Dillinger's Ghost

            John Dillinger’s ghost appeared to me in the Monte Vista Hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona. I wasn’t staying there at the time. I was staying at a motel on Route 66 just outside the old town. I wanted to leave the motel because it smelled like there was a corpse under the floor, rotting. Wandering through the old town, I saw the Monte Vista. When I asked the man at the desk if they had any vacancies, he said ‘Sure. Would you like to look at the rooms?’

Hotel Monte Vista

When I said yes he handed me a key he lifted at random from the wall behind him. I wandered upstairs by myself, along a narrow corridor with golden-yellow walls and no windows. I felt an errie, claustrophobic sensation. Unheimlich. I opened the door to the room. It was decorated in shades of golden-yellows and browns. The mirror had an ornate frame in gold. All very kitsch. I looked in the bathroom, then looked out the window at the view. It was as I turned from the window that I saw Dillinger smile his lop-sided cynical smile at me from the full-length mirror on the wall by the bathroom door. I recognised him as Dillinger immediately. I was familiar with pictures of him.

            I went downstairs and the desk-clerk smiled at me. ‘How d’you like it?’ he asked. ‘Great,’ I said, and checked in for three nights. The three nights were uneventful. I asked the desk-clerk if John Dillinger had ever stayed there. ‘Who?’ he asked. He had no idea who Dillinger was. It was only later that I sat and read the hotel’s brochure which claimed the hotel was haunted, although there was no mention of Dillinger.

Dillinger

According to the brochure, John Wayne was one of the first guests to report a ghost. In the 1940s and 50s, around 100 films were made at nearby locations and the stars stayed at the Monte Vista, including Wayne, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy. A scene from Casablanca was filmed in one of the hotel rooms. Wayne said the ghost that appeared in his room was friendly. In room 210, guests are often said to be woken by a phantom bell-boy knocking on the door, announcing room service. When they open the door there is, of course, no one there. In a room on the fourth floor, people are reported to have seen or felt the presence of two women murdered there in the 1940s, prostitutes who were thrown to their death from a window. There are other ghosts reported to haunt the hotel but no one has ever mentioned seeing the ghost of John Dillinger, probably because there’s no record of him ever having been there. But then Dillinger was known to use aliases. It’s not entirely improbable that Dillinger stayed in the Monte Vista as he certainly travelled through Arizona. In 1934 he was arrested in Tucson, Arizona, from where he was transferred to the Lake County Jail in Crown Point Indiana from which he made his notorious escape with a piece of soap he’d whittled into the shape of a gun and blackened with boot-polish.

           

Not Dillinger

Dillinger might never have been in the Monte Vista Hotel but one bank robber certainly died there. In 1970, three man robbed a bank nearby. One of the men, wounded in a shootout following the robbery, took refuge in the hotel’s bar and died there with a drink before him. Staff are said to hear him say ‘Good morning,’ when they open the bar each day. I can understand people hearing the ghost of a bank robber who died in the hotel’s bar, or who see the ghosts of two prostitutes murdered on the fourth floor, or who hear the knock of a phantom bell-boy who might have worked there for a number of years. But Dillinger? Why should I see Dillinger’s ghost there? Even if he was a guest, however briefly, he died outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. If he should haunt anywhere, shouldn’t it the Biograph, or whatever property occupies the space these days? Perhaps, we take our ghosts with us. Though why I should see John Dillinger’s ghost I have no idea. Up until I saw his ghost, I had no particular interest in him, except for having watched a documentary once in an idle hour. Maybe it’s a random haunting.

            Carl Jung believed there was always a psychic element to hauntings. But that isn’t to say it was all in the mind. People who saw ghosts, he believed, had somehow invested the apparition with psychic energy which allowed it to manifest. No viewer, no ghost. It was a two-way trade. The ghost only revealed itself to the right person, the person who was willing to part with a little energy.

            Why is the Monte Vista such a haunted location? It isn’t a particularly old building, not by 

A room in the Monte Vista

European standards, and was built as recently as 1927. It would be nice to imagine the land it is built on was once an Indian burial ground, an Arizona Overlook, so to speak, but there is no mention of such a history and I’m sure if such had been the case the hotel owners would have advertised the fact. Are some locations more conducive to hauntings than others? If so, is it on account of the location? Does the land itself generate such energies as to make the location a locus of apparitions? Or is it something in the make-up of the building, some quality of the materials from which it was built that can store elements of the past, whether visual or audible, to release them intermittently? I once heard a speculator on the paranormal claim that buildings made of stone with a high slate content are more liable to produce strange sounds than buildings made of other materials. He believed that the slate in the stone could store sound and pointed to the analogy of early records which were made of slate. As the needle on the slate records released the recording, so the contraction of the stone at night when the temperature dropped might be the cause of the errie noises reported in these buildings.  

            I once found myself wandering in Central and South America with a friend. I’ll call him Doc although he wasn’t a doctor but he did have three years medical experience. In his fourth year a dark cloud was seen over campus. He left under it. On one occasion, we arrived at a village in time for a local fiesta and were invited to join in. The event was to take place in an abandoned structure which seemed an unlikely spot for a party. The building inside was gloomy and uninviting. It had been a storage depot for a mining concession which had been abandoned when a more profitable source of ore with easier access had been discovered. But I watched in fascination as the people converted this inauspicious location into a magical area prepared for dancing and feasting. A generator was set up and a thousand wires run off from it to light small bulbs inside coloured bottles. A decoration resembling large streamers of Christmas tinsel was hung all over the walls. On a closer inspection I saw the tinsel was made from pieces of intertwined wire and coloured strips of plastic cut from whatever material the plastic had originally constituted. The band was a sight to see. They looked as if they had been gathered together from some hobo jungle and promised a free drink if they’d put in an appearance. The band numbered seven in total and had the oddest assortment of instruments, all apparently home-made or put together from a patchwork of found and broken instruments. Their clothing, also, didn’t bare much scrutiny. And nor did their faces. To judge by their complexions they spent as much time drinking as they did playing. An occupational hazard, one of the locals told me, because the men would often play for free and, as soon as they arrived, they were offered a drink. Throughout the night of the dance people continually brought them more free drinks until the party finally ended when no more musicians were standing.

The windowless hallways of the Monte Vista 

I wondered what kind of racket might come from their weird assortment of instruments but when they started up the effect was nothing less than miraculous. One man who played a trumpet of sorts also sang and the sound that came out of his mouth would have graced any concert hall in the world. The man had the most misshapen lips I have ever seen – from long years of playing his trumpet, I supposed – and his teeth sprouted from his gums at differing angles and such varying degrees of rottenness that it was a mystery how such a beautiful sound might emerge from such an unpromising source.

Not the Monte Vista

And then the women arrived. They had clearly been at great pains to prettify themselves, wearing their best dresses and blouses which looked very garish in colour and with the colours uncoordinated. They had decorated their dresses with paper flowers and had contorted their hair into various styles. Some had real flowers in their hair.

The power and magic of the fiesta changed everything into a timeless scene. It was a ritual that had perhaps been repeated since the earliest of humans had grouped themselves together. The women looked beautiful, dignified, charming, elegant and poised. The men looked like gentlemen. The band looked like maestros. The disused depot looked like a palace, or more accurately, a fairy-grotto.

The party had been in full swing for some time, everyone chatting, laughing, joking, dancing. Then… something strange happened. I had the bizarre feeling that some presence had manifested itself, that even the air had changed in quality as though some mysterious malevolent power hovered over us like a huge winged beast, crazy as it sounds. The manner of the crowd was suddenly changed. It was as if the happy energy had been drained from the room. People instantly became tired, began to yawn, to stop talking, laughing, dancing. The singer sat down. There was a sense of fatigue and depression about us.

The magic was gone.

The scene revealed itself for what it was. The coloured lamps became, again, coloured bottles with lights in them. The tinsel resumed the look of cheap plastic cut into strips. The band became a tired collection of half-drunk amateurs. The dresses of the women returned to their mis-matched shabby cotton garments with paper flowers attached. The real flowers in their hair wilted and drooped. Their hair fell dishevelled over their tired careworn faces.

I asked Doc if he had noted the change. He nodded. We picked up a bottle of tequila and wandered off to sit outside with one of the old men who, for reasons of his own, had decided not to attend the party. As we sat, we shared our bottle with him.

‘I saw it,’ said the old man.

We both looked at him. The hall, he told us, was a bad place, a haunted place. Un lugar embrujado. Not right for a fiesta. It should have been burned down and nothing taken from it. Not that it was the materials themselves which were bad but the spot where they had been placed. That area had always been an avoided place, he said. When there had been no building on it the animals would not graze there. Nobody placed a shack there and lived in it for more than a few nights. The depot, which had been built at such great expense, closed down after only four months. Doc wondered if it was something in the ground. The old man nodded. In a manner of speaking, he said. But it wasn’t so much the ground. The area was like a doorway, he tried to explain, an entrance were malign forces were concentrated and able to enter this world – whether from above or below... who knew? The old man couldn’t really explain himself further than that.

Doc said he had heard and read of such things before. Some believed that there where areas of energy in the earth and, where these lines of energy crossed, varying affects were experienced. Some claimed they could be areas of great healing which is why many standing stones are found at such spots. It is often discovered that a Christian holy place, such as St Paul's Cathedral in London, has been built on the site of a pagan temple, and that temple built on the spot of a spring or stone which had always been considered sacred and of beneficial power. But the opposite can also be the case. That an area can have a malign influence, that things are seen and felt at such spots which have a great difficulty in revealing themselves elsewhere. Some areas seem to give energy, while other areas seem to take it.

But what happened that night?

Perhaps some force which might be interpreted as an entity which feeds on energy drained the energy from the fiesta. Everyone has known of people capable of such a thing. There is a warm gathering in a pub, a home, anywhere people are mixing freely, chatting, drinking, laughing, and then... some person joins them. The mood is gone. The atmosphere entirely changed. That person has drained all vitality from the room as a vampire drains the vitality from its victim. Perhaps we experienced such a thing that night only on a grander scale. Or perhaps, Doc speculated sometime after, the negative energy of the area allowed for the coalescence of the dark side of human nature, that the area where the fiesta took place, due to its underground currents of energy or energy absorption, facilitated a materialisation of the dark thoughts of the crowd – lethargy, despair, depression, disillusionment, pessimism. Doc firmly believes that some areas – for whatever reason – hold such malign influence, just as other areas hold a benign influence, and just because we can’t measure such things with instruments is no more proof that they don’t exist than a claim that microbes didn’t exist before the microscope.

The next morning, I woke with a ferocious hangover to the sound of a great commotion. The disused depot where the party had been held was on fire. No one was making much of an effort to put the fire out. I saw Doc sitting by the old man we had spoken to, sharing a smoke and a drink. They had been up all night and both had a smile on their drunken faces like a pair of... like a pair of happy arsonists, perhaps.

            Is it possible that the site of the Monte Vista is such a spot as the South American depot but on a lesser scale? Or again, perhaps John Wayne suggested the ghost story to the management as a marketing ploy.