Chapter 4
One quarter mile (a five-minute walk) from the Grand Canyon’s rim sits the Maswik Lodge. This popular lodge is located in the southwestern corner of the Grand Canyon Village and next to the Backcountry Information Center where hikers must go to receive a camping permits if they are descending into the canyon overnight. Also, the Maswik Lodge is situated in the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world, which covers 1.8 million acres. The word “Maswik” comes from the Hopi Nation and refers to their kachina god who guards the Grand Canyon.
The Maswik Lodge was built on the same property that originally housed the old and dated Motor Lodge. The Motor Lodge was built in 1927 by the Fred Harvey Company and Santa Fe Railway. By the 1940s, as more and more people traveled to the Grand Canyon by car, the Motor Lodge had to add 36 more guest cabins to accommodate the increasing number of visitors. When the 1960s came, the park administrators decided it was time to remodel the aging Motor Lodge and give it a new look and name. Most of the 120 cabins that made up the lodge were demolished and replaced with more modern two-story hotel rooms. In all, 18 buildings were constructed, and the old Motor Lodge was transformed into the new and more modern Maswik Lodge. The Maswik has 250 rooms and fills up quickly.
A few of the old cabins from the Motor Lodge days were successfully salvaged from the wrecking ball. These relics are now being used strictly for employee housing and are off-limits to overnight guests. With this lodge nestled in the ponderosa pine forest, wildlife abounds (please remember, it is illegal to approach any wildlife in any national park). Elk, deer, raccoons, squirrels, and rabbits roam freely. Believe me, these cute animals have some serious anger management issues. Staying at the Maswik Lodge, you can have a wonderful time viewing these wild and untamed animals from a safe distance.
Inside the main lodge is the overnight guest registration desk, a gift store, a small branch of the parks transportation desk, a cafeteria, and a pizza pub. The majority of the overnight passengers who arrive at the park with the popular Grand Canyon Railway tend to stay at the Maswik Lodge. Also a lot of tourists and Grand Canyon employees tend to gravitate towards the Maswik Lodge’s pizza pub. It’s one of the only places in the park for guests to watch sports on a big screen television, and let me tell you, the pizza is fantastic. Even though this lodge isn’t right on the rim, that doesn’t seem to bother a few ghosts that like to hang out around the Maswik Lodge’s property.
Want to Work Overtime?
The gift store inside the Maswik Lodge has some really nice merchandise for sale, including graphic T-shirts and sweatshirts for the whole family, turquoise and copper jewelry spread throughout the store, books about the Grand Canyon region, and decorative metal art. However, what most people don’t know is that this gift store has its own resident ghost that thoroughly enjoys making items sway and the jewelry stands spin around.
One night after the gift shop closed, assistant manager Josh was busy finishing up his closing duties and went back into his office to put some items away. His office also doubled as an extension of the stock room. Above the door in this room is a shelf where extra hangers and pegs are kept in large boxes, so a one-inch safety lip was added for protection to keep anything from falling off and injuring anyone. After Josh put some merchandise away, he stopped at his desk to complete his daily sale worksheets. Josh was getting ready to get up from his desk when a large box of hangers that weighted roughly twenty pounds, which had been securely placed on the shelf above the door, came flying off towards him and missed him by mere inches. Josh sprang out of his chair and tried to comprehend what had just happened. He slowly walked over towards the shelf to inspect the safety lip to see if it had somehow broke. The wooden base and lip were still intact and Josh for the life of him couldn’t figure out how this heavy box could have fallen off the shelf by itself, let alone be hurled several feet to where his desk was located.
Not long after the hanger incident, another one occurred. Josh and a female employee had just closed the gift store for the night. Josh went to the back office to finish working on the day’s paperwork while the lone employee stayed out front, straightening everything up. The door between the office and the gift store had been securely closed. Sitting at his desk, Josh heard the door to the manager’s office open and someone walk in. He glanced up to ask the employee what she needed when he found no one there, and before the Josh could get up out of his seat, he felt as if someone rushed up on him and he could even sense a slight breeze. Every single hair on his body was now standing straight up and every inch of him was covered in goose-bumps.
Paralyzed with fear, Josh could not only hear, but also felt the floor beneath him pulsate as disembodied footsteps headed back towards the door leading into the gift shop. With his mouth gaped opened and terror oozing from every one of his pores, Josh watched in amazement as the connecting door leading into the store slowly opened then closed. Running out from the back room into the gift shop, Josh noticed that the closing employee was on the other side of the store folding clothes. Even though the frazzled manager already knew the answer, he still asked the busy worker if she had opened the door into the office for any reason, with the girl giving him the answer he was so not hoping she would say: “No.” Josh confided to the employee about what he had just experienced when the girls eyes widened and claimed that five minutes before his encounter, she watched as one of the jewelry stands that’s on a swivel base begin to spin around as if a child was twirling it until it finally stopped and she had to pick up all the jewelry that had fallen onto the floor. She didn’t want to say anything to him about the possibility that the store was haunted out of fear of being ridiculed. Josh and the employee decided enough was enough and left as quickly as they could.
Caught on Tape
Most buildings in the main village are equipped with brand new, state-of-the-art surveillance cameras, always looking for anything out of the ordinary, including but not limited to shoplifters, assaults, and mischievous individuals (crime is fairly low in the park, generally speaking). Law enforcement personnel sit for hours, reviewing long, boring, sleep-inducing videos. Then one day, Maswik Lodge’s management was informed that someone had been stealing personal property from other employees in the back office area. Park security was notified about the possible theft and were asked to review the video tapes. The alleged crime was believed to have happened in the early morning hours when the back office had been secured until normal business hours resumed. For hours, a security staff member painstakingly watched several videos and right before he was going to call it quits for the night discovered something out of the ordinary, but not necessarily criminal. The time stamp on the tape was roughly 4:45 a.m., that’s when a large stack of papers which were placed on one of the desks abruptly and semi-violently shifted and became scattered all over the desk. There had been no one in the back room for a while, nor was any window open that may have caused any air current. The officer claimed that the manner in which the papers blew around was in no way natural. This incident caused a little bit of a stir within the security department, as all of the security staff got a chance to review it. They were ecstatic to have caught this, since nothing paranormal like this usually happens where the cameras are rolling. If you looked away for a second you would have missed it. Despite the efforts of security, the phantom criminal was never caught.
Living with a Dead-Beat Ghoul
Across the street from the Maswik Lodge’s front doors are the only surviving relics left from the old Motor Lodge days. These little cabins have relatively small rooms, not to mention they sit within mere feet of the Grand Canyon’s noisy train tracks. The park just recently stopped renting these rooms to park visitors and are now housing for only park employees.
Seasonal employee Michelle was assigned to cabin 205 as her living quarters back in April 2013. Besides Michelle, this small cabin was also home to three other female employees. To pass the time away, the girls would occasionally tell ghost stories to each other, sometimes all night long. One evening during the middle of their scarefest, the overhead light in their room turned off for no apparent reason, but the light in their bathroom was still blazing. All four terrified girls started screaming and ran out of their home and straight to a friend’s cabin and told the bewildered man what had just happened. The male friend just thought the girls were being silly and went to their cabin to make sure they were safe and to check if the light bulb had just burned out. All the bulbs were still good, so the young man walked towards the light switch and noticed that someone had flipped it to the off position. The girls all swore that none of them turned it off so the friend concluded that they had just spooked themselves with their stories. A few minutes after the young man had returned back to his cabin, the girls once again were all in their bed and resumed telling stories.
A little while later, one of the girls got out of bed and went into the bathroom and shut the door. Michelle and the other two girls continued with their stories when they heard a blood-curdling scream coming from inside the bathroom. When the girls reached the bathroom door they found it locked. The girl’s screams were deafening and they feared she was in danger. Michelle kept begging her to unlock the door, but all they could hear was their trapped friend sobbing. Finally, the door slowly opened to a dark room. Michelle cautiously walked into the bathroom and tried to turn on the light with no success and found the terrified friend cowering in a corner. When the girls were finally able to get her to calm down and stop crying, the girl told them that when she was in the bathroom, she started hearing like something was hissing. Fearing an animal had made its way into the bathtub, she went to look when the bathroom light blew out and when she grabbed the bathroom door to leave it wouldn’t open no matter how hard she tried. At first she believed her roommates were playing a joke on her when she felt someone touch her back—that was when she started screaming. This poor hysterical girl asked her friends to look at her back because it felt as if it was on fire. When Michelle lifted up the girls shirt, she saw three deep red scratch marks running down her back.
Another incident that occurred with one of the original Motor Lodge cabins was in July 2013, when another female employee, Abby, and her roommate, Julie, had just returned to their cabin from the employee’s laundry facility. It was going to be awhile before their clothes would be dry, so they decided to go back to their cabin to prepare dinner and watch a movie. As soon as their dinner was prepared, they decided to watch the horror movie Insidious, which they rented from the Grand Canyon Community Library. Settling in to their own beds with the blankets pulled up and dinner plates in their laps, they began to watch the movie neither had seen before. Around twenty minutes into the film, the front door to the cabin was forcefully thrown open, hitting the wall with a hard thud. Abby jumped out of her bed and ran to the door to see who was trying to scare them, which they had succeeded in doing. Besides not seeing anyone around, there was also no wind, not even a slight breeze that could have blown the door open. Julie uttered to Abby that she remembered locking the door after they came home from the laundromat. Thinking back, both girls had remembered hearing stories from current employees about some of the old cabins at the Maswik being haunted. Abby said that both of them were beyond scared and should be inducted into the Guinness’s Book of World Records on how quickly they dressed and dashed out of the cabin. They left their plates of food on their beds and as they ran out of the building, Abby made sure it was closed and locked. The two roomies headed back to the laundry facility to retrieve their clothes and discuss if their cabin was actually one of the haunted ones that they had heard about. The girls finally worked up enough courage to return to the cabin, but when they opened up the door, one of their other roommates, Summer, had arrived home after a long day of work. This roommate was furious with both Abby and Julie, claiming as she walked up to the cabin, the front door was wide open, which is an invitation for anyone to steal all of their belongings. Abby was trying to explain to Summer what they had experienced earlier when and the television set turned on by itself. The girls fled the room and stayed with friends that night.
Terrorizing Overnight Guests
If you think hauntings only happen in old homesteads, battlefields, European castles, plantations, ancient cemeteries, or any other old ruin, you are sadly mistaken. Newly constructed homes and apartment complexes, high rise condos, and last but not least, recently constructed malls can be just as haunted as an abandoned 1600s farmhouse. This planet we call home has many mysteries and we will never truly know all of her dark secrets. I have no doubt that every piece of land somehow remembers every dark event and trauma of ancient battles that have taken place on its soil. We do know that the Native American’s ancestral Anasazi Tribe survived within the inhospitable depths of the Grand Canyon at the beginning of the 13th century, but who lived here before them? Don’t be too surprised to learn that some of the newer rooms at the Maswik Lodge have become a hotbed of paranormal activity.
The newer two-story guest rooms at the Maswik Lodge are quite appealing. The rooms come equipped with single-cup coffee makers, mini-refrigerators, safes, air conditioning, satellite TV, telephones, and two queen beds, plus they are nestled smack-dab in the middle of the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world and the aroma from the trees is heavenly. The main inconvenience facing guests staying at the Maswik Lodge is fighting for standing room on the overcrowded and sometimes smelly shuttle buses. However, a few overnight guests that stayed in a couple of the rooms at the Maswik had their vacations turn into a living nightmare.
Maswik Lodge guests Will and Shawn had been planning their vacation to the canyon for well over five months. They had reserved a room at Maswik Lodge for their first night and the next morning had plans to hike down the Bright Angel Trail to the Indian Garden Campground and camp there for an evening. They arrived at the park around 2:oo p.m. and headed straight to the Maswik’s front desk to check in. The two young men were pleased to find the room that was assigned to them, 6738, was ready for occupation. They pulled their car around to the front of the building they were to stay in and hauled in their luggage. Upon entering the room, Shawn felt as if the room was giving off a negative vibe. He turned around and mentioned to Will that he felt they weren’t welcome there. Will laughed and told Shawn there was nothing wrong with the room. Even though he was uneasy in the room, Shawn claimed a bed, removed some items from his luggage and placed them in a dresser drawer. Both men freshened up, then departed their room to go explore the Grand Canyon Village and get something to eat. After an evening of sightseeing and having dinner at the Arizona Room, Will and Shawn decided it was time to go back to their room, watch a little TV, relax, and finally go to sleep.
When Shawn chose his bed, it was the closest one to the front door. He still felt uncomfortable inside the room and said it was as if it was saturated with bad vibes but couldn’t explain the feeling in any greater detail. At around 3:00 a.m., Shawn abruptly awoke out of a sound sleep profusely sweating and his heart was pounding so hard he thought it was going to jump out of his chest. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Shawn glanced around the dark room and thought he saw a tall black shadow of a man standing in a corner near the bathroom. He looked over towards Will’s bed thinking maybe he was up walking around only to find his friend soundly asleep. Shawn looked back towards the corner to see if the black shadow was still there but it was gone. Shawn figured he had imagined it due to him being in new surrounding but one thing he did know was that he and Will needed to be up in a couple of hours to start their hike so he had to try to go back to sleep. Around twenty minutes later as Shawn started to doze off, he was awakened from not being able to breathe. When he opened his eyes, he saw the black shadow being hovering a few inches from his face and was trying to strangle him. Shawn thought he was going to die as he felt his body starting to go limp when the murderous entity slowly let go of its grip around Shawn’s throat and slowly faded away in front of his eyes.
Shawn let out a yell that woke Will up out of a deep sleep. Shawn was trying to explain everything to Will that had just happened to him. Will was annoyed with Shawn’s wild imagination and refused to believe his cockamamie story that their room was haunted. Shawn stormed into the bathroom to look in a mirror to see if there was any proof of his attack when he saw deep red marks encircling his neck, but Will believed his friend might have done it accidentally to himself while he slept. Shawn was now extremely upset that his longtime friend refused to believe him, so he grabbed all of his belongings and left the room to go sleep in their vehicle. Will truly believed his buddy had experienced a rare condition known as a night terror, which is different than a nightmare. Night terrors are a form of a sleeping disorder where a person will partially awaken from sleep in a state of terror.
Will felt bad about his friend going to sleep in the car but he wasn’t about to leave his warm snuggly bed and the fluffy pillows that were holding him hostage, besides it didn’t take very long for him to fall back to sleep. Forty-five minutes later, Will came running out of the room screaming like a banshee that a black shadow had attacked him and he too was also sporting long red marks on his neck. Neither men would go back into the room until the safety of the all-mighty sun arose, and only Will had the guts to re-enter the room, but only long enough to retrieve his belongings. Shawn and Will went to the front desk and informed the staff about what had happened to them that night and were refunded their night’s stay with apologies from the Maswik’s front desk staff. Two fully grown adult men, running out of a room they claimed was haunted, does indeed appear to be a nightmarish situation, but what happened to a female guest in the same complex is truly terrifying.
Elizabeth is a young woman who was overly excited about visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time with two of her friends. Running late, the group arrived well after the sun had set, so Elizabeth and her companions decided they would just get a small meal at the Maswik’s cafeteria and go to their room to crash for the night. When the friends reached their room, Elizabeth chose the bed furthest away from the door in the room while her two friends wanted the one closest to it. The girls were extremely exhausted from their long day and prepared for bed. Elizabeth tucked herself tightly under the covers and decided she wanted to read a little before going to sleep and her friends opted for the television. Elizabeth had been reading for about a half hour when it felt as if someone sat down on the end of her bed. Setting her book aside, she got out of bed and walked around it, looking to see if possibly the bed frame might be broken. She got down on her hands and knees and looked at the bed frame but it seemed to be intact.
Standing back up she noticed that her two companions had already fallen asleep. Elizabeth decided it was about time to go to sleep herself so she turned off the lights and television and crawled back under the covers of her bed, closing her eyes and quickly dozing off.
Having been asleep for roughly an hour, Elizabeth was awoken by the feeling of something crawling onto her bed and laying right beside her. Knowing both of her friends had not moved a single muscle since they had fallen asleep, she slowly but hesitantly turned her head to see who or what was in the bed with her. Elizabeth didn’t see a physical body, however she did notice a distinct imprint of a head on the pillow next to hers and it looked like a body lying under the sheets with her. With her heart racing, Elizabeth closed her eyes and began to pray that whatever was next to her would go away. Unfortunately, the opposite happened when she began to feel strong, powerful hands begin to caress her inner thighs. As her heart was pounding loudly, her eyes filled with tears while she silently wept. After what felt like an eternity, the stroking finally ceased and she felt something shuffle off the bed, ending her traumatizing experience. Elizabeth knew if she woke up her friends and told them what had just happened, they wouldn’t believe her.
Elizabeth had never believed in ghosts herself and has more than once criticized other people that had confided in her about their own ghost stories. She tried to convince herself that she must have imagined the whole thing. That day’s journey to the canyon was long, the weather had been ridiculously hot and humid, plus they made a lot of unexpected detours, so she just must be overly tired and the best scenario was to go back to sleep and everything would be better in the morning. Even though Elizabeth was trying hard to discredit herself, she could still feel where the entity had caressed her thighs. A little while later, when Elizabeth had almost fallen asleep, she began to feel something touching her thighs again. She distinctly felt a hand and fingers touching her and this continued off and on for the rest of the night. Not once did Elizabeth try to wake her companions out of fear that it might anger the entity or possibly attack her friends.
When the assaults finally cease all together right before the sun emerged, Elizabeth’s friends finally woke up to their friend crying into a soaking wet pillow. Her two companions cuddled up next to her on the bed and asked her what was wrong? Elizabeth was hesitant at first but her concerned friends insisted she tell them and after she told them what she had gone through the whole night, her friends became angry and started yelling into the room that whatever this monster was needed to show itself. When the malicious entity didn’t appear, the two friends tried calling it out for being a coward. Elizabeth begged her friends to stop that she didn’t want it following her home. The girls packed up their belonging and left the room. While they were checking out at the front desk, one of Elizabeth’s friends inquired the front desk agent if she knew if the building they were staying in was haunted. This clerk was unaware of any paranormal happenings within the canyon but her co-worker happened to overhear the conversation, cut in and told Elizabeth’s friend that he had a couple of overnight guests tell him about frightening encounters they experienced in their rooms. The clerk informed the girls that if they wanted to talk to someone about their experience, go to the front desk of the Bright Angel Lodge and look for Judy (me).
Elizabeth and her friends casually strolled into the Bright Angel from the back doors that lead outside towards the view of the Grand Canyon. I remember them walking in, looked right at me and whispering to each other. I wasn’t busy at the moment and all three girls walked up to the counter, looked at my name tag, and said “Hi.” I smiled back at them and asked if I could help them. One of the girls told me that a clerk from the Maswik Lodge had suggested to them to come to the Bright Angel Lodge and look for someone at the front desk with my name. Elizabeth stepped forward and asked me if I knew of any hauntings that have taken place at the Maswik Lodge. I told her a few stories of the many hauntings I knew about, assuming the girls were looking for a few places to go ghost hunting, until Elizabeth confided to me about what happened to her that night. I will never forget the terrified expression that consumed her pretty face, nor the tears flooding her cheeks. I walked out to the lobby from behind the desk, took Elizabeth and her friends aside, and told them that the canyon’s rims and depths are an epicenter of hauntings. My heart broke for Elizabeth and I gave the girls a hug, telling Elizabeth to contact me if this malicious entity followed her home. I never heard from her again, so here’s to hoping Elizabeth put this whole experience in the past and has a wonderful life.
Wanna Go for a Stroll?
Other supernatural occurrences associated around the Maswik Lodge don’t really have anything to do with any of the buildings. The sidewalk that passes in front of this lodge, heading north, ends at Hermit Road and has had some interesting ghost stories associated with it. There have been several reports of both tourists and park employees hearing unnatural breathing accompanied with a hot, moist breath in their ears and on the back of their necks as they stroll north towards the rim.
Furthermore, people claim to have an intense feeling of being followed and have heard disembodied footsteps behind them. Besides hearing ethereal breathing and footsteps, one more strange occurrence has been told by several witnesses that involve a tall shadow figure walking side by side with them. Creepy as it may sound, these pedestrians were walking alone on this sidewalk and noticed their shadow casted onto the sidewalk or grass by the sun. What surprised them about this was there would be two shadows as if someone else was walking with them when they thought that they were all alone.
The Maswik Lodge may be a newer building in the village and it may not be located right on the rim, but it does have a large and delicious cafeteria, a super awesome pizza pub, and lots and lots of paranormal activity.