The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Ghosts said to mingle with guests at haunted Arizona hotel Posted: 31 Oct 2012 08:09 AM PDT  Hotel manager Robin Brekhus recalls her first experience with a ghost in one of the hallways of the basement in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, October 29, 2012. While many hotels in the United States claim ghosts, staff and guests at the Gadsden have recorded scores of supernatural encounters from the top floor right down to the maze-like basement – not just at Halloween, but year round. – Reuters pic "It was like he wanted me to make eye contact with him and acknowledge that I saw him," she said, recalling how she then sprinted up the steps to the spacious lobby with its Italianate columns and Tiffany & Co. stained glass mural – a new believer. In its heyday in the early decades of the last century, the lobby of the Gadsden Hotel was known as the "living room" of the remote Arizona ranching town of Douglas, hosting cattle barons, cowboys and executives from the local copper mining industry. While many hotels in the United States claim ghosts, staff and guests at the Gadsden have recorded scores of supernatural encounters from the top floor right down to the maze-like basement – not just at Halloween, but year round.  Hotel manager Robin Brekhus describes some of the ghost activities that guests have reported while in one of the many rooms of the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, October 29, 2012. – Reuters pic The 160-room Gadsden Hotel, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, opened in 1907, but was badly damaged by a fire, and reopened in 1929. Since then, little has changed. The lobby retains the original white marble steps leading to the large mezzanine, up which Mexican bandit-turned-revolutionary Pancho Villa once reportedly rode his horse. Visitors ride one of the oldest manual elevators west of the Mississippi to their rooms, many fitted out with original furnishings, aging drapes and pictures that recall the hotel's bustling heyday. SUPERNATURAL ENCOUNTERS Many of the alleged supernatural encounters have been recorded by guests themselves and are kept in two binders behind the front desk. Accounts include televisions turning on and off in Room 333, supposedly the most haunted, and mysterious knocks coming from radiators. "My heart almost came out of my chest," one guest wrote of her experience. "But then I thought 'Pray the Hail Mary,' all was fine."  Hotel manager Robin Brekhus enters room 333, one of the most haunted rooms of the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, October 29, 2012. – Reuters pic One woman visitor wrote of something pulling on her hair during the night, while another said she felt someone "sit on the edge of the bed, then ... felt pressure as the person laid down next to me." "She came down the next morning and said, 'You know what? It felt like someone got in bed with me'," deputy manager Brenda Maley recalled as she stood in the spacious sunlit lobby. Maley, who said a ghost once pinned her to a bed in room 114, said she apologised and offered up a new room. But the woman happily declined. Television paranormal sleuths and amateur ghost hunters have probed the Gadsden, some toting thermal image cameras. Enthusiasts have also sent in photographs of purported paranormal phenomena, including an eerie snap of a shadowy translucent cowboy sitting on a couch in the lobby. But not all guests are believers: "The only thing haunted about Room 333 is the toilet, which won't stop running," wrote one skeptic. Some newer staff are a little uncomfortable. Ana Yanez, a server in the Cattleman's Coffee Shop, said she hears coffee spoons tinkling sometimes, and shudders at the thought of working the front desk "graveyard shift" at night. But for Maley, who has worked at the hotel for 36 years, the ghosts provide company in an isolated town. "You get used to it," she said. "You would be lonely without them." – Reuters |
| Georgia teacher turns plane into kindergarten Posted: 31 Oct 2012 12:30 AM PDT  Children play near the Soviet-era Yakovlev Yak-42 plane that's been turned into their kindergarten. Gari Chapidze bought the old but fully functional Yakovlev Yak-42 from Georgian Airways and refurbished its interior with educational equipment, games and toys but left the cockpit instruments intact so they could be used as play tools. "The idea was to create a kindergarten where children go with joy," Chapidze, the rector of the Institute of Georgian-Ukrainian Social Relations that runs the kindergarten, told AFP. "Sometimes kids have difficulties in adapting to kindergarten, to a new environment. We decided to help them by making it fun," he said. There are around 1,500 buttons in the small Soviet-era plane's cockpit which the kindergarten's 15 children can play with as they imitate real pilots taking off, he said. "The children come in to the kindergarten with pleasure and cry when they have to go home. They are happy here," he added. The private play school in the impoverished Georgian industrial city charges parents around US$90 (7RM20) per month for each child, more than double what is charged by state-run institutions. — AFP/Relaxnews |
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