Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 1 9 68 GHOSTS GHOSTS OLD FAITHFUL INN worst. ere was the young woman, sprawled in the bathtub, drenched in blood. She had been decapitated. Staff members frantically searched the room, but her head was nowhere to be found. Days later, guests began to complain of a foul odor in the hotel. It seemed to be coming from the crow's nest, high up near the ceiling of the lobby. Someone was sent up to the tiny platform to take a look, and to his horror, there lay the young woman's severed head. Old Faithful Inn tour guides are reluctant to tell the story, but suggestible guests of the venerable hotel who have heard the tale still occasionally claim to see the figure of a young woman in a bridal dress drifting around the place, carrying her head under her arm like a halfback cradling a football. It's a grisly story, probably the most well-known tale of murder told in Yellowstone Park. And it's total claptrap. Every word of it. George Bornemann, then an assistant manager of the Old Faithful complex, told the Deseret News in a 1991 interview that he'd been closing up the inn for the season one winter night with only one other staff member in the building. While lying in his room, reading, he heard someone running down the hall just outside his door. He looked out into the hall a couple of times but saw nothing. At midnight he left his room and walked to the balcony that overlooks the lobby. at's when he looked up and saw a figure on the stairs. It was there for a few moments, he said, and then it vanished. Later, after moving back to his home in Missoula, he told a coworker from the inn that he'd learned that a woman had been murdered in the hotel in 1915, in Room 127. She'd been found in the bathtub in her wedding dress, missing her head. ere is no legitimate record of a murder being committed at the Old Faithful Inn in 1915. Bornemann had been telling the story since 1983, which is when he made up the whole thing. He actually had heard some phantom footsteps in the hallway, he said, and that gave him the idea for the horror story, which he cooked up as a way to give the inn some mystique. Like many legends that are repeated through the years, this one has taken on a life of its own. The Crow's Nest inside Old Faithful Inn IN MOST OF THESE ACCOUNTS, SHE IS HOLDING HER DECAPITATED HEAD UNDER HER ARM. Eat a delicious meal and go to the Crow's Nest www.distinctlymontana.com/inn194 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL

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