A twitch of the hair, a tap on the shoulder, laughter in the distance: all these paranormal happenings are said to have occurred multiple times at the Hotel San Carlos in downtown Phoenix. Since the late 1920s, the San Carlos remains rife with a history of classic celebrities who stayed there and multiple suicides that occurred.
But you can hear those stories and more when you visit for a ghost tour. What you can’t hear is my story. The experience for me at a San Carlos ghost tour neither exemplifies the demons and door-slams of the “Paranormal Activity” movies nor accounts rash, unbelieving skepticism. I lie somewhere between the realm of believing in the slightest twitch of my hair and scoffing at the loudest inexplicable laughter. Last Friday, I went on the ghost tour with a friend and realized that the most interesting aspect of a ghost story is not the ghosts themselves, real or not, but the people who interpret them, including myself.
When the tour started, our guide, Julia Fordtner, asked everyone to remain quiet and observant. A few minutes later, as we walked down the hall and heard a chorus of wailing “Whoooooooooooos” from the back of the group, Fordtner stopped the procession to ban any further “Whoooooos” or popping out to frighten a friend.
“It’s a little more quiet, it’s more mature, it’s not people jumping out at you and it’s not sitting around carving pumpkins,” Fordtner later said. This tour is for grown-ups.
We entered out first destination — the basement — and I felt … nothing. Though it exemplified the qualities of a creepy place: concrete walls, shelves for knocking over, ominous fluorescent lights and a story about some ghostly Phoenix children, I could not vibe a spookiness.
My friend and I, the youngest on the tour, related most to the child ghosts said to play in the basement. But not young enough, apparently. But here enters the first debate, where my human perception questions a strange occurrence. The tour guide asked us to check the battery levels of our cameras before the tour. Fordtner said cameras often die at full battery levels or randomly turn off during the tour. Mine measured at two bars. Once we reached the basement, our first destination, the battery read one bar and flashing near death. Conflicting thoughts fluttered through my head. I first grew excited — spirits had drained my battery! But my camera also could have been approaching one-bar levels; perhaps I merely used this drainage as an excuse to encounter ghosts.
The uncertainty of my battery leaves me with one realization about myself — I want to believe, but I don’t want to look stupid. Some people during the tour excitedly claimed “my camera is acting really weird,” but the faulty functioning may attribute more to their lackluster point-and-shoot than an actual encounter with spirits. Regardless, my camera died soon after.
The next internal debate — ghost or no ghost — occurred upon the scent of strawberries. On the seventh floor of the San Carlos, as our tour guide discussed a female ghost, I smelled something: light, airy, fresh. I almost commented on the delicious smell, but did not want to interrupt Fordtner's story. About a minute later, Fordtner said that the female ghost wore strawberry perfume, which people could catch a whiff of. I asked the people standing near me if they wore perfume or cologne that evening. They didn’t.
Perhaps I smelled someone’s shampoo or laundry detergent, or perhaps I smelled a ghost. The internal debate rages on.
The last oddity that I felt on the tour did not manifest in any physical form. It was merely a feeling. As my friend and I explored a dark room of the manager’s apartment on the second floor, my heart rate increased: I felt something. The room echoed with our footsteps, interlaced with my paranoia, the darkness obscured a sense of well-being. Right before, Fordtner told us about a man on a former tour whose leg was scratched by inhuman claws in three places and bleeding when he emerged from the bathroom connected to the apartment. Were these stories and my imagination playing tricks, subconsciously adding a presence to the room, or did the source originate from something otherworldly?
Another tour guide, Joe Atredies, said he wants the experience to be as genuine as possible.
“I want to try and disprove anything they show me or experience, because there’s gonna be a time, and it happens about 20 percent of the time, that I can’t do it,” Atredies said.
The ghost wranglers do not want their ghost tours to be a circle of kids sitting around a fireplace, nor do they want criticize and find no fun in the adventure. A ghost tour at the San Carlos is not about ghosts – but people – dead, living or somewhere in the blur of mind and reality.
Contact the reporter at harmony.huskinson@asu.edu
