Distinctly Montana Magazine

63 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m ade building left fallow for a time. Stuck here on this side of the Great Beyond, we can only speculate as to whether the Hotel Meade's ghosts enjoyed their brief solitude. In 1961, Bannack was made a National Historic Site and some of her buildings made sturdy enough to stand. One of those was the Hotel Meade, and now thousands of people walk through its doors a year. Definitely more, and most probably much more than walked through its doors when it was an operational hotel. Dorothy, in short, has more company than ever. If it is true, as has been alleged of some of the other ghosts on this list, that all "they" really want is to be left alone, then poor Dorothy has a rough go of it. Let's hope, then, that Dorothy ap- preciates the company. And maybe, if you believe the experiences of folks who write on the internet, she's busier than ever. An anonymous poster on Ellen Baumler's blog about Dorothy wrote, "I was hurrying down to the creek to try to get a picture of an elk and as I was trying to look past some of the bushes at the creeks [sic] edge I heard a female voice say 'I wouldn't go any farther if I was you...'" The person "stopped and looked around," but "there was no one there. Later I Googled Bannack and found out about Dorothy, I think it was her warning me as the water was high and moving quickly." Is Dorothy warning the incautious away from a fate like hers? If so, she's not only a ghost, but a saint. But one anonymous and semi-coherent post on the same web- site suggests a less beneficent Dorothy. We will reprint it, typos and all, as its own warning to the unwary: "i went to bannock i got many pics of dorthoy she came after me and my friends when your there take a pic of the closet" THE METLEN HOTEL DILLON, MT CLOSED TO GUESTS WHILE UNDER PAINSTAKING RENOVATION You can't stay at the Metlen just now. Or rather, we should say "yet." You could in 1897 when it was built to replace a tent hotel that had followed the railroad camps, going as far as Utah before return- ing to Dillon. After that more temporary structure burned down, a local business owner named Joseph Custer Metlen constructed the Metlen for $30,000. As such, the hotel was rather overconstruct- ed, says current owner Lee Bryant. It was almost certainly the first building in town to have hot and cold running water, along with an intercom system, electric lights, a cast-iron boiler and myriad steam radiators. The walls are thicker than they need to be, resulting in superior insulation to this day. Thankfully, that dogged devotion to sturdy engineering is the biggest part of why the building survives to terrify us today. Bryant is slowly restoring the building where possible, and replacing the bits he can't. He's making great prog- ress, too, but none of the rooms are ready to receive customers yet. Lee is a general contractor from Hawaii who first saw the hotel with his wife and two daughters when one of his daugh- ters was accepted into University of Montana Western. Now she's getting a master's in geol- ogy from Montana Tech and the rest of the family has moved to Dillon. He's spent years restoring old buildings, and at 65 years old, as he says, this one is his "last project." But what a project it is. So while you may not be able to spend the night there (yet), you can go to either of its bars and have a drink. At one of them, you can even dance, as do many of University of Montana Western's students, who flock to the Metlen Hotel Bar for the nightlife. The evening tends to begin with country-western and end with hip- hop. Sometimes they get more than they bargained for and see something unexpected, and unexplainable—the form of a young woman, not of this century, materializing on the dance floor. That's only the ground floor. The second floor is worse, sup- posedly haunted by the spirit of Gus, a one-time train robber who commited suicide by pistol while hopped up on pharma- ceutical-grade cocaine. Bryant finds himself addressing Gus in case it helps settle the spirit down. "Coming up, Gus," he'll say as he climbs the stairs, or "good- night, Gus," as he locks up for the night. That's to say nothing of the basement, so scary that it served, last Halloween, as a community "haunted house." The unexpect- ed presence of an animated werewolf statue (which happened to startle this author) is hardly the most frightening part of a large, winding basement with many dark and echoey corners. But then there's the third floor, previously locked up to the public for decades. If you believe the story told to Zac Bagans on the season 13 episode of Ghost Adventures about the Metlen, the third floor demonstrated so much supernatural activity at such a high intensity that it was closed for the safety of the public. And while we believe that, we would add that keeping those aforemen- tioned college students out may also have been a factor. Yet even the skeptical will probably admit that the third floor gives them the authentic creeps. Lee reports hearing boots scraping on the floors, and finding things inexplicably moved from where he left them. But for Lee, the strangest thing was when he found elk steaks strewn about downstairs. He went downstairs and had just checked the freezer a couple of minutes before when, suddenly and without explanation, he discovered a solitary elk steak on the hallway floor. Then anoth- er here. Another couple there. It was six or eight elk steaks all told, and Lee still can't figure out who, or what, is responsible for moving them. Even so, he doesn't feel the hotel's noncorporeal guests are unfriendly. Frightening? Maybe a little. But none of them have ever been anything but neighborly to him. THE METLEN HOTEL SOME VISITORS HAVE REPORTED SPECTRAL HANDS GRABBING AT THEM, OR FEELING AS IF THEY WERE BITTEN. SOME HAVE DISCOVERED UNEXPLAINED SCRATCH MARKS ON THEIR SKIN. AUGUST MILLARD

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