Through the long corridors the ghosts of the past walk unforbidden, hindered only by broken promises, dead hopes, and dream-dust.

Myrtle Reed, “Old Rose and Silver”

Room 5 at the Trempealeau Hotel

This past March, my beau Levi and I decided to celebrate his birthday by taking a road trip along the Mississippi River. We headed south from Sibley on the Great River Road with the idea of eventually ending up in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Unlike me and my control-freak tendencies, Levi is an adventurer who likes to keep things loose and open to possibility. That’s why, after moseying along for several hours, stopping to eat, walking around the bluff-top roadside parks, and enjoying the earthy smell of spring in the damp gray breeze, we ended up with no place to stay for the night. Levi had done a little research before we embarked on our trip—he’d found three or four different, rustic B & B possibilities along our route, including our first choice, a cabin that had a tree growing in the living room. We didn’t worry about making reservations because it was so early in the season we didn’t think there’d be much demand for rooms. In a way, we were right. It was so early in the season that, at 4 pm or so, when at last we started calling around to book a room, we found out that none of the B & B’s on our list were even open for business until April.

We decided to keep driving, with the idea that something interesting would turn up. The highway passed through the picturesque historic town of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, where an inviting waterfront park with a big clock, old-fashioned street lamps, and a railroad track caught my eye. We drove down for a closer look around, and that’s how we discovered the Trempealeau Hotel. Built in the 1880s, the historic hotel is a two-story building with a screened porch, clapboard siding, and a big side yard for concerts and picnics. Levi went in to see if they had any rooms, while I tidied up the car. He came out with a big grin on his face.

Hallway at the Trempealeau Hotel,
Trempealeau, Wisconsin, 2008.

“What, what?” I asked.

“You’re going to like this hotel.” That was all he would say.

We went inside, and I did genuinely appreciate the hotel’s character and authenticity. It was a historic building, nice without being fancy, with a few charming antiques and a vintage bar. A door in the main bar room opened to a staircase that led to the hotel section of the property. The bartender told us we could go upstairs and choose any room we liked. She mentioned that no one else would be staying at the hotel that night.

As soon as we started to climb the steep wooden staircase, I knew the place was haunted. Levi said he felt it, too. For all his practical outdoorsman ways, Levi has a hippie soul and an open-minded curiosity about metaphysical matters. Levi felt that the spirit was a woman and that she was watching us as we entered her territory. At the top of the staircase was a small sitting area with a couple of chairs, including an imposing wooden chair with Masonic ceremonial-type carvings and trim, such as a stylized star and globes on the top rail. There was one bathroom upstairs for all the guests to share, European style. An old wooden armoire in the sitting room was filled with books, board games, and puzzles, and there was a basket that held prints of vintage photographs, images of people long since dead. We decided to purchase a photograph of people at the local train depot in the late 1800s, and brought it with us as we made our way down the hallway. Old pictures also lined the walls of the long hallway of doors. I wondered if any of the people in the photographs had been associated with the hotel and if the photographs provided them with an energetic link to the property.

Levi and I stuck our heads in the doorway of every room as we walked past. Each had its own vibe and décor, a wonderful hodgepodge of individuality with old-fashioned iron beds, colorful quilts, and antique dressers or bureaus. Just getting to look into each room and choose the one that suited us was a pleasure. One of the middle rooms had a bit of jangled energy that made me think it might be haunted. The last room, at the end of the hall, was room 5. It was a corner room with two lace-curtained windows, one of which faced the river, and a pretty blue quilt on the bed. Levi and I both felt that the ghost woman hung out in this room, but we loved it and decided it was the room we wanted.

When we went downstairs to pay for our room, we asked the bartender if the hotel was haunted. She smiled and said that some people thought so, but she didn’t volunteer any more information. Levi asked the bartender if there was a female ghost upstairs. The bartender said that she hadn’t experienced anything herself, but people said the hotel was haunted by the spirit of a woman. The story was that the ghost hung out in room 5, and when people slept in her room, the ghost wandered up and down the hallway and rattled doorknobs, trying to find a place to sleep.

Levi and I looked at each other. “We knew room 5 was haunted!” we told her.

“Which room would you like?” she asked.

We both grinned. “Room 5.”

The bartender laughed and shook her head. “That’s the room people always choose.”

We checked in, then went to dinner at a supper club just a little upriver from the hotel. The supper club was on the road that led to Perrot State Park, which we made plans to visit the next day. When we got back to the hotel, Levi and I had a drink at the bar, then went up to our room. It felt kind of weird to go upstairs to bed while a bar full of people socialized on the main floor, but we couldn’t hear any bar noise once we left the room, and no one paid any attention to us at all. The bartender had told us to leave our key on the dresser in the morning, as there would be no one at the hotel after the bar closed. The idea of being the only guests in a haunted hotel felt a little Norman Bates-y. It definitely heightened our anticipation of the night ahead. We decided to put my favorite faux fur hat on the bed of the other room that seemed haunted, as sort of a peace offering and sort of an invitation to the spirit to spend the night in that room instead of her usual hangout. We told the spirit we were happy to be staying at the hotel and invited her to stay in the room with us if she was friendly and quiet. Back in room 5, we lay in bed for a while and listened, but nothing happened and we eventually fell asleep.

At some point in the early morning hours, I woke up. The room was dark. I held my breath and listened. Someone was rattling the door. This was one of the few times in my life where my first thought was that it was an intruder rather than a ghost. “Levi,” I whispered. The door rattled again. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes.” I could feel his body tense.

“Do you think it’s the ghost?”

“I hope so,” he replied tersely. We waited, but there was only silence.

After the rattling stopped, it was sort of cool to think the ghost had come to the door. But Levi and I were not prepared for the crazy little screech that came out of thin air beside the bed. We both jumped, then froze. For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. Finally, I asked Levi if there was a radiator in the room. He reached out in the dark and felt a radiator beside the bed, but it wasn’t hot. The high-pitched shrieky sound started up again and continued, a nonsensical nee neeneenee neneenneee! Whatever it was, it sounded perturbed. Then it stopped.

Levi and I were a little stunned. Unlike door rattling or footsteps, this noise seemed raw and emotional. I asked if a spirit was trying to communicate, and the radiator started up again—nee neeneenneee! Levi and I asked a few questions, uncertain if the weird shrieky sounds were the spirit’s responses or just a broken radiator noise. I had the impression we were being treated to an escalating litany of grievances. I have seen and heard ghosts before, but I couldn’t tell if this noise was coming from a ghost or not. The ghosts in my house communicate through the radiators, but with whispers, not shrieks. The radiators in my house are from the same era as the ones at the hotel, and they have never made a noise like the one we were hearing. When I spoke on a radio show one day with Mary Ann Winkowski, the real-life ghost whisperer who inspired the television show of the same name, she told me it was common for spirits to use heating and plumbing pipes to communicate.

I wished that I had better clairvoyant or psychic skills so I could either see the spirit or communicate with it more effectively—or see if there was nothing there. I said, “If this is a spirit trying to communicate, please do something else so we know we’re not just talking to a radiator.” The radiator responded with a loud clank! Levi said that was the moment he became convinced we were actually talking to a ghost.

I spent the next five or ten minutes asking questions: “Are you the spirit woman from this room? Are you unhappy? Do you need help? Do you want to go to the light?” The experience reminded me of talking to my cats, trying to figure out what they want through cues other than language—deciphering the timing and tone of their meows and applying a little intuition and deductive reasoning power.

After this sincere attempt at communication, our best guess was that the spirit was not happy, didn’t want help, and did not want to go to the light. I thanked the spirit for communicating and asked her to let us get some sleep. After two more brief but quieter shrieky noises, the radiator went silent. I actually got out of bed and knelt down and prayed for peace for the spirit and for the hotel. When I got back in bed, Levi and I talked about how freaky and interesting the experience was. We dozed off but woke up at 6 am to a SSSSSsssss! coming from the radiator. Levi and I braced ourselves for more caterwauling, but the radiator didn’t shriek or do anything else that radiators have no business doing. It just hissed. We got up and went into each room in our PJs, checking the radiators to see if they were all making the same noise. (It was weird, but so much fun, to have the entire place to ourselves to explore in this way. It felt very Scooby Doo-ish, which is how I usually describe my experiences living in a haunted house.) The radiators all seemed to be firing up for the day and we concluded that there must be a timer on the thermostat, and 6 am was when they were set to warm up the bedrooms. My hat was still sitting on the bed in the middle room where I had left it the night before. It hadn’t moved or disappeared and didn’t seem to be bewitched in any way, so I picked it up and brought it back to our room.

A few months later, I invited my friend Will Barker to join Levi and me at the Trempealeau Blues Bash. When I told him he could stay in a haunted hotel, he started to laugh and said, “Do you remember when I called you from a haunted hotel last year? That was the place!” I did remember getting a phone message about a haunted hotel from Will, but he hadn’t left any details. A laconic restaurateur who spends a lot of time sailing or taking road trips on his motorcycle, Will does believe in ghosts and has had a couple of spirit encounters himself. There was a ghost named Walter in the first restaurant Will owned in Hudson. Walter’s heavy footsteps could be heard walking across the creaky hardwood floors after the bar and grill was closed for the night and all the customers had gone home.

I asked Will to tell me again what happened to him the night he stayed at the haunted hotel. He said he was completely alone in the place, which was pretty weird to begin with. I asked if he was in room 5, and he said he didn’t remember that kind of stuff. He said he slept in the room that faced the river at the end of the hall. “That’s room 5!” I practically shouted. Will said he woke up in the night because he thought he heard someone walking around out in the hallway. Then he said the radiator made a crazy noise––spooky, like it was upset about something. He toughed it out till morning, but it was definitely a strange night.

After Levi and I had checked the radiators in all the other rooms at the Trempealeau Hotel, we went back to our room and fell asleep again. We woke up around 8 am. It was daylight. We took our time getting dressed and brushing our teeth in the community bathroom. We gathered up our stuff, said goodbye to the ghost, and lingered for a minute in the room just in case she wanted to communicate one last time. But the room was silent. When we got to the small sitting room at the top of the steps, we heard a clang from somewhere back at the far end of the hallway, a ghostly goodbye, or maybe good riddance, from the occupant of room 5.