PARANORMAL
What’s It Like to Appear on a “Ghost Hunting” TV Show?
Spoiler: It depends on the show
Until very recently, I spent three years managing a “supernatural hotspot.” Long before accepting this position, I was aware of the historic hotel’s spooky reputation, but that fact had no influence on my acceptance of the job. As a frustrated middle manager in the hospitality industry with a history degree, I knew the position would bridge what I was good at and what I enjoyed doing.
At the time, I maintained a generally skeptical outlook, having spent over five years working at another historical location with an even more fearsome reputation, where I had been disappointed to experience zero phenomena. However, as my tenure as a hotel manager went on, that skepticism would shift to optimism and eventually lean toward a cautious belief in the supernatural.
Starting my first week on the job, coworkers—some of whom had worked there for decades—related story after story of supernatural occurrences that they had either witnessed first-hand or regarded as common knowledge. Tales of apparitions being observed in certain spots in the building (including several caught on camera), pets refusing to cross invisible thresholds, and plenty of glasses flying around in the building’s three bars were just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, I had heard similar stories at my previous job with a community theatre organization housed in an old Elk’s lodge, and although I spent significant time alone in that creaky old building, often late at night, I never experienced so much as an eerie feeling.
The stories from the two locations did differ, in that tales involving the theater were usually told in the style of a kid at a campfire trying to get under the skin of a younger sibling, while the experiences in the hotel were related with an air of nonchalance and quiet acceptance. Initially, I attributed that to the obvious difference in enthusiasm between “theatre people” and career hotel workers, but now I see that as overly simplistic. Although it didn’t strike me at the time, this now makes me think of the matter-of-fact tone soldiers have when recounting their combat experiences versus the gleeful effect that people who were never in that situation have when talking about the same subject.
After about two months on the job, I experienced what would be the most outright supernatural phenomena of my tenure, although by no means the last. One day, when standing behind a bar with a coworker and talking with two customers, a decorative wine bottle from high up on a shelf literally flew off and shattered right where my coworker had been standing moments before.
The four of us immediately discussed the situation and tried to debunk it but could find no reasonable hypothesis as to why the bottle would have fallen, let alone flown, off the shelf. At some point, one of us remembered the security cameras all over the building, and we rushed to the front desk and saw footage of what had just happened, which only made the situation seem more uncanny.
Early on, I found out that the owners, an extremely intelligent and hard-working couple who had rescued the building from certain destruction in the ’70s, harbored no doubts about the existence of paranormal activity in the building. While they were comfortable talking about it with their team in the same way they discussed any reality of the business, from the ancient plumbing system to the boarded-up tunnels in the basement, they were reluctant to do anything to encourage the public to consider the supernatural angle.
Thinking it risked overshadowing their decades of hard work and distracted from the classiness of the joint, the tourists and reporters constantly hitting them up for ghost stories were usually steered in different directions, finding themselves hearing instead about how the hotel was the first building in our medium-sized Route 66 town to secure a spot on the National Historical Registry or that time in the ’80s when Jon Bon Jovi spent the night charming everyone in the bar while on a motorcycle trip.
As I slowly gained the trust of the owners, I did my best to drop subtle hints about the economic opportunities that could come by capitalizing on the building’s supernatural reputation. The financial argument eventually won out, as the market for paranormal entertainment was obvious, with multiple third-party “ghost tours” stopping by our building each week. While our business benefited from the increased sales these groups brought in, we were missing out on doing the tours ourselves.
To test the waters, we started posting the occasional scary anecdote on our social media and selling t-shirts and stickers stating “Haunting Flagstaff Since 1897.” The reaction to these posts and the sales of the spooky merchandise was promising, so with the owners’ permission, we progressed from simply tolerating the hotel’s existing haunted reputation to embracing it. In-house tours that carefully walked the line between history and supernatural accounts sold out repeatedly, and we started posting and re-posting supernatural info about once a week.
When the first email from the producers of one of those “ghost hunting” shows arrived, the rest of the management team and I knew we had to be strategic about convincing the owners to allow the business to participate. They had been approached by amateur paranormal investigators many times over the years, and depending on their mood and what was going on in the building at the time, they occasionally let people snoop around. Since they hadn’t seen any tangible benefit to these “investigations,” they weren’t impressed with a televised version that seemed like more of the same, so we did our best to sell them. Finally, when the producers offered to pay for the use of the space, they were convinced that they had nothing to lose and went along with it.
This first show of two shows (so far) in which we were featured had our hotel as just one of several locations in our city and was hosted by two investigators with a Mulder/Scully dynamic. While their team was professional, we all left the experience convinced that none of the people involved had any personal belief in the supernatural and that the show was solely for entertainment purposes.
References to tired “Indian Burial Ground” tropes that involved tribes who never lived in our area, in addition to glossing over nuanced stories from our owners in favor of sensationalistic, made-up instances that supposedly took place decades before our town was even established, left us mildly annoyed but no worse off. The interest generated by the show and the extra revenue that went with it was noticeable and appreciated.
About a year later, we were contacted by arguably the most popular and certainly one of the longest-running paranormal shows who wanted to do an episode specifically about the hotel. If you’re curious about which one, just know that it’s hosted by a very enthusiastic dude who shares his last name with a famous family of hobbits. This show would require us to close to the public for two days, so it was much more of a financial risk. However, the owners were receptive and after some cajoling from both the producers and the hotel’s own management team, they consented.
Having had a mediocre experience with the previous show, we were expecting more of the same and were surprised when producers, as well as the onscreen talent, listened to our stories and built the episode around the allegations that we discussed among ourselves on a regular basis. There was a minimum of “coaching,” and in their quasi-scientific way, they demonstrated things that fit in with the narrative we all have experienced, including singling out some hot spots that none of us had thought to mention to them.
When the episode aired, we hosted a big party in our main bar. The way it was edited confirmed to us that they took our concerns seriously and aimed to do justice to what they found. While it was corny at times, and there was a fair amount of padding in the hour-long episode, overall, we were pleased, and best of all, it gave us a new appreciation for the cool place in which we worked.
I currently tell anyone who asks about the hotel's supernatural status that while nothing happened that converted me into a true believer, if hauntings do exist, then I have no doubt that my former workplace is haunted. Also, I don’t mind telling them that the team behind at least one popular paranormal TV show is earnest about what they do.
While Drew no longer manages the hotel in question, he’s still close with the owners and occasionally conducts history tours there. Click here to learn more about the hotel.
