Haunted hotel has unwelcome guests

Otherworldly spirits seen, felt, even smelled

Who needs fake gore in a commercial haunted house when Boulder City has the real thing: a hotel with unwelcome, otherworldly guests.

One of those guests is said to have a bad nicotine habit.

"Whenever he comes around, the smell of cigarette smoke comes with him," said Boulder City-Hoover Dam Museum collections specialist Dennis McBride, a font of information about spirits, hauntings and other "unusual happenings" at the Boulder Dam Hotel.

McBride said "the cigarette man" just sits there and watches, but never speaks.

"His appearance has nothing to do with anything going on in the hotel. He could show up in five minutes or five months from now," the museum specialist said.

Another sighting involves a ghost named "Maggie," reportedly found in the women's restroom in the basement.

"She gets very upset if you turn the light off," McBride said of the silent spirit. "You can turn the lights off and by the time you get down the hall, the lights are back on again."

Then there was the story about the "flash" seen by a female staffer in the museum's theater.

"When she same to work and opened the theater, she said she saw a man that looked like me run across the theater," he said.

Later, the staffer learned McBride wasn't even at work during the sighting.

Darrell McGarvey, business manager for the Boulder City Art Guild, was the Rotary's president in the mid-'80s and had to go down to the basement to retrieve a set of flags each time the group met.

"I'd have to go down and get the flags and it was like walking through a dungeon," he recalled. "There was only one light bulb, so your eyes got used to the light. I'd talk to the ghosts and say, 'Hi guys, I'm down here picking up some stuff, so go ahead and play poker.' One time, I felt like a 'phweuh' go across the back of my head and I got so scared. I never saw what it was, and it never answered me."

Charlene Phillips of Charlees Boutique said one morning when she arrived for work, she thought she saw someone standing by the register. But by the time she unlocked the door and got inside, no one was there.

McBride added that other people have seen other things at the hotel, with most of the sightings being associated with the sense of smell.

Not all the ghostly visits are benign. Marie Sullivan, who works in the museum's gift shop, was walking across the carpet when she swore something grabbed her ankle, causing her to trip and break her wrist.

A little more than 24 years ago, McBride, with the help of Las Vegas novelist Nancy Ashbaugh, arranged for well-known psychic Patsy Welding to come in and "read" the hotel.

It took two hours, which, McBride wrote, left Welding "physically exhausted and emotionally drained" because "the variety and intensity of the vibrations she channeled were more than she anticipated. Extreme emotion leaves behind a psychic residue" that people such as Welding can read like an open book.

The account of Welding's visit is captured in "The Spirits," a chapter in McBride's 1993 book titled, "Midnight on Arizona Street: The Secret Life of the Boulder Dam Hotel."

In it, she picks up inklings of crime, passion, distress and depression found in the hallways, the basement, the front counter, the kitchen, the dining room and seven guest rooms.

The section titled "The Thing in the Basement" can send chills up most spines when the reader feels what Welding felt that Aug. 16, 1980, night. She related, "I don't want to go in there ... it's a bad scene ... blood, lots of blood as though somebody were murdered ... they lie beneath the concrete, five or six feet ... a black fog rolls and permeates the basement up to the door sills of the first floor."

While some might doubt Welding's psychic readings, McBride said it would have been virtually impossible for Welding to fabricate her findings.

"Although there were stories about changing owners, the restaurants and the guests, she couldn't have made up those stories at that time," McBride said. "Nothing had been published about the history of the hotel.... There's no way she could have made up those stories."

McBride added that anything described by a psychic now would be dubious because so much has been published about the alleged spirits.

"In the years after, strangers came up with things she didn't pick up or I didn't know about," McBride said. "But her stories were genuine and real at the time."

At last check with the Boulder Dam Hotel reservations clerk, nine rooms have been reserved for Halloween night, leaving a lucky, or some might say unlucky, 13 rooms left.


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