Ghostly tale lives on downtown

  SANDPOINT — Some ghost stories are shared in jest, others are told in somber tones.  This one falls into the second category — an otherworldly tale of a lonely spirit who, according to some accounts, wandered the empty halls of an historic downtown hotel on the upper floor of the Bernd Building for more than 80 years.

    One man who owned the brick building heard her pacing upstairs at night.  Another owner heard her voice in the darkness. Both climbed the stairwell to investigate numerous times, always finding nothing but the vacant rooms of a long-abandoned hotel.  Later, a property manager told of tenants who were driven away in fear.

“We used to manage the Bernd Building,” said Ned Brandenberger of Sandpoint Property Management. “We leased the entire upper floor to a professional and they said they could hardly stand to be up there.  They finally moved out when it got so bad that they were hanging Tibetan prayer flags on the wall to ward off whatever they thought was upstairs.

“The story,” he added, “was that a young woman was murdered up there at some point.”

Two other people who worked nights on the second floor say they caught glances of her out of the corner of their eye or saw her full on. Objectivity and cold reality normally would cause me to discount such stories as the product of a runaway imagination. Except that I was one of those people.

Rooms to Let

In the 1920s, the Bernd Building was home to a grocery store at the street level and the Lincoln Hotel upstairs. The Lincoln, like many hotels downtown, was rumored to offer accommodations of a different kind, serving the booming timber trade as a brothel for those woodsmen who came into town on payday and hadn't already lost their stake in downtown saloons and gambling halls.

For years after the hotel closed and the upstairs sat empty, there were stories of a death that happened around that time — the death of a girl.

“People talked about it being haunted,” said local architect Kris Contor, who had an office on the second floor of the building in the early 1990s. “They always told the same story - that it was a house of ill repute and that there was a ghost upstairs.”

Contor said he never encountered the ghost. An artist who recently had purchased the building with her husband and sometimes worked upstairs after other downtown stores had closed for the day, however, believed there definitely was a spirit afoot in the place. Maybe she put ideas in my head, because it was at about this same time that I rented space for a small photo studio in one corner of the former hotel.

The entire floor, to be honest, was in shambles, but the price was right and it had the feel of a bohemian artist's loft — two attributes I found appealing. The owner walked me through the north side of the top floor, where doorless thresholds stood in a line along a wooden-floored hallway. Transom windows and room numbers were the only remaining vestiges of the Lincoln's presence. Even in the daylight, the place was delightfully creepy.  Some of the rooms had been torn out by a former owner and a large storage cabinet had been constructed at one end of the hall.

“You can use the storage closet for your equipment if you'd like to,” the owner told me. 

“And always be sure to greet the girl who lives up here when you come upstairs,” she added, handing me a key. “Just let her know you're friendly and that you know this is her place.”

I waited for a laugh or a wink. But the information was conveyed as a matter of fact, in much the same way that the switch for the heater and the location of the fuse box were pointed out.

Soon after, I made my first visit to carry lights, stands and miscellaneous photo equipment upstairs. Because afternoon art classes were sometimes held adjacent to my corner studio, I decided to keep the gear under lock and key in the storage closet. The closet sat almost dead center in the upper floor and, for some reason, walking up to it always caused me to shiver. Not that surprising, really, since looming in the dark behind the space were the gaping doorways, staring back like empty eye sockets along the gutted hallway. Over the course of the next few weeks, the feeling of discomfort turned to dread, until I nearly had to drag myself into the dark closet to retrieve the equipment.

Before long, I simply decided to leave the gear set up on “my side” and avoid the ruins of the old hotel completely.

A partial wall separated me from the rooms. More than once, I thought I caught a glimpse of movement, as if someone had peered around the wall and ducked quickly behind it when I turned to look. On other occasions, the distinct sound of footsteps along the creaking floor of the wooden hallway on the other side stopped me cold. The old building is just settling in the night, I told myself.  Just settling in the precise rhythm of someone walking down the hall of an abandoned hotel.

My last night in the space - the night before I turned in my key and cleared out my gear — was the night I “saw” her. The creaking had become routine and the glimpses of movement I had explained away as tricks of light. 

But as I knelt one night to tuck the cord of a photo strobe under its stand, I caught her in my peripheral vision. She was standing to my right, about 10 feet away, peering around the wall.

I let my eyes move scant inches in that direction and froze in place. The details of a white nightgown became clear. There were pleats running down the bodice and buttons along the full length of the garment. I had a sidelong glance of dark hair falling around her shoulders and a pretty face with dark features.  It was so real that I never thought to be frightened.  Instead, I was certain that someone with a key had managed to sneak in for a late-night prank.

“OK,” I said, standing and turning in one motion.  “Not funny.”

The hint of a shoulder and a wisp of brown hair disappeared around the corner and I followed, highly annoyed.

“Joke's over,” I called as I walked into the skeletal remains of the hotel rooms.  “You've had your fun.”

I took a few more steps to follow the prankster and felt the familiar chill at the center of the room. The line of doorways faced me and the storage closet was at my back.  That's when the floor creaked a few feet away in the dark.  It creaked again and then again in a measured pace, moving closer to where I stood.

There were about 30 steps down the steep, old stairwell of the original Bernd Building.  My feet might have touched four or five of them on my flight down to the door. I fumbled the key into its slot, wheeled to the other side and locked the door behind me.

From that day on, I never shared the details of my last night in the Lincoln Hotel with another soul.  People would mention the supposed haunting and I'd reply, “That's the rumor” or “That's what they say.”

Until last week.  That's when I learned that, while I may indeed be nuts, at least I wasn't the only person who'd been visited by the ghost.

Into the Night

My e-mails and phone messages stating that I was looking for a few good ghost stories for a Halloween feature turned up a lot of gag responses and one-liners, but no solid leads. No leads, that is, until I got the call from Kathleen Hyde. 

In 1989, she was an employee of Sneaky Tee's, which had a shop downstairs in the Bernd Building and a production area upstairs.

Perry Edwards had purchased the building and began remodeling the top floor for offices and a manufacturing space for his screen-printed t-shirt business.  He later told Hyde that he would hear footsteps upstairs when he was working alone in the shop at night and several times scoured the top floor after he heard a woman's voice and climbed the stairs to investigate. 

Hyde, however, knew nothing about those audible encounters when she and another young lady signed up as a two-person night shift to help meet the deadline for a 40,000-piece shirt order.

I kept my counsel when she called to say she had a story about the old hotel, as I was dying to know if any of the details would jibe with my own experience.  We set a meeting for the following morning.

“This is where I always saw her,” Hyde said, making a circle on a hasty diagram she had just drawn of the upper story of the building. “Right there.”

She tapped her pen at the end of a hallway she had drawn. A hallway lined with doorways. A hallway that, in her sketch, ended at a circled spot that was located in the very center of the top-floor space.  I felt like I had seen a ghost.

“The storage closet?” I asked, barely breathing.

“No, the tub room,” she said, shaking her head. “The room at the end of the hall that had the claw foot bathtub.”

That room had been torn out after Edwards sold the building — to allow for more storage, as it turned out — but still existed in the late-1980s.

“It always happened the same way,” she continued, drawing the path with her pen.  “She'd come out of that doorway, walk down the hall, turn left and go toward the corner of the building.”

“My corner,” I muttered out loud.

“What?” Hyde asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “You saw her? Straight on?”

“Yes!” she said. “She was barefoot and walked very upright.”

“What did she look like?” I quizzed. If she told me she'd seen a girl in a gingham dress with blonde ringlets, I would have been relieved.

“She always had on what looked like a long, white dress or gown,” she said.  “And she had dark hair, that fell just past her shoulders.”

“Uh, we need to talk,” I told her.

When I shared my story — the closet where the tub room had been; footsteps in the night; the dark-haired girl in white — Hyde said nothing.  Eyes wide, she simply held up her arms, looked down at them and then back at me.  Her skin was covered in goosebumps.

'I'm really afraid'

Hyde worked the night shift and saw the same, spectral “movie” several times — the girl in white would walk out of the room where the claw foot tub sat, look over her shoulder in Hyde's direction, then turn and walk slowly down the hall and away from her.  She never mentioned the sightings, but became increasingly alarmed when co-workers on the day shift began complaining about files or materials that were missing when they came back to work in the morning and would just as mysteriously reappear a few days later.

The visual apparition transformed into an “energy” that clung to the woman and, she felt, followed her around the top floor as she did her work.

“It got to the point where I dreaded going in to work that shift,” Hyde said. “When you came in at night, she was right there with you.

“I finally went in and told my manager, 'I'm really afraid - I need to talk to somebody about this,'” she went on. “She took me into the owner's office and closed the door.  I remember her words as clear as day: 'Perry - she's seen the ghost.'”

The wife of Edwards' business partner heard that some kind of unusual nighttime activity was going on and invited a group of ghost hunters from the region to probe the old hotel. They combed the space while Hyde worked.  She purposely avoided the spirit-seeking team over the three days they spent in the building and in subsequent research at the Bonner County Courthouse.

“I hadn't told them anything about her,” Hyde reported. “When they were done, they came to me and said, 'It's definitely a spirit and we feel it's female.'”

It only got weirder from there. The team determined there was an especially strong presence around the room with the tub and felt compelled to dig further for police reports or death certificates associated with the old building. According to Hyde, they found one that seemed a likely prospect.

“There had been a death in the hotel in the 1920s,” she said. “A teenage girl had drowned there.  She drowned in that tub.”

Within a week, an employee who was screen-printing in the basement came upstairs with a faded photograph. 

“Look what I found down there,” he announced, pinning the photo to a wall outside the offices. Hyde walked over to have a closer look and got a shock.  In the picture, a woman stood beside the grainy image of a teenage girl.

“It was her,” Hyde said.  “It was the girl from upstairs.”

The next day, the photo was gone. No one knew where it had gone — no one had any particular reason to want it — and the staff tallied it up as one more disappearance among many.

Once the shirt order was shipped, Hyde never set foot in the former hotel again after the sun had set.  And, until now, she never shared her story about the girl in the hallway.

“When it first happened, I tried to convince myself that it was the reflection of car lights from First Avenue — or something,” she said.  “You just try to justify what you see with what you know, not the unknown.”

Since Coldwater Creek purchased the Bernd Building and completely renovated it for a downtown retail store and wine bar several years ago, the place has reportedly been free of spirit inhabitants.  Still, some distant echoes remain, according to a spiritual consultant who agreed to visit the Bernd Building and other reportedly haunted local sites in 2007.  Having no knowledge of the stories associated with the spot, she traveled upstairs and stood a few moments in silence.

“I'm sensing and feeling things here, but I don't feel a presence,” she said at last. “I sense that there were women for sale up here. Some of them were very young, as far as age goes — in their teens.

“I can tell you there was a lot of laughter in this building,” she added and turned to leave.

A few steps away, at a spot near the top of the stairs — a place very near the exact center of the top floor — she stopped and cocked her head to one side, as if listening to a whisper.

“And there were a lot of tears.”