Haunted Hotel For Sale

This nice little ghostly story of an old hotel in Hardy, Arkansas that is for sale, and quite possibly haunted, was printed in today's Arkansas Gazette. I included a video below it and relevant links within the story.

LITTLE ROCK — HARDY - The Old Hardy Hotel Antique Mall is one of many sites in Arkansas where people claim to see ghosts. But there’s something else in the air, hovering over this creaky, 110-year-old landmark on downtown Hardy’s Main Street: It’s for sale on eBay.

The building and contents, including its “Murder Room” and certified ghost (or ghosts), are for sale on the Internet for $125,000. Owners Steve and Marcia Weaver want out. But the ghosts are apt to stay.

“I know they’re here,” Steve Weaver, 60, says, “but they’ve never done anything mean, so it doesn’t bother me.” He tells of hearing footsteps in the empty hallway on the second floor and the sound of doors closing up there, even though he took the doors off. “And we’ve had hundreds of customers tell us stories.” The latest, just the other day, was the man from Romania. He was keen to the same legends that Bram Stoker heard - creepy tales of bats and shadows, the makings of Stoker’s Dracula.

This man wanted to see the room upstairs where the killing happened, the “Murder Room.” It’s still the way it probably was that night, around 1940. The room holds a single bed, a chair, a two-drawer stand with a basin and pitcher on it.

The doomed occupant, a soldier, had made enemies in a bar across the street.

Details are vague, but Marcia Weaver, 62, keeps a book to record the bits and pieces she hears about what happened. The victim’s killers followed him back to the hotel.

And here’s what the man from Romania told her: He recounted the vision he said came from the room. The killers didn’t skulk in through the back door, he said. They crept over the roof, and dropped to the balcony, and sneaked in that way, and stabbed!

And if the victim’s spirit lingered, well - It seems he’s not the only one.

Marcia tells the strange thing she saw one recent morning. It was early, she says - no big lights on, just a couple of night lights. She came in to open the business, and ...

If anyone had told her the same story a year ago, “I would have looked at them like they were crazy,” she says.

Who would believe it?

Some do, some don’t in this timeless little town. Every brick and stone on Main Street has an aura of the past. Hardy grew out of a railroad construction camp, in 1884, and trains have wailed through ever since. Mist clings to the hills. Crows gossip in the treetops.

Ghosts might seem more likely here.

Ghosts have people talking.

Alan Silva’s Arkansas Paranormal Investigations team - ghost hunters out of Fayetteville - looked into peculiar doings at the hotel in August 2007 and again in March.

A sign on the front door reads, “It’s official, we’re haunted.” The ghost hunters made it official.

“Yes, absolutely,” Silva, 46, says. “That particular building has a lot of activity going on.”

The investigators recorded “a female voice that says, ‘Yessssss,’ clear as day,” he says. They caught on video a blur of “some unknown energy source,” he says. “I don’t know ... it appears to be in human form.”

The video is available on the Internet at YouTube.com, and on the hotel’s site at www.old hardyhotel.com.

The hotel haunting seems to be “pretty much playful,” Silva says - nothing angry, nothing dangerous, more like a play for attention - and “residual,”linked to the hotel’s past.

“I don’t believe it would stop just because of new owners,” he says.

Tillie Stark, 91, has lived in Hardy since 1930. The hotel “was a nice boardinghouse,” she remembers. It catered to traveling salesmen, and then to renters with families, children, babies born there, “good people.”

But ghost stories have been drifting out of the hotel since “15, 16, 18 years ago,” she says in the still of her shop, Stark’s Antiques, near the hotel. “If those walls could talk ... ”

Haunted?

“From what I’ve heard,” she says, “I have reason to believe it is.”

Paul Hall of Hardy’s Wolf Creek Realty is the Weavers’ agent. He’s not so sure the old hotel building has ghosts, but it’s right across the street from his office, and he hears tales to the contrary.

“I listen to part of them,” he says, “and part of them, I don’t listen.”

Hall, 60, is convinced of this much: The classified listing on eBay (search for “Old Hardy Hotel”) has attracted more than 11,000 lookers so far, and “14 good responses,” he says. Half the potential buyers consider the ghost a plus.

The Weavers bought the place four years ago. It had the space they wanted: 3,500 square feet to fill with glassware and figurines, old books, this-and-that to sell; two floors and 10 rooms that take some time to explore.

Also, it has a balcony off the second floor - the only such stately tier on Main Street - and that, the wide front door, and the front desk still give the premises the look of a hotel.

Five steps lead up from yesterday’s hotel lobby to a room that used to be an old-time card den. It smells of here-and-gone cigar smoke some days, Steve says. He can’t say why.

Marcia glanced toward the steps in the dim light of early morning. She saw a young woman - about 20, she says - auburn or red-haired in a dark, “not quite black” dress.

“It was a Miss Kitty dress,” she says - long and bustled like something the character of Miss Kitty would have worn in the TV Western series, Gunsmoke, that was set about the same time as Hardy’s wilder past.

Today’s Hardy boasts three blocks of antique and crafts shops for tourists. The town is a rustic getaway in far northcentral Arkansas, where most days the Spring River lolls by aslazy as a dog on a warm sidewalk. Amid candy and curios, Hardy’s Realtors sell the idea of tranquility to the especially charmed, like the Weavers. They moved from Orlando, Fla., adding to Hardy’s 578 population, and they plan to stay.

But Hardy was a tough town in the 1800s. Today’s Hardy is dry, but old Hardy poured whiskey. Rumor has it, the hotel was a nest of soiled doves.

The young woman appeared as real and solid as Miss Kitty did to Marshal Dillon, and she looked in a hurry as if she’d been startled, Marcia says. Up the steps she went. Gone!

Years ago, this stranger could have vanished out a door to the adjoining carriage house and corral. But now, the corral is gone, the carriage house is a candle shop, and the old way out is sealed off, hidden behind a sheet of drywall.

All the same, Marcia says - Miss Kitty had left the building. AND NEXT DOOR ...

Yesterday’s carriage house is today’s Kozey Kandles & More Kountry Store, where Rhonda Messer, 41, makes the sweetscented candles.

The Weavers didn’t pay much attention to ghost stories whenthey bought the hotel, and neither did Messer when she set up her gift shop about a year ago.

But right away, there was something odd about the back of the store, she says. Children seemed scared of it. She describes the little boy who started crying right where the front carpet ends, giving way to ocher tile.

Follow the line across the floor, and it leads to where the old passage used to be.

“I’ve never actually seen anything,” Messer says. But still ...

Candles seem to move around in the night, she says. A towel rack, tightly screwed to the wall, fell off. And one night when the ghost hunters were at work in the hotel, she had a weird problem with the lock on the front door.

“The key wouldn’t go in,” she says, as if hotel’s spirits had taken refuge among the candles.

“I’m going to say it,” she musters up: “They would not let me in the store.”

Up the stairs to the second floor, down the tight hallway, under the bare bulbs - floorboards creaking, popping - past the Murder Room, out there is a pretty view.

The Old Hardy Hotel’s balcony offers a unique scan of the whole downtown, including the cemetery at the end of the street. The gray stones go back to Hardy’s founding days, some too worn to read.

Midtown, a mural depicts the town’s pioneers, celebrating the spirits of Doc Johnson and Aunt Tee. And the hills, rolling green with twinges of yellow and red, the ghosts of green, are worth the climb.

But the 16 steep, claustrophobic steps from the hotel lobby are a big reason the Weavers are selling. Steve says the climb is too hard for them nowadays.

Health troubles are why they’re selling, he says - not phantoms. They’ll be glad to train the new owners in what to expect. The usual. And the not so usual.

The lights go on and off by themselves, he says, and it’s strange how you can lose a pen right under your fingers, and some people are scared that ghost might follow them home, and others want to stay the night.

The only bed left is the one just for show, that marks where the killing happened, but Steve is ready with a different offer.

“There’s no tour,” he says. “We can’t guarantee you’re going to see a ghost. Just go on up there.”

This article was published Tuesday, October 28, 2008.
written by Ron Wolfe
Style, Pages 25, 30

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