The Chico Hot Springs Lodge and Ranch in Montana's aptly named Paradise Valley is famous for its steaming
thermal pools and its superb gourmet cuisine; but in recent years, it has become almost as well known for
its psychic phenomena.
It isn't surprising that Chico has such star-quality spooks, not when you consider that the combination
restaurant, hotel and resort is also a favorite "haunt" of celebrities such as Peter Fonda, Jeff Bridges,
and Dennis Quaid. In the old days, Chico even hosted famed cowboy artist Charles Russell, who traded
drawings on the back of stationery for drinks, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who stayed there the
night before he visited Yellowstone National Park, thirty miles to the south.
Originally named the Chico Warm Springs Hotel, the establishment opened to the public on June 20, 1900.
Owners Bill and Percie Matheson Knowles enjoyed the resort as much as any of their guests, although Percie
did have strong qualms about drinking. Over her objections, Bill constructed a saloon and dance hall on the
property, and the resort became even more successful, promoting itself as a place to cure "rheumatism,
stomach and kidney troubles, and all skin and blood diseases."
Perhaps Bill Knowles should have spent more time in the hot pools and less in the saloon, because on
April 22, 1910, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was buried a few days later at nearby Chico
Cemetery, leaving Percie and the couple's twelve-year-old son, Radbourne, to run the business.
Percie's dream was to turn the retreat into a real health-care center, and her first action was to
close the saloon she detested. In 1912, she persuaded Dr, George A. Townsend to make the hotel his
headquarters, and he was so successful in treating patients that Chico's fame spread quickly to surrounding
states. Over the next five years the pools were enlarged, and a hospital wing was added.
Dr. Townsend stayed At Chico Hot Springs for thirteen years, but finally the hard work became too
much for him. He retired in 1925, and even though other doctors came to take his place, the resort
would never again enjoy a fine reputation as a hospital.
Radbourne Knowles moved away to get married, and Chico attracted fewer patients every year. As Percie's
beloved resort began to decline, so did she. Her mind as well as her body gave way to the pressures of
running a failing business, and for a long time she was confined to her room in the hotel. In 1936 she
was admitted to the state hospital in Warmsprings, where she died four and a half years later.
After Radbourne's death in 1943, Chico Hot Springs went through a series of owners who couldn't decide
whether to make it a health resort, a vacation getaway, or a combination of both. In 1973, Mike and Eve
Art bought the property, and three years later they moved from Cleveland, Ohio, to live on it. Since then
they've made many improvements, so that once again Bill and Percie's resort is thriving.
And so is the ghostly activity at the old lodge. Could the Arts' refurbishment of Chico have caused the
burst of psychic phenomena reported by guests and employees alike? This might be possible, except that
former owner John Sterhan recalls that during his tenure, from 1967 to 1972, the staff also reported strange
events. The most common belief among those who have had eerie encounters at Chico is that the Knowleses,
especially Percie, have never left.
Earl Murray wrote about the otherworldly occupants of the resort in his Ghosts of the Old West (Chicago:
Contemporary Books, 1988). In "The Hot Springs Phantom," he describes the weird experience of two security
officers, Tim Barnes and Ron Woolery, around 2:20 A.M. one Sunday in May 1986. The two guards had waited for
all the customers and employees of the Chico Saloon to leave, then they locked the doors and returned to the
hotel via the board walkway. At this time, Tim had been working for the resort for eight years, and he'd
never believed his coworkers' spooky stories. Just as he opened the door leading into the lobby, he saw
something and suddenly froze.
"Look," Tim said, and pointed across the room in the direction of an old piano.
The two security officers stared in amazement at the sight before them. A white filmy figure hovered just
above the floor near the piano, and the smoky features of a face stared back at them. Only the head and
upper body were distinct/ the rest of the apparition was a formless mass trailing away to nothing.
"It was an eerie feeling, the kind that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck," Tim said, when
I interviewed him in October 1991. "I wasn't afraid of it, but I realized that we were definitely looking
at something supernatural. We kept staring at the ghost, and I finally got the idea to take a picture of
it with a Polaroid camera in the office."
To get to the office required courage, because it meant walking close to the figure. Tim steeled himself
and hurried around the phantom and through the door. He found the camera, but because it didn't belong to
him and because he was nervous, he couldn't figure out how to attach the flash bar.
"I decided to take the picture without the flash, and the results weren't very good," he said. "There's
one tiny white unidentifiable spot in the middle of the photograph. Whatever we saw was definitely in the
basic form of a person, but we couldn't tell what sex it was. It must have hovered by the piano for a good
two minutes, but after I took the picture the hazy form just dispersed like smoke."
Tim is now the general manager of Chico Hot Springs, and he's joined the ranks of those who are certain that
the old hotel is haunted. His mother, Edie Mundell, is another person who knows from firsthand experience
that the phantom is real. She worked as a night auditor there for three years and had just quit her job
when I talked to her, also in October 1991. Edie's encounter was very similar to that of her son.
"I've been interested in metaphysical subjects for a long time, so I thought I'd be well prepared if I
ever saw the ghost," she explained. "On the morning when I finally did, everything had been very quiet.
I needed to get a printout on the credit card machine, and I walked into the dining room to pick it up.
At the same time, the security guard who had just finished his rounds was coming through the front door
along with some people working the breakfast shift. I heard them all talking together.
"The dining room was dark because I hadn't turned the lights on," Edie continued, "and for some reason,
I suddenly had an impulse to look behind me, through the back of the dining room and into the small lounge.
And there, standing at the door to the lounge, was an apparition.
"It was cloudy and all white, just like ghosts are often portrayed in the movies. It was smoky and hazy,
but it was shaped like a person. I think it was a woman, but I'm not sure. Looking at it gave me the
weirdest feeling, and even though I thought I would be well prepared for such an encounter, I wasn't. I
think I startled that ghost nearly as much as it startled me-I could sense fear coming from both of us. I
don't think the spirit noticed me until I began walking quickly away from it. I got out of there before it
had time to disappear."
Around the time of my interview with Edie Mundell, bartender Terrie Angell encountered the same apparition
in another part of the darkened dining room at about three o'clock one morning. "Even now I can't tell you
whether or not I believe in ghosts," she told me, "but I could definitely feel her presence as soon as I
walked through the door. And there she was, sitting in a chair on the left-hand side of the room. Because
it was dark, I can't describe what she looked like except to say that the image seemed more hazy that solid.
I ran out of that dining room as fast as I could; even talking about it now gives me goose bumps."
Fellow employee Lindy Moore was equally terrified by her encounter with the filmy phantom in the winter of
1989. "I had gone up to the second floor to put a blanket in a room, and all of a sudden I became aware
that someone else was there," she said, "I turned around and saw the apparition very clear. I'm sure it was
Percie. She was wearing a dress and she appeared to be floating. The figure was cloudy and misty, but I
could definitely see her features. She had a fairly blank expression on her face, but I'm sure she could see me.
"I'd never actually seen a ghost before, and it scared the heck out of me," Lindy admitted. "I stood there
for probably twenty seconds, and part of me really wanted to stay to find out what would happen next. But
when the form started to move toward me, I changed my mind in a hurry and got out of there. Thinking back
over the experience now, I believe something very interesting would have happened if I had stayed in the room,
but I was just too scared. And I've never seen her since."
Former security guard Larry Bohne has probably gotten a closer look at Chico's lady spook than anyone else.
Larry hastens to explain that he is by nature a highly logical and analytical person, having worked as an air
traffic controller for the U. S. Air Force, and as a soils and concrete lab inspector for the U. S. Army Corps
of Engineers. His other work, as an ambulance technician and a volunteer firefighter, also required equal
measures of cool observation and common sense. Larry had been employed at Chico Hot Springs for about
fifteen months when he had one of the eeriest encounters ever reported there.
"It was the third week of January 1990, and I was used to being alone in the old hotel," he said. "During
the winter months it usually has only a few guests at any one time, and on this night they were in rooms on
the main floor just off the lobby. Besides them and me, the only other person in the hotel was the night
auditor in the main office.
"Even though no one was staying on the second and third floors, it was still my job to make routine fire
checks in these areas," Larry said. "On one of my rounds, at about 2:30 A.M., I was walking along the second
floor hallway, and as I passed the stairwell leading to the third floor I could sense that someone was at
the head of the stairs. I stepped back a few paces to the bottom of the stairwell and looked up to see a
matronly lady standing at the top landing looking down at me."
"That seemed unusual because I was sure there were no registered guests above the first floor," Larry explained.
"The lady appeared to be about five feet four to five feet six inches tall and approximately forty-five to fifty
years old. Her face, though clearly defined, seemed pale and without expression. It was obvious that she was
looking at me, but she didn't acknowledge my presence in any way. She wore a full-length pale blue dress with
a high collar and long sleeves and the material was printed with what looked like tiny white flowers. Her graying
hair was in a tight bun, and her hands were clasped in front of her."
"Thinking that she was a guest who had gotten lost, I asked if I could help her. When I spoke, she silently
turned away and moved into the darkness of the third floor hallway behind her. I say "moved", because she
didn't seem to be walking-she just drifted away without any movement of her upper torso. I couldn't even
detect any leg movement under the long dress."
"I went up to the main hallway of the third floor, but I could see nothing," Larry said. "Everything was
dark except for some soft light from the courtyard below that filtered into the window at the end of the hall.
The lady I had seen so clearly just seconds before had vanished."
"All the rooms on that floor are kept locked, so I guessed that the only place she could have gone would have
been into the window at the end of the hall or into one of the bathrooms, which are not locked. As I walked
down the hall, I detected a sweet fragrance in the vicinity of rooms 346 through 350. I checked the bathrooms,
but they were empty and dark. I retraced my steps down the hallway and again smelled the sweet scent in the
same area as before. It reminded me of jasmine or lilac and it was strongest near room 349."
"I used my security passkey to unlock the door. The room was silent and dark, and I shone my flashlight inside.
Then I noticed that the rocking chair in the corner by the window was gently moving back and forth. I quickly
flipped the light switch on, and I saw the chair stop rocking so suddenly. I also realized that the sweet
fragrance that had been so strong before had now completely faded away."
"The entire episode lasted about five or six minutes," Larry said, "and afterward I was eager to return to the
reality of the main office and the reassuring company of Edie Mundell, the night auditor. I was so unnerved
that it took me several cups of coffee to muster up the nerve to tell her what had happened; when I did, she
smiled and said, "Welcome to the Percie Club."
"Edie also told me that room 349 was the one in which Percie Knowles had lived during her last days at Chico,"
Larry explained. "She had become, quite senile and spent nearly all her waking hours in a rocking chair, staring
out the window at Emigrant Peak behind the hotel."
Security guard Charlie Wells had an experience similar to Larry's when he worked part-time at Chico in 1989 and
1990. But while Larry initially believed that the woman he saw was flesh and blood, Charlie was made immediately
aware that the lady ascending the stairs from the second to the third floor was not of this world.
"I came up out of the lobby on one of my rounds, and all I saw at first was a kind of mist," Charlie explained.
"I could see features, but it seemed as if I were seeing her through a smoke-filled room. I saw her arms,
but no hands and no legs, and I could just make out a face. She appeared to be floating rather than walking
up the stairs, and she was wearing a long, flowing white dress. In fact, it looked a lot like the one that
Percie Knowles is wearing in a picture hanging in the lobby."
Charlie often had the disquieting experience of finding the door to Room 349 unlocked and open. "This was
during the wintertime when business was slow," he said. "I knew the room hadn't been rented out, so I'd
lock it up; but the door would be open again when I made my next round. I was the only one there before the
auditor arrived, and I was the only one with the keys. The other keys were all locked away."
"Another time, I was locking the outside door to the saloon when I noticed a light on in the lounge," he
continued. "A man and a woman were sitting at a table near the window in the dining room off to the right.
I couldn't make out many details, but I did see that the woman was wearing a long white dress. I knew that
the cooks, the waitresses, and the dishwashers had all left after dinner, and I thought that maybe the owner's
daughter, Andy Art, had come back with her boyfriend to have a drink."
"I went on into the lobby, and I could tell that the night auditor hadn't arrived yet," Charlie said.
"Then I walked over to the dining room doors, opened them, and saw that no one was in there. But two
chairs were pulled out, and there were two glasses on a table. The next night I questioned the cocktail
waitress, and she insisted that she had cleaned everything up and left the room in order. I'll always
wonder whether the two figures I saw were Bill and Percie Knowles."
Charlie also found unexpected disarray in the kitchen one night after all the staff had gone home.
On his first round everything was in order, but the next time he checked the area he found knives, dishes,
and a variety of other utensils scattered across the cooks' table.
More than a few employees of Chico Hot Springs have reported hearing the clattering and crashing of pots
and pans from the kitchen when they knew no one was there. About three weeks after he followed the ghost
of Percie into room 349, Larry Bohne was tending the lobby fire place at 3:00 A.M. and wishing he had
someone to talk with.
"There were no guests in the hotel, so I was the only person on the premises," he recalled. "Even the
night auditor wasn't due in for another hour and a half. But suddenly, from the kitchen area, I heard
the clanging and rattling of dishes and pots and pans, as if someone were busily cooking or cleaning up."
"I knew I was supposed to be alone, so I went to investigate," Larry said. "But just as I approached
the kitchen from the dining room the sounds stopped, as if someone had suddenly switched them off. I
entered the kitchen, which was still dark, and when I turned on the lights, everything appeared to be
in its place - nothing was out of the ordinary in any way. Immediately, I checked the exit to the
outside courtyard and the door to housekeeping. Both were just as I had found them on earlier rounds,
tightly secured. The only other way to enter the kitchen was from the dining room door through which I
had gone myself."
"As I left the kitchen, I turned off the lights. At the same time, the telephone began to ring. Rather
than go all the way back to the office, I switched on the lights again and answered the phone in the kitchen.
But instead of hearing a voice on the other end of the line, I heard what I can only describe as an electrical
hum, totally different from the sound of a dial tone. I hung up the phone and then picked it up to listen.
This time I heard only a normal dial tone."
"I turned off the lights once again and started walking back to the office," Larry continued. "I had
gotten as far as the dining room when loud music started blaring out of the kitchen."
"This time I just knew that a trickster was at work, so I sneaked back again and shone my flashlight
into the room. It was completely empty, but I noticed that the music was coming from the employees"
radio-though the power switch was in the off position!"
"I flipped the switch on and off several times, but I couldn't get the music to stop or the volume
to decrease," Larry explained. "The noise stopped only when I pulled the plug from the socket. And
when I plugged the cord back in to test the radio, everything worked normally."
"Maybe what happened with the telephone and the radio could be attributed to some kind of electrical
glitch," he admitted, "but this episode left me very unsettled. And I've never been able to explain
away the sound of the clattering dishes when, obviously, no one was present."
During this same winter, Larry's twenty-year-old son Mike also became a security guard at Chico Hot
Springs, and his initiation into "the Percie Club" was just as uncanny as his father's had been.
"If Mike said something happened to him, it did," Larry insisted. "He's not one to let his imagination
run wild, and the jobs he's had couldn't be done by a person who panics easily. At sixteen, for example,
he was the youngest state-certified ambulance technician ever in Montana, and he's also served with search
and rescue units, earning the rank of major with the U.S. Air Force Civil Air Patrol. It's also
interesting to note that Mike had never heard about my experiences with Percie until after he had
tangled with her himself."
Before the young man's first night of duty in the hotel, his senior partner gave him a copy of Earl
Murray's Ghosts of the Old West. But even levelheaded Mike doubted the wisdom of reading the chapter
about the Hot Springs phantom while he was alone on his first evening watch.
"But, naturally, common sense soon gave way to curiosity," Mike admitted, "so I went ahead and read it,
and for the rest of that night all the creaks, cracks, and other noises kept my nerves on edge. But I
didn't actually encounter Percie Knowles's ghost itself until I'd been working there three weeks, just
long enough so that I no longer grew apprehensive at every little sound."
"At about three o'clock on one bitterly cold January morning, I was stoking the main fire and completing
some paperwork after having made several rounds of the complex," he said. "Only one room on the main
floor of the hotel was occupied; a few more had been rented out to guests in the lower lodge about three
hundred yards from the main building. The night auditor had not yet arrived."
"I took a break and made my way through the dining room toward the restrooms in the rear," Mike continued.
"As I approached the small lounge at the end of the dining room, I noticed that the tables and chairs
were arranged so that there was a clear straight aisle to the restrooms. This seemed a little odd because
the furniture was usually set up in such a way that you had to take a twisted path around it to get to the
bathrooms."
"I also noticed that the dining room and lounge area felt unusually cold as I walked through it, and it
felt just as chilly when I returned from the restroom. It's highly unusual for the area near the kitchen
to be anything but cozy and warm because it usually retains the heat from the day's cooking. It also
struck me as odd that several chairs were now blocking the clear path I had taken on the way into the men's
room. I actually had to move them before I could get through the area and return to my office. I thought
that the night auditor must have arrived early and moved the chairs for some reason."
"When I got back to the office I expected to see her, but no one was there," Mike said. "An uneasy feeling
crept up my spine. To settle my nerves, I decided to take a walk around the outside of the main lodge,
and as I strolled past the parking space reserved for the night auditor I saw that it was still empty."
"The air was so cold that my nose felt numb so I went back to the hotel lobby. I stoked the fire and
returned to my paperwork. Soon afterward, Edie (the night auditor) arrived, booted up the computers,
and went back to the kitchen to fix herself a cup of coffee. When she returned, she commented on the
unusual chill coming from the kitchen, and we both attributed it to the fact that it was so cold outside."
"Edie and I were engrossed in our paperwork when we were suddenly interrupted by the sounds of dishes clinking,"
Mike said. "We looked up and joked that Percie must be busy at work because the kitchen crew wasn't expected
for another hour. The noises continued for so long that curiosity got the best of me. As I made my way back
to the kitchen, it seemed peculiar that even though I was approaching nearer to the clattering, it didn't
sound any louder to me. When I was about twenty feet from the kitchen, the dish-rattling stopped completely."
"I entered the kitchen and was immediately hit with a blast of air so cold that it vaporized my breath,"
Mike said. "There was not much light, but as I peered across the room I could plainly see a woman with her
back to me. Time seemed to come to a stop, and I felt an eerie sense of calm."
"The woman gave no sign that she noticed me," Mike continued. "She remained standing still without changing
position, and I noticed that her hair was piled on top of her head. She was wearing a long dress and, as I
continued to stare at her, I noticed that her hem was about six inches from the ground and nothing was visible
between it and the floor."
"I felt dizzy. I was afraid to stay but more afraid to move, so I stood frozen just inside the kitchen door.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the woman moved forward with a motion that was unlike walking. She went
out a door, and I know I saw it close behind her; she was gone and the chill that had been in the room dispersed
instantly."
"The door she exited from is padlocked from the outside, and there is no way to unlock it from the inside,"
Mike explained. "I had checked that door several times on my rounds that evening, and I knew that I had the
only key to the lock except for the one that general manager Tim Barnes always keeps with him. On that night,
Tim and the other set of keys were two hundred miles away in Billings, where he was attending a conference.
I checked again to see if I could open the door from inside the kitchen, but it wouldn't budge."
In addition to seeing Percie's apparition and hearing her bang pots and pans around in a very chilly kitchen,
the employees of Chico Hot Springs also report a variety of other phenomena apparently related to her.
Security guard Charlie Wells was in the lobby one night when he heard the mysterious sound of a woman moaning.
He looked for the source of the noise for at least forty-five minutes but was never able to track it down.
Housekeepers hear doors slamming on the third floor when they know they're supposed to be alone on that level,
and they often feel an unseen presence in the rooms there. And no matter where they place the chair that
Larry Bohne saw rocking in room 349, it reputedly always returns to a certain spot facing the window. A
bible in the attic is said to remain mysteriously free of dust and is always open to the same page in the
Psalms, even after employees have purposely left it open elsewhere. At different times, a feather and a
handkerchief have been placed on the open pages, and those who checked later found no trace of the feather
and no footprints on the floor of the dusty attic. The handkerchief was found later in the saloon.
The Arts' daughter Andy believes in the ghost, but she distrusts the legend about the bible because so many
people now have access to the keys to the attic. But no one has been able to explain a tray of candles that
apparently lighted themselves in the kitchen, or a single candle that was found burning again after Charlie
Wells knew he had extinguished it.
Charlie says that even animals occasionally sense something awry at Chico. He recalls the time that a
"Heinz 57" breed of dog was so afraid to walk down a hallway that he fell, shaking with fear and wetting
the carpet, when his owner demanded that he come to him.
"The Knowleses are supposedly buried just up the road from the hotel," Charlie explained, laughing. "And
the security guard who helped break me in said that there's a big gopher hole in Percie's grave and that's
how she got out."
In addition to giving the employees of the lodge an occasional scare, Percie apparently enjoys playing
tricks on them, too. Her specialty is making things disappear-especially when they're needed the most.
"In the summer of 1991 we lost a rooming list for a group that was coming in," explained Lindy Moore.
"We were all working with it out on the front desk and all of a sudden it was gone. We turned this place
upside down looking for it, but we never found it. The group came and went and about a week after they
had gone I walked into the office-and the list we'd been searching for was lying right out on the desk."
"On another occasion, I was the only person in the room and I set down a file to answer the phone," she
continued. "When I tried to find the file again it was nowhere to be seen. But when I was getting ready
to drive back home after work that day, guess what I found on the seat of my car? The file looked just
as if it were supposed to be there. Things are always disappearing and reappearing in very strange places."
Percie has pulled so many pranks on the hotel staff that Edie Mundell thinks her spirit might have regressed
to the time when she was twelve years old. "When I saw the ghost, I had the feeling that she was a young girl,"
the night auditor explained. "Maybe Percie was happiest at that time of her life and that's why I perceived
her as being so young. And she certainly acts like a kid."
Edie explained that Percie is especially attracted to coins. "Once I was counting my money and I came up a
nickel short," she said. "I searched for it for quite a awhile and then I gave up because it just wasn't there.
A couple of hours later, when I'd forgotten all about it, I found the nickel way out on the front counter.
I hadn't been anywhere near that area, and I can't imagine why anyone would leave a lone nickel there."
On another occasion, Edie dropped a coin on the floor, saw where it landed, but decided to wait until she
finished counting to pick it up. When she finally reached down to retrieve it, it was no longer there.
Instead, it had traveled to the table where security guard Charlie Wells made out his evening reports.
Charlie vouches for Edie's story and swears that he didn't take the coin himself.
Most of the strange incidents at Chico are believed to be caused by Percie, and most of the apparitions
seem to be of her. But several employees have seen what they thought were male ghosts or at least spooks
of undetermined gender. Many of these sightings have occurred in the area above the bar called the annex,
where many employees live. Maintenance man Bob Oppelt was living in the annex in the winter of 1989, and
his story is one of the most frightening of all.
"I had gone to bed and was just about to fall asleep," he recalled. "It was fairly dark but a little
light from outside was coming in through the window. Suddenly, a tall figure appeared in the corner of my
room. It hovered off of the ground, extending almost to the ceiling."
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing, so I closed my eyes, thinking whatever it was would go away," Bob
said. "But when I opened them and dared to look again, the awful thing was still there, hovering just below
the high ceiling of the room. And, even worse, it began moving, waving away from the wall and down toward me,
then back again. No individual parts of its body moved; it just moved all together in this peculiar waving motion."
"I couldn't see too clearly, but the figure looked like that of a very tall man wearing something like an overcoat,"
Bob explained. "I could make out the definite outline of a beard and the facial features, too. My hair was
standing on end and I'll never forget the eerie feeling in the air, almost like electricity. The apparition
didn't reach out for me but it kept waving down toward me. Finally, after four or five motions away from
the wall and back again, the ghost came right down next to me as I lay in bed. "I tried to scream, but my
throat was paralyzed," Bob said. "I remember rolling out of bed and crawling out into the hallway on my hands
and knees. For quite a while I couldn't bear to go back in to my room; after I finally did, I lay in bed with
the light on for a long time."
"At first I didn't tell anybody about what had happened because I was afraid people would think I was crazy.
I told my story only after I found out that my brother had had a similar experience two weeks later in his
room at the other end of the hall."
"His girlfriend had just come out of his room and he was lying on the bed with the light out saying his
prayers," Bob said. "Suddenly, he felt something pressing on his chest, and then whatever it was started
shaking him. His bed was right against the wall, making it difficult for him to get away. Then this thing
started bouncing him off the wall so loudly that the guy living in the room next door could hear it. Eventually
the presence went away and left my brother alone."
"I don't know if the form I saw in my room was the same thing that visited my brother," Bob said. "But I know
that neither my brother nor I will ever forget what happened to us."
Andy Art was living in a small cabin across the road from the hotel when she, too, experienced an unwelcome
nocturnal visitor. "I usually sleep on my side," she began, "and one night I felt something tap me on the waist.
I remember flipping over, startled, and feeling that someone was in the room with me. Then I saw a hazy shape
nearby. The head and shoulders were very distinct, but the rest of the body seemed to be flowing like a shapeless
nightgown."
"I lay there looking at the thing beside my bed. It didn't move; it stayed in place and I sensed that it was
looking at me, although I couldn't make out eyes or any other facial features," Andy recalled. "I sat up and
wondered if I were still dreaming. I tried to adjust my eyes, thinking the form would disappear, but it was still
there. It must have remained in my room for about ten minutes. I was terrified, but I didn't know what to do,
so I just sat on the edge of my bed and looked at it. It didn't threaten me in any way and eventually it just
floated away and faded from view."
"This happened in the late seventies, when I was about seventeen," Andy said. "I've always considered myself
to be somewhat psychic because I often know who's calling me before I answer the phone. But that was the
first time I had ever seen a ghost."
Another encounter with a vague hazy entity occurred when Andy was living on the third floor of the hotel.
"I was staying at the far end, opposite the attic entrance," she explained, "and I remember getting up one
night to go to the bathroom. I was walking down the hall when I looked up to see this same kind of misty
cloudy form. Again, the shape of the head and shoulders was fairly distinct and everything below them just
seemed to flow away to nothing. The figure was walking toward me and I was very startled. But this time it
moved away and disappeared without coming close to me. I don't know if it went into a wall or what, but
suddenly it wasn't there any longer. I remember having a hard time getting back to sleep after that."
Andy believes that many manifestations may be attributable to the fact that the hotel was a hospital for
so many years. "I'm sure that a lot of people have come in and out of the world at Chico Hot Springs, so
many spirits may reside here," she said. "I've seen phantoms two or three times in the lounge behind the
dining room, and that area was at one time part of the hospital. One night, my boyfriend was in the bathroom
and I was in the kitchen and, simultaneously, we both felt a presence with us. At first we each thought the
other had come in to play a trick, but then we realized that that wasn't true."
Andy believes that the spirits may also be attracted to the furniture in the dining room. "There's a good
chance that some of it may actually have belonged to Bill and Percie Knowles," she explained. "Lots of it
dates back at least to the 1920s or 1930s, and most of the owners previous to my parents didn't put much
money into new pieces, at least as far as I know."
Andy also wonders if an odd discovery made behind the hotel has anything to do with the psychic phenomena.
When the Arts moved to Chico Hot Springs, they had to dig a new septic line. "Way down deep we found some
very strange things," Andy said. "There were gold fillings with a piece of tooth still attached, a pair
of men's beat-up shoes, and, as I recall, some eyeglasses. It made you wonder if someone had died down there,
except that there were no bones or other clothing. There are many strange stories at Chico about a Chinese
gardener who disappeared. Who knows if these were his things or someone else's" Finding these long-buried
objects gave us a very strange feeling, almost as if we didn't want to disturb them. We felt somehow that
they were supposed to be there."
Regardless of who besides Percie Knowles the other ghostly inhabitants of Chico might be, the employees
agree that the paranormal activities are most common in winter and often in the dead of night, when
everything is quiet and the hotel is much less busy. It is probably also significant that so many of the
stories involve an intense feeling of cold and only partial materialization of spirits-from hazy indistinct
figures with no discernible features to those who are so solidly formed that they look like flesh-and-blood
creatures, except that they might be missing hands, or feet, or everything below the knees.
Both the coldness and the misty incomplete formation of specters may be understood more easily if we think
of ghosts as manifestations of energy. The chill that so often accompanies the sighting of apparitions
or other kinds of psychic phenomena may be explained by the theory that when spirits return to the earthly
plane of existence they require a lot of energy to make themselves seen or heard. They may draw some of
this energy from the physical environment.
Sometimes, in fact, a ghost may not look like a person at all. According to Earl Murray's Ghosts of the
Old West, a group of teenagers and young adults were having a New Year's Eve party at Chico, and they were
jumping from a roof into the hot pool. Suddenly a mysterious white light began moving along the roofline.
The party-goers interpreted the light as a warning that they should get down; indeed, serious accidents had
occurred previously when young people played on the roof.
There's no guarantee, of course, that anyone visiting Chico Hot Springs Lodge and Ranch will have a paranormal
experience-ghosts may abound at this lovely resort, but they don't perform on demand. In fact, guests at
Chico are usually so busy enjoying the pleasures of this world-scrumptious food, relaxing hot pools, and
towering snowcapped peaks-that they have little time left to think about the next one. But if you really
want to have an unearthly encounter, come to Chico Hot Springs in the dead of winter and stroll on the third f
loor of the hotel around three o'clock in the morning. If you catch a whiff of lilac or jasmine near room 349,
put your ear to the door and listen. You might hear the sounds of the rocking chair swaying back and forth,
back and forth, as a lonely lady stares from her window into the blackness of night.