Haunted Hotels of Southwest Montana

Why are hotels, especially Montana hotels, so haunted?

Is it because hotels, by their nature short-term, are analogs for the mysteries of life - which is to say we can't be sure how long we're staying, but we know it's only temporary?

And, arguably strangest of all, why do we enjoy staying at haunted hotels so much? What is so attractive to us about a brush with quietus interruptus? Do we yearn for proof of life beyond death - even if that so-called "life" is melancholically wandering the corridors of a temporary homestay?

Maybe it's not so complicated; maybe some simply like it spooky. For them, then, we present a trio of southwest Montana's most haunted hotels. One is open for business, one aims to open sometime soon, and one is definitively closed to guests, but all three are, if you believe the stories, lousy with ghosts.

Hotel Meade
Bannack, MT
Closed To Guests Forever

Bannack's Hotel Meade began "life" as the courthouse for Beaverhead County. When the courthouse was moved to Dillon, however, the building was purchased by an enterprising Dr. John Singleton Meade, who decided to turn the large, well-constructed building into a luxurious hotel.

The Meade's most iconic ghost tale sadly involves the death of a child in 1916. A group of three girls including sixteen-year-old Dorothy Dunn decided, one day, to go for a dip in the local dredge pond. They took a misstep and tumbled into deceptively deep water. None of them could swim. A nearby twelve-year-old boy named Smith Paddock struggled to free the girls, first pulling out one, and then another as Dorothy struggled to keep her head above water. But sadly, as the Butte Miner reported at the time, "life was extinct in the body of Dorothy Dunn when it was finally brought to the shore."

Bertie Mathews was Dorothy's best friend and the daughter of the folks who ran the hotel at that time. Whether she was mad with grief and therefore given to hallucinations, or genuinely in touch with the specter of her boon companion, things would get spooky for poor Bertie. Just days after Dorothy's death, Bertie saw her in a top-floor window of the hotel wearing a long blue dress that Bertie recognized as her friend's. According to the late great Ellen Baumler, chronicler of Montana's ghost stories as well as an important historian in her own right, Bertie didn't like to talk about her vision of Dorothy, finding it too troubling to recount.

Now people, mostly children, have been seeing Dorothy ever since. She'll appear in the window and look down, or the sound of a young female voice laughing will be heard. Sometimes cold spots are reported. Sometimes, according to ghost hunters, a bit of her is captured in photographs, usually the blue of her dress or a glimpse of her hair.

Bannack, despite being so important in the early years of Montana's territorial history, would begin to fade as other, larger communities grew. Finally in the 1940s, Bannack was abandoned for good, and the Hotel Meade building left fallow for a time. Stuck here on this side of the Great Beyond, we can only speculate as to whether the Hotel Meade's ghosts enjoyed their brief solitude.

In 1961, Bannack was made a National Historic Site and some of her buildings reinforced so they would stand. One of those was the Hotel Meade, and now thousands of people walk through its doors every year. Definitely more, and most probably much more than walked through its doors when it was an operational hotel. Dorothy, in short, has more company than ever.

If it is true, as has been alleged of some of the other ghosts on this list, that all "they" really want is to be left alone, then poor Dorothy has a rough go of it. Let's hope, then, that Dorothy appreciates the company.

And maybe, if you believe the experiences of folks who write on the internet, she's busier than ever.

An anonymous poster on Ellen Baumler's blog about Dorothy wrote, "I was hurrying down to the creek to try to get a picture of an elk and as I was trying to look past some of the bushes at the creeks [sic] edge I heard a female voice say 'I wouldn't go any farther if I was you...'" The person "stopped and looked around," but "there was no one there. Later I Googled Bannack and found out about Dorothy, I think it was her warning me as the water was high and moving quickly."

Is Dorothy warning the incautious away from a fate like hers? If so, she's not only a ghost, but a saint.

One anonymous and semi-coherent post on the same website suggests a less beneficent Dorothy. We will reprint it, typos and all, as its own warning to the unwary:

"i went to bannock i got many pics of dorthoy she came after me and my friends when your there take a pic of the closet"

The Metlen Hotel
Dillon, MT
Closed To Guests While Under Painstaking Renovation

You can't stay at the Metlen just now. Or rather, we should say "yet."

You could in 1897 when it was built to replace a tent hotel that had followed the railroad camps, going as far as Utah before returning to Dillon. After that more temporary structure burned down, a local business owner named Joseph Custer Metlen constructed the Metlen for $30,000. As such, the hotel was rather overconstructed, says current owner Lee Bryant. It was almost certainly the first building in town to have hot and cold running water, along with an intercom system, electric lights, a cast-iron boiler and myriad steam radiators. The walls are thicker than they need to be, resulting in superior insulation. Thankfully, that dogged devotion to sturdy engineering is the biggest part of why the building survives to terrify us today. Bryant is slowly restoring the building where possible, and replacing the bits he can't. He's making great progress, too, but none of the rooms are ready to receive customers yet.

Lee is a general contractor from Hawaii who first saw the hotel with his wife and two daughters when one of his daughters was accepted into University of Montana Western. Now she's getting a Masters in geology from Montana Tech and the rest of the family has moved to Dillon. The proud father spent years restoring old buildings, and at 65 years old, as he says, this one is his "last project." But what a project it is.

So while you may not be able to spend the night there (yet), you can go to either of its bars and have a drink. At one of them, you can even dance, as do many of University of Montana Western's students, who flock to the Metlen Hotel Bar for the nightlife. The evening tends to begin with country western and end with hip hop. Sometimes they get more than they bargained for and see something unexpected, and unexplainable - the form of a young woman, not of this century, materializing on the dance floor.

That's only the ground floor. The second is worse, supposedly haunted by the spirit of Gus, a one-time train robber who committed suicide by pistol while hopped up on pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. Bryant finds himself addressing Gus in case it helps settle the spirit down.

"Coming up, Gus," he'll say as he climbs the stairs, or "goodnight, Gus," as he locks up for the night.

That's to say nothing of the basement, so scary that it served, last Halloween, as a community "haunted house." The unexpected presence of an animated werewolf statue is hardly the most frightening part of a large, winding basement with many dark and echoey corners.

But then there's the third floor, previously locked up to the public for decades. If you believe the story told to Zac Bagans on the season 13 episode of Ghost Adventures about the Metlen, the third floor was closed because it demonstrated so much supernatural activity at such a high intensity that it had to be closed - for the safety of the public. And while we believe that, we would add that keeping those aforementioned college students out may also have been a factor.

Yet even the skeptical will probably admit that the third floor gives them the authentic creeps. Lee reports hearing boots scraping on the floors, and finding things inexplicably moved from where he left them. But for Lee, the strangest thing was when he found elk steaks strewn about downstairs.

He had just checked the freezer a couple of minutes before when, suddenly and without explanation, he discovered a solitary elk steak on the hallway floor. Then another here. Another couple there. It was 6 or 8 elk steaks all told, and Lee still can't figure out who, or what, is responsible for moving them.

Even so, he doesn't feel the hotel's noncorporeal guests are unfriendly. Frightening? Maybe a little. But none of them have ever been anything but neighborly to him.

I asked him if he knew the Metlen was haunted when his family bought the hotel. He says yes, of course he did.

"It didn't disturb us at all. But our Hawaiian friends refuse to visit."

As for their roles at the Metlen, Lee Bryant says, "we don't consider ourselves the owners. We consider ourselves the caretakers."

He pauses a moment. "Like in The Shining," he adds with a grin.

Gunslinger Gulch
Outside Anaconda, MT
Open to Guests

Gunslinger Gulch is a one-of-a-kind experience. Each themed cabin also serves as a functional piece of the larger "ghost town." There's a jail, a post office, a brothel above a saloon, even a pair of cute little family houses that are, more often than not, rented together. And while that is certainly enough to entice most fans of the Western experience, these unique rentals come with a twist: they're very haunted, according to owner Karen Broussard and her family.

If you're a fan of shows where people yell at ghosts while filmed in night vision than you may already have seen the television show that aired for two seasons on the Travel Channel. Karen's son Colby says they're not altogether happy with the show, which took what might be charitably called poetic license when it posited there was a demon at the site.

There are no demons at Gunslinger Gulch, Colby says. Only ghosts.

That said, not all of the ghost activity witnessed or felt at the Gulch has been entirely friendly. Some have reported spectral hands grabbing at them, or feeling as if they were bitten. Some have discovered unexplained scratch marks on their skin.

Even without the TV show, the place is at least a little creepy. The ramshackle dwellings (ramshackle on the outside at least - they're actually very pretty inside) line the street like teeth in some crazy mouth. A large church that has been converted into the family's house for now looms over them all. You can't help but notice how, when the sun's going down and the lights come on the upper floor windows, it looks quite a lot like the Bates Motel did in the movie. All along the rough, rutted street roam chickens, goats, cats, and a very friendly pony and mule. Maybe that last part isn't spooky, but it added to our enjoyment. It's probably been proven somewhere that petting goats is good for your blood pressure.

We were put up in the jail next to the saloon and "across the street" from Kees Laundry. Once a century-old family's house from the Butte area, the small home was relocated and turned into a jailhouse right out of an old John Wayne movie, complete with two "jail cells" with bars that swing shut and a big wooden desk for the sheriff to sit behind and watch the prisoners. We were put in the jail, we were told, because even though it is pretty haunted, it is probably the least haunted place on the property.

There's only one ghost in the jail, a pensive old-timer who walks, restlessly, from room to room. The ghosts at Gunslinger Gulch, the family says, mostly want to be left alone. Many Montanans, I suspect, can sympathize. Nevertheless, we hoped that the misanthropic manifestation would appear to us.

Alas, he did not; instead, we had a deep and restful sleep and awoke energized.

Drat!