to yell at her. Betty doesn’t stir. The usher then starts shaking her, thinking
she may have just had a little too much to drink (again) and discovers
strangulation marks on poor Betty’s neck attached to a head that’d been dead
for hours. Someone had choked the life out of Betty Gotly from behind during
the show with no one was the wiser.
An
investigation follows suit with Jerome authorities questioning every citizen
that had occupied the Liberty theatre that day. They arrive at one patron’s
residence and upon opening the door he says, “I didn’t kill her.” Needless to
say they hug him that very night.
Betty’s
dreams of Hollywood stardom were never recognized in life but fame has
certainly graced her in death. Betty now haunts the Liberty theatre, and occasionally
makes herself known in the corner of one’s eye or as a whisper in one’s ear.
Our guide informed us of an incident where Betty had involved herself in a
couple’s dispute where a woman’s belligerent male partner was being an
all-around tool on a ghost tour some years ago and had pushed himself to the
top of the theatre’s back-stairs to be the first to see Betty’s ghost. In a way
he’d gotten his wish for once he reached the second story both legs of his had
been pulled out from under him sending his face to the floorboards. Both his
girlfriend and the other tourists insisted that the man’s legs seemed to jerk
out on their own and upon hearing the tale of Betty’s murder at the hands of a
dangerous man the guide theorized that Betty might have returned to exact
justice on yet another dangerous man. Once hearing this, the fallen tourist’s
face became pallid and he ran out the theatre never to return. The woman he was
with moved on from their one sided relationship and has taken the Jerome ghost
tour several times since.
Exploring the Theater
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