Distinctly Montana Magazine

62 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 4 W HY ARE HOTELS, ESPECIALLY MON- TANA HOTELS, so haunted? Is it because hotels, by their nature short-term, are analogs for the myster- ies of life—which is to say we can't be sure how long we're staying, but we know it's only temporary? Or is it because so many of the human passions are spent at hotels? Love, hope, fear, desperation—is it possible those po- tent affections sink into the walls of our abodes and wait to be uncovered by some visitor with sensitive enough antennae? And, arguably strangest of all, why do we enjoy staying at haunted hotels so much? What is so attractive to us about a brush with quietus interruptus? Do we yearn for proof of life beyond death—even if that so-called "life" is melancholically wandering the corridors of a temporary homestay? Maybe it's not so complicated; maybe some simply like it spooky. For them, then, we present a trio of southwest Mon- tana's most haunted hotels. One is open for business, one aims to open sometime soon, and one is definitively closed to guests, but all three are, if you believe the stories, lousy with ghosts. HOTEL MEADE BANNACK, MT CLOSED TO GUESTS FOREVER Bannack's Hotel Meade began "life" as the court- house for Beaverhead Coun- ty. When the courthouse was moved to Dillon, however, the building was purchased by the enterprising Dr. John Singleton Meade, who de- cided to turn the large, well-constructed building into a luxurious hotel. The Meade's most iconic ghost tale sadly involves the death of a child in 1916. A group of three girls including six- teen-year-old Dorothy Dunn decided, one day, to go for a dip in the local dredge pond. They took a misstep and tumbled into deceptively deep water. None of them could swim. A nearby twelve-year-old boy named Smith Paddock struggled to free the girls, first pull- ing out one, and then another as Dorothy struggled to keep her head above water. But sadly, as the Butte Miner reported at the time, "life was extinct in the body of Dorothy Dunn when it was finally brought to the shore." Bertie Mathews was Dorothy's best friend and the daughter of the folks who ran the hotel at that time. Whether she was mad with grief and therefore given to hallucinations, or genuinely in touch with the specter of her boon companion, things would get spooky for poor Bertie. Just days after Dorothy's death, Bertie saw her in a top-floor window of the hotel wearing a long blue dress that Bertie recognized as her friend's. According to the late great Ellen Baumler, chronicler of Montana's ghost stories as well as an important historian, Bertie didn't like to talk about her vision of Dorothy, finding it too troubling to recount. Now people, mostly children, have been seeing Dorothy ever since. She'll appear in the window and look down, or the sound of a young female voice laughing will be heard. Sometimes cold spots are reported. Sometimes, according to ghost hunters, a bit of her is captured in pho- tographs, usually the blue of her dress or a glimpse of her hair. Bannack, despite being so important in the early years of Montana's territorial history, would begin to fade as other, larger commu- nities grew. Finally in the 1940s, Bannack was abandoned for good, and the Hotel Me- T H E H A U NT E D H O T E L S T H E H A U NT E D H O T E L S O F O F M O N T A N A M O N T A N A article and photos by SHERMAN CAHILL HOTEL MEADE

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