JH: Personally, I have seen a tall, gaunt old man with white hair. Occasionally, when I look into one of the old mirrors on the second floor hallway or the parlor, I see him standing behind me. I turn to look and there is no one there. I look in the mirror again and he is gone. This has happened to me about five times since we moved here in June of 2001. He has just a head, his body is a column of fog. I call him "Mr. Foggybody." Maybe this is what was forming in Room 5 in the previous account.
AH: Do you know who he is?JH: I think it may be Francis O. Clark who managed the Inn for his father-in-law, Lewis Mason, for several years. He did not die here, but his wife, Mary Mason Clark, brought his body here for the wake and he is buried in the Bentonsport Cemetery. This may be the man who "did not die here, but liked it here in life and came back after death." I have seen pictures of Mr. Clark and he was thin and had white hair. My daughter has seen a "floating head" in Room 8. The room was dark and she did not see any foggy body. She said it was an old man with white hair.
AH: What else have you experienced?JH: We have heard footsteps when no one else was in the building. Just a few weeks ago, I was dusting upstairs when I heard footsteps in the hallway. These were clomping boot steps. Thinking it was my husband looking for me, I called out "I'm in Room 7!" But he did not come in the room. I finished my cleaning and went downstairs where I found him talking on the phone in the office. I asked him what he wanted and he said he had been on the phone the whole time I had been upstairs. It was not him in the hallway. The front door was locked and no one from the street could have gotten in.
My daughter-in-law and her father came for a visit in March and they were staying in Room 5. She said she had gone to bed early and was waiting for her father to come to the room so she could turn off the lights. She heard him climb the stairs, but he did not come into the room. Later she heard him climb the stairs again and this time he did come into the room. She asked him why he had come up earlier but did not come in [but] he had been downstairs talking to me the whole time. I saw him climb the stairs only once and go into the room. There were no other guests on that floor that night.
We have found windows closed when I knew they had been opened and open when I thought they we all closed. The front door has often been found locked when I know I had left it open for late night arriving guests. We have heard footsteps when we are the only one home, and twice we heard a rattling plastic bag that woke us up at night. In the morning I found an empty Wal-mart bag laying by the door. (I wonder if George likes plastic bags.) Our bedroom door often opens and closes at night. Sometimes gently, sometimes slamming shut. If I say "Stop it, go away," it will stop. Guests have mentioned hearing doors closing and footsteps in the hallway all night long. Either everyone was asleep or they were the only ones on the floor; either way there was no one else who heard the noises, just the one person.
AH: How did you come to own the hotel?JH: My husband, Chuck, retired from the Air Force after 25 years of service. We were living near Dayton, Ohio at the time. We decided we would like to try our own business and decided to buy a small farm in Iowa. While looking at a realtor's web site for farms, we saw this old hotel for sale also. On a trip through Iowa in the summer of 2000, we stopped to look at some of the farms for sale, and also the old hotel. We fell in love with the hotel and decided to become Innkeepers instead of farmers.
A year later, after [Chuck] retired, we bought the place and moved in. It came fully furnished will all the original beds and dressers and furniture. We are the fifth owners, and each time the place has been sold intact with all the furniture and furnishings, so it is full of original Mason family antiques. Mr. Mason was a furniture maker, and he made a lot of the pieces here.
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