The Haunting of Goldfield

The Haunting of Goldfield

The Cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. The local park ranger Bernard Chester couldn’t believe it. He had driven down this path for several years and had not ever seen anything going on in there. Now, he sees a candle. He had to admit to himself that he was freaked out by it. He did not want to go anywhere near that cabin. Of course, he never did. That cabin had always given him the creeps! It was old and it was very run-down. Nobody had lived there for nearly thirty years, and, to his knowledge, nobody had stepped foot in there for just as long. The people who owned it had just abandoned it one day. They left and were never seen again. Nobody seemed to know why. Bernard had his suspicions, but he had always kept them to himself. He didn’t want to scare the townspeople.

And tonight, there was this candle burning in the window! As much as he did not want to go check it out, he had to. He was the local park ranger, after all. So, he pulled his truck up, into the driveway. Then, he got out of his truck and walked up to the old, rotting door of the creepy old building. A part of him was petrified, especially since it was especially dark. Daylight savings time had just started, and it was especially cold this year. The owl howling nearby didn’t help matters, either. He had always hated the sound of owls. It was one of the creepiest sounds to him. What made it worse was that the tree right next to the cabin had bats in it, he could tell. That was another creature that had always given him the creeps. He thought they were interesting, but they sure freaked him out. “Between the bats, the owl, the mysterious candle, and the dark and cold, this was shaping up to be the worst possible night to be out here,” he thought to himself.

When he got up to the stairs and walked across the patio, he noticed another strange thing. The window that was part of the door had been broken and the door was slightly open. “Who would want to break in here?” he thought to himself. He braced himself for whatever he might walk into and entered the cabin. The place was just as creepy as he had always imagined it would be. Dust and spiderwebs were everywhere! The Furniture was old and outdated. The smell of mold permeated the air. It just had a feeling of… “abandonment” to it. Of course, why wouldn’t it when it had been abandoned? Then he heard a noise and thought he saw a shadow over by the window where he’d seen the candle burning. “Who’s there?” he asked. There was no answer. He slid his sidearm from its holster and walked slowly toward the window. Once he got there, he saw a young man, in his late 20’s to early 30’s sitting on the floor, pressed against the wall. Once he saw how scared the man looked, his own fear melted away. This poor guy had more fear in his eyes, than Bernard had ever seen.

“What’s your name?” Bernard asked him. The man just sat there, as if frozen in a trance. Bernard repeated the question, but the boy’s trance was unbroken. Bernard looked around and noticed a wallet on the floor. He picked it up and saw the boy’s picture on the ID and learned that his name was John. He also noticed that there was a business card in there. John was from a reality TV show he’d heard of once or twice called Scare Seekers. “You must have just come from Goldfield” Bernard said, Knowing the proximity of the hotel to their current location. The Goldfield Hotel was only a couple of miles up the road from where they were, and the more he thought about it, the more it made sense: Someone who had gone inside that place would have come out of there like the devil himself was behind him! Once they’d made it out, they’d look for the first shelter possible to hide in! John, here must’ve come tearing outta that hotel, found this old cabin, and even though it’s the creepiest place Bernard knows of, John must’ve seen it as the sweetest, safest sanctuary he’d seen since his very own room, back at his momma’s house, when he was just a tot! the young man continued to look at him with that scared, frozen look on his face.

“Your crew went into the old Goldfield Hotel, didn’t You?” he asked. John only continued to stare, wild-eyed, as if trying to make sense of what he had seen. Bernard waited a few moments, then got hopeful when John started to work his jaw, but then was disappointed when he stopped without saying anything. When John didn’t say anything. He decided to give it one last try. “Look, kid; I can see you’re scared, but I’ve got stuff to do and a patrol to run. Looks like everything’s all right. I’m gonna get moving if there’s nothing you’ve got to add, or you don’t need anything. Sorry you got yourself freaked, but that’s what happens when you go poking around haunted hotels.” With that, Bernard snapped his fingers a couple of times in front of John’s face and called, “You hear me?” and headed for the door. That’s when John started talking.

“I have never been through anything like that in my entire life” John said. Bernard turned back around. “What happened? Did you see a ghost” Bernard asked? John looked at him, still petrified. “YES!” he said. “Figured! Everybody around here has heard the legend of The Goldfield hotel. Tell me what all happened” Bernard said, then walked over and sat down in one of the dusty chairs.

John then started telling Bernard how about a month ago he and one of his colleagues from the show had been in John’s office trying to think of a new idea for the show. They had already covered Bigfoot in the woods, the sea monster Chessie from Chesapeake Bay, aliens around Area 51, etc. They felt like they had run out of ideas. That is until John had noticed a pamphlet on disk that somebody had put there. He assumed it was his secretary. The pamphlet was to Goldfield, Nevada. John’s eyes had opened wide when he had seen this. “I’ve heard of this place! This place has a haunted hotel!” he informed his colleague. He brought up some links on the Internet, along with images and videos to drive the point home and his teammates got really excited about it. John recounted how they had realized, somewhere along the line that none of them had any idea where that pamphlet came from, but they were sure glad it had turned up on their desk. They knew what was going to be their next topic and where they were headed!

“You didn’t think it was strange that this pamphlet just appeared on your desk out of the clear blue like that?” Bernard asked. “Maybe I should have, especially since nobody on my crew seemed to know anything about it, but I was just so excited about my new assignment that I really didn’t put much thought into it” John said. Bernard just nodded his head, as if he were annoyed, but he tried to get past it. “What happened next?” Bernard asked. “I spent the next month with my crew, preparing for our trip to Goldfield and the story we were going to do on it. Finally, the day arrived for us to go there. We put our camera equipment, along with our camping gear, and our portable grill and food all in the vans, then got on the road and headed out here”.

Bernard glanced at his watch. He did have a patrol to run, but this was important. And he wanted to hear more. Once he finally got John to speak, it was like tumbling down a rabbit hole! He didn’t put much stock in those reality TV shows, but he had, after all been to some pretty scary places, and if he was this shook, well, there had to be something to it! He was still staring at the far wall, as if remembering something that had happened a long, long time ago. His mouth hung open between his sentences, as he wasn’t aware or just no-longer cared about such things as the dust and mold that was floating through the air around them. After a couple of breaths, John continued:

When the vans pulled up in front of the hotel and they all got out and looked at it, everybody seemed got get chills up their spines. “Why didn’t you turn around and leave right then?” Bernard asked. “Why would we have done that when we had just made that long journey?” John countered. Again, Bernard seemed annoyed, however he still wanted to hear more of the story. “So, what happened, everybody got out of the van?” Bernard asked. “Most of us went inside the hotel, while a few stayed outside and set up the grill and got ready to prepare food. Half of the team that went inside the hotel decided to go upstairs, while the other half stayed downstairs. Something we noticed before we split up that kind of freaked us out was the fact that the hotel just reeked of cigar smoke, yet nobody had been in there” John said. “The Legend is that is George Wingfield, the owner of The Goldfield Hotel, who died in 1959, still haunts the hotel” Bernard informed him. “Well, whatever that was,” John continued, “the smell was just terrible. I tried to get past it, by taking my crew upstairs. The first freaky thing that happened to me was while I was walking up the stairs, I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, nobody was there! Then, I could hear laughing! How could I have heard that when nothing was there?” John asked. “That is supposed to be the ghosts of three children, who like to do just that. Sneak up behind people and tap them, then disappear and laugh!” Bernard answered dryly, recalling the legends he’d heard about the hotel throughout the years. “Well, whatever it was, it scared the daylights out of me! So much that I just about turned around and left right then! I knew that everybody else would be disappointed if I did, so I tried to forget it and just kept walking up the stairs. The next thing to happen was when we reached the first floor. We had gone and opened all the doors to the hotel rooms to check them out-you know-make sure no one else was around, waiting to jump us, or anything. There weren’t any problems with the first eight rooms. It wasn’t until we got to 109 when the trouble started, really.” Bernard listened patiently as John took a breath and paused to steel himself before continuing. “When we opened that room, it was ice cold. Even worse than the other ones. Steve, the cameraman was fumbling with some equipment when his phone slid out of his jacket pocket, and he kicked it into the room by accident while standing in the doorway and trying to set up a shot. After a full five beats had gone by, something threw that phone back OUT at us!” John’s eyes went wide as he recounted this. Bernard could tell that this kid wasn’t making it up-either what he was saying had really happened or at the very least, he believed it happened. “Whatever parlor tricks they’re playing, up there in Goldfield, they’re good,” Bernard thought to himself! John asked if Bernard had anything to drink and Bernard apologized. He hadn’t brought any water with him, tonight. After another couple of moments, John swallowed again and then continued: “When we tried replaying the footage from the camera that Steve had set up, there was nothing there. The camera was just pitch black. Why had none of the stuff that was in that room shown up on camera? At this, Bernard raised his eyebrows. “What stuff?” he asked. “We looked up and saw a lady wearing white with long hair floating around” John said. “That sounds like Elizabeth, the girlfriend of George Wingfield, who was pregnant with his child. Legend has it that since he was already married, he imprisoned her in that room, as he didn’t want a scandal, until she died. Nobody knows for certain how she died. Some say it was childbirth that took her life. Others say he killed her. Whatever the truth is, her ghost still haunts the hotel to this day…” His voice trailed off, as if Bernard were trying to remember any other details he’d forgotten. Then he blinked back to the present, all-of-a-sudden: “By the way, your equipment isn’t broken. Legend has it that no images of room 109 ever show up in any type of photography.

What happened once you saw the ghost?” asked Bernard.

“She floated up to us and showed us her face, then screamed” John said. “Oh, my! That must have been frightful!” Bernard remarked. “It was!” John replied. “We ran out of there as fast as we could! We even left our equipment there! While this was happening, our crew who had stayed downstairs ran into a situation a situation of their own. They went to the main dining room and saw a man there. They kept trying to get his attention, calling, ‘Sir?’ ‘Sir?’. He finally turned around and when he did, he came at them with a huge kitchen knife and started stabbing it at them, then he disappeared. Even though he just vanished, they could still feel the pain and see all the blood” John said. Bernard nodded his head knowingly. “that’s The Stabber. He does that. Crawls up on people and tries to stab them. I have never actually heard of him harming anybody though. He usually just pulls the knife on them, then vanishes. This is the first I have ever heard of anybody getting hurt by him” Bernard said. “Well, he did hurt someone this time. He hurt a group of people,” said John. Bernard was just dumbfounded. He didn’t even know how that was possible. “What happened next?” he asked. “They all got out of there as fast as they could, as did my group. None of that was even the worst part, though”. Bernard couldn’t believe it. “What could be worse than any of those things you had already been through?” he asked, very curious, now. “While my crew was being scared by Elizabeth and the other crew was being attacked by The Stabber, the crew outside that was making lunch had their own encounter with a demon” John said. “What?” asked Bernard. He was really starting to get scared, now! “My friend and colleague Rocky had turned on the portable gas grill. When the temperature was right, he turned around to get the meat. Just as he was about to put the meat on the grill, a pair of hands came out from the grill and pulled his face down on it and held him there while his face cooked to a nice, crisp, well-done!”. Bernard started shaking at hearing that. “Can you explain that?” asked John. “Well underneath The Goldfield Hotel is supposedly a portal to one of the seven gates of Hell “said Bernard, visibly shaking, now. “Apparently, it is! A demon attacked my friend. That still is not even the worst part of it! Bernard was still trying to get his mind around the image of a demon pulling a man’s face onto the grill from inside the grill! He took a breath and looked at John, not really wanting him to continue, but he stayed silent, waiting to hear what came next. Their eyes met and it was if John’s were asking permission before he went on. Bernard really didn’t want to hear it, but he knew John had to say it for his own sanity. This was a cleansing process for him. Before he knew he was doing it, he nodded his silent approval and john went on. “My crew got in the van and drove out of there, leaving everything, including me behind” John said. “WHY, why would they do that? Asked Bernard. “Because there was a force that was pulling me back into the hotel,” John revealed. I’m glad they got away! If they hadn’t, it might’ve gotten ahold of them, too! And then, I would’ve been stuck, trying to free them! I have no idea how I escaped it, but I did. I just started running and running, even though my body physically hurt, until I ended up here” he said. “Well, I’m glad you made it out in one piece!” Bernard said and meant it. John looked at him and said, “Just curious, how do you know so much about that hotel?” Bernard looked at him for a moment before answering. “Because I grew up in Goldfield. I’ve known seen many people stupid enough go into that hotel and come out frightened, because they ran into Elizabeth, The Stabber, the 3 children on the stairs, or the two ghosts that roam the third floor, or heard moaning sounds that sound like it was coming from the underworld. When I became a young adult, I tried to warn all these thrill seekers to stay out of that place, but they never listened to me. So, I left Goldfield and came here to the forest. I wanted to get away from all that drama” Bernard said. Just then, the flame burning on the candle began to burn blue. Bernard’s eyes went wide, and the color flushed from his cheeks. John noticed the change in the older man’s demeanor and asked what was wrong.

” That happens when there is a ghost present!” Bernard screamed and got up and ran out of that cabin as fast as he could. As he got in the truck and drove away, he could hear John yelling “Let go of me!”. That was what he thought had happened to the original owners. They were stupid and went hunting for ghosts in The Goldfield Hotel, the ghosts followed them home and took them. Well, just like the original owners of the cabin, John was never seen or heard from again.