MARIE ROOM
Three of our rooms do not have little books for guests to write entries about their stays. Some of my guests and I have had experiences in all three of these rooms. The Marie room is in the main building called Captain Grant’s. Holly and Margaret are in the Avery home next door. Phenomena have occurred in all of these rooms. The Avery home is where the spirit of the Victim resides and where my husband and I live.
Let’s begin with the Marie room, which is on the first floor of Captain Grant’s. It is convenient for guests who have difficulty handling staircases. It is also our smallest room. It was once occupied by one of the Taylor sisters, who had so much hatred for each other. It displays a lot of history. The ceiling is open-beamed and the floor is made of nineteenth-century fitted wooden boards. Directly above this room is the Adelaide room. Since the Marie room isn’t as haunted as Adelaide is, the hauntings in Adelaide become even more curious. What I mean by that will become evident as you read about the occurrences that I am about to share with you.
In 1998 or thereabout, I had an occasion to sleep in the Marie room. It had just been restored and I was anxious to see how the room felt now that it was done and ready for guests. I had slept in the room many times prior to the completion of the renovation and had never experienced any otherworldly happenings. Around 10:00 p.m. I crawled under the covers and fell asleep, confident in my belief that I was going to have a good night’s sleep.
It was almost midnight when I was awakened by a loud noise. I was awake instantly, my eyes wide and peering over the covers. The room was full of the noise of loud, banging furniture moving. I lay there not daring to move. Was the noise outside on the deck or in my room? It sounded like it was everywhere. I slowly pulled the sheet and blanket down from my face and peered over the edge of the comforter. There was no one there. I barely dared to breathe. Maybe it was a raccoon or a squirrel. No, I thought. There was way too much noise for it to be a squirrel. The sides of the walls began to be scratched. I prayed fast and furiously. I didn’t dare get out of bed lest I be attacked by some unknown animal or just some unknown thing.
The noise lasted for well over an hour. Then, after more than two more hours of heart-pounding anxiety, I finally fell into a deep sleep. In the morning I awoke and went outside to the deck next to the Marie room. Nothing had been disturbed. Not a thing. This experience, to my knowledge, has never occurred since. I was alone in the house at the time.
A few months later, guests started to report what they had experienced in the Marie room. Many were certain that a spirit had visited them in the night. More than one stated that they had seen an apparition. This room is only one of two bedrooms where an apparition has manifested.
In March of 1997, some guests in the Marie room reported that they had barely slept all night. It appeared to them that the guests in the Adelaide room had come in late and then began to speak loudly and make a lot of noise. They heard someone open the Adelaide door and start walking in the upstairs hallway. This went on for over two hours.
At close to 9:00 the next morning, right before breakfast was to be served, the Marie room guests said they were going to leave. They didn’t want to be at breakfast with the Adelaide guests in case words came up between the two parties. One man had gone up to the Adelaide room the night before, knocked on the door, and asked the guests to please be quiet. We decided to give them a free night stay in the future if they wished to come back.
Finally it was breakfast time and the remaining guests gathered in the dining room. We usually talk with our guests at breakfast, and I decided to ask them how their evening had gone. All but one couple had gone to the casino. The other couple had retired at 10:00 p.m. The casino-goers were all in bed by 11:00 p.m. “Did anyone hear someone come in?” I asked. They all said no. “How was everyone’s night? Did all of you sleep well?” One guest said that it was really quiet.
At this point I told the guests what had happened to the guests in the Marie room. They were all dumbfounded. We knew the noise was not caused by anyone looking for a room. We asked the guests in the Adelaide room if they had heard someone knock on their door. They denied hearing anything. We knew that no one had driven up the driveway and gone in the house. Our security system alerts us to that. We all wondered who the Marie room guests had heard.
Perhaps the strangest thing that has ever happened in the Marie room actually occurred in the Adelaide room. This was prior to the little leather-bound books being placed in the upper rooms. The couple in the Adelaide room were regular guests of ours, having visited several times. On one particular night, their door opened and then closed by itself. No big deal, they told me. But then the TV went off and they had to turn it on again. The infamous shower curtain hurled itself onto the floor and lay there until morning. The guests weren’t about to get out of bed and hang it up again.
The home at this time was heated by steam. This is one of the best types of heat that a home can have. As the boiler heats up, steam rises through pipes running from the basement to the first floor and then to the second floor. The pipes for the Adelaide room run through the Marie room. If it gets too warm in a room, the guests can turn down a shut-off valve but the pipe running to the next floor continues to offer heat. The guests in the Marie room had done that very thing—turned down their valve when the room was comfortable. Following this, they went to bed.
In the Adelaide room above them, the heat kept cranking out until the room was over 80 degrees. The guests in the Adelaide room said, the next morning, that no matter what they did, the heat just kept pouring out of the radiator. Eventually they opened a window to help the room cool off. This occurred in the heart of winter. At breakfast we asked the couple in the Marie room if their room was too warm. It wasn’t. Also the steam pipe leading to the Adelaide room was cold when they touched it but the steam radiator in the Adelaide room was hot, an impossibility. The Adelaide couple was moved to the Margaret room and spent the next night restfully. This has never happened since and the couple has never returned.
All in all, the Marie room is spiritually quiet. It is still heated by steam, but the Adelaide room is now heated by a gas fireplace. For us it means that event will never happen again.
There is one event that happened that had us chuckling a bit one morning. We had guests staying in the Adelaide room. They were the only guests we had that night. We live in the Avery house next door and walk over to the Grant house each morning to serve breakfast. That morning was no exception, but on the way over we noticed that one of the cars was missing from the parking lot. As we entered the kitchen we saw a note on the island. The guests had left in the middle of the night. They had heard a man talking, a woman singing, people laughing, etc. The guests wrote that they were too scared to stay and left for home. Our TVs at that time could be programmed to act as alarm clocks, going on at a designated time. I decided to check out the Marie room, and sure enough the TV was on. We felt bad that our guests had experienced such fear, but we also shook our heads at how much fear we can create in our own minds.
In the Amy room, the identical thing happened. We had a wedding at the inn. The bride and groom slept in the Amy room and immediate family members filled the rest of the rooms. At 2:00 a.m. the Amy room TV blasted on. It was an old George Raft gangster movie. At breakfast the next morning, the family said they all woke up to a man yelling, “I’m going to kill you!” They all thought that the newlyweds had had a terrible argument. I am glad to say that we no longer have those TVs.