Lake Chelan Mirror
Marilee Stolzenburg didn’t believe in ghosts. The realtor hadn’t mentioned hauntings when she bought the old Victorian home on Highland Avenue. It was just an old home in need of repair. A bit creaky, perhaps, but ghosts? Most certainly not.
Stolzenburg’s new neighbors, however, insisted it was a haunted house, one of several in Chelan with spooky reputations. Are the stories real? Or figments of wild imaginations?
For Marilee, time swayed her resolve. She and her husband Brad traveled to Chelan on weekends to fix up the old house, which they planned to turn into a bed and breakfast. The house was in terrible condition. Past owners had gutted it and ripped out appliances and plumbing. Marilee and Brad made a makeshift living room downstairs and pulled a bed into a little room nearby.
Then, one weekend, Marilee left her husband and baby son sleeping to work upstairs. Deep in her task, she heard footsteps creak. She assumed Brad was awake, but when she looked, no one was there. Brad was still asleep. Later, after rejoining her family in the little bedroom, Marilee heard an old woman’s voice outside her window. It sounded like she was talking to a group of people. Curious why people were gathered outside, Marilee crept to the window. No one was there.
She returned to bed and stretched her eyes wide to ensure she was still awake. I know it wasn’t a dream, she said. The woman outside continued talking. “It was kind of like a town meeting. They were discussing if they should allow us to stay in the home, if we would take good care of it.”
The Stolzenburgs must have earned “approval.” They finished the repairs and opened their bed and breakfast business. Then the stories started rolling in. “Do you have ghosts?” guests asked after curious experiences. “You know there’s a friendly presence here, don’t you?”
Marilee heard story after story. A ghost dog jumped on a guest’s bed during the night and left its imprint on the blankets. A guest saw the presence of an old woman with glasses standing next to Marilee in the parlor. But she’s here to protect you, said the guest.
Marilee doesn’t feel any threat. She’s grown used to cold spots in the house, the soft shadows, the sweet perfume she smells only when she sits on a certain spot on the pink couch. “I tell myself, ‘You exist, I exist, and that’s okay.’”
Across town, a home built by a sea captain for his wife has its own ghostly rumors. The three-story brick home across from Latte Da Coffee Shop has been used as an inn, as well as a home for the elderly and a sanitarium for the mentally ill; the patients lived in the basement. Another rumor says secret chambers were built into the home’s interior. The spaces were supposedly used to hide Chinese people being smuggled through the area.
Documentation to support the theory hasn’t been found, and the only secret passage present owners have discovered is a space in the old attic. Residents, however, say they sometimes smell the scent of rice cooking. One morning, not long after the current owners moved into the house, the stairway was strewn with brown rice, “which we don’t eat,” they said. “Legend says the Chinese spirits who linger here bless the house with brown rice.”
The owners first learned about the hauntings from their contractors. The workers reported strange happenings and tricks. Since then, the owners have watched items zing across the living room, but they’re not convinced there isn’t a logical explanation behind the hauntings. “We’re not sure we believe in ghosts, but a lot of people seem to sense them here.”
It’s the same at Campbell’s Resort. Rumors of its ghost Caroline run rampant with employees. Many insist the old hotel is, without a doubt, haunted.
No one seems to know much about ghost Caroline, just that she was a woman who once lived in a room in the now-closed section of the hotel, above the restaurant and pub. Some people say she likes to loiter in the men’s bathroom. Sometimes, they say, she plays with the lights or skips up and down the stairs.
All that’s known for sure is that, at some point, a woman named Caroline lived in the corner room upstairs. Room 210. The words “Caroline’s room” are still barely visible on the wall outside the door. Inside, yellowed paper with full-blown pink roses tied with ribbons cover the cracked walls.
“I believe in her,” said Terry Emery, who tends bar at the pub downstairs, “and I’m not the only one who’s experienced her.”
Emery said she heard Caroline last spring. It was late at night. Emery had just shut the front door of the hotel. As she locked it, she heard a sound like someone dragging furniture across the floor upstairs. Emery ran and told a co-worker, who heard the same frightening sounds.
Did Emery go up to see what the noises were? “No,” she exclaimed. “There’s no way I’d go up there. I say let sleeping ghosts lie.”
Photo: Mary Elizabeth Lord, known as Grandma Lord, pictured in her bedroom at her son’s home on Highland Avenue in either 1909 or 1910. Ironically, bed and breakfast owner Marilee Stolzenburg named this same room “Grandma’s Room” before she knew about its previous occupant. When Marilee saw this photo, she was shocked. The bed frame pictured is identical to the one she had already chosen and placed in the room.
A full version of this story was published in The Lake Chelan Mirror. Photo courtesy of The Lake Chelan Mirror.
Celeste Hankins, Writer, Nature Guide & Yoga Teacher 