Recognizing that a reputation for being haunted can be good for a hotel’s business, the manager of an aging resort in the Great Smoky Mountains is making every effort to get guests to complain about ghosts.
Bob Payne, who has been running the Shady Indian Resort, just outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for more than 20 years, said that knowing the financial bonanza hotels such as The Crescent, in the Ozarks, and The Stanley, in Colorado, have made from their resident spirits he thought it could be worthwhile to scare up a ghost or two for his own property.
But getting people to believe in ghosts, and, more to the point, complain about them loudly enough to garner national, or even regional, press, has turned out to be much harder than Payne anticipated.
“Doors that seem to open and close on their own, unexplained cold blasts of air in the hallways, skeletons in the closet – I’ve tried to blame it all on paranormal activity,” Payne said. “But guests just assume it’s the result of poor maintenance.”
Payne said it was particularly hard because in all his years at the Shady Indian the only violent death he could recall was when he accidentally checked a family with a small cat into a room already occupied by a circus performer who was traveling with his pet boa constrictor.
“And without a death worthy of a headline it’s really hard to conjure up any kind of story about an apparition,” Payne said.
He said he did think he had a winner one night when guests began complaining about shrieks and moans coming from what appeared to be an empty room. “But it just turned out to be a honeymoon couple who had somehow managed to get themselves under the bed.”
With Halloween upon him, Payne said he would give the haunted approach one more try, perhaps by having the maids draw images in soap on the bathroom mirrors of the contents of guests’ luggage. If that didn’t work, he said, he would go back to claiming “Washington Slept Here.”
