The Bloody Stairs

By Lou Bernard

I get a lot of compliments on my columns. People stop me all the time to tell me how much they enjoy my writing. And many of them add a quick remark: “…Especially when you write about ghosts.”

No matter what historic topic I write about, the haunted stuff is what always gets the most attention. People love that sort of thing.

Well, hang on, because you’re about to get more of it.

I bring this up as a subtle way to talk about my new project at the Ross Library, the teen paranormal club. The plan is to take kids between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, and teach them to investigate the paranormal. This includes ghosts, UFOs, cryptozoology, and other areas. I’ll be teaching them how to do it reliably and scientifically, based on research and evidence.

And you never know; we may get to take a few field trips to do some investigating.

Right now, I’m pulling for the Lockport Hotel.

You’ll never find an actual hotel on the site today. The closest you can come is picking it out on a map from 1869. But it was a haunted place, according to the old stories.

Originally built sometime in the early 1800s, it was owned by a man named F.H. Smith, and taken over by Benjamin Myers about 1844. By the 1850s, Robert M. Hanna had purchased it, and it burned down in 1858.

Not to be stopped, Hanna rebuilt it. It reopened on October 28, 1859, fittingly just before Halloween. It was listed as being four stories high, having three huge saloons, and over fifty rooms. It was open to the public, but catered to the lumbermen as they came through on their rafts.

So now you’re waiting for me to get around to the “haunted” part of this. Which I will, but I have to caution you that up until this point, I have had documentation on all this. This next part, the ghost part, is all old legend; I can’t prove any of it.

According to the stories, there was a lumberman from a distant town who came to Lockport….And never left. Supposedly there was a bar fight one night between the rough raftsmen, and one man ended up dead, bleeding to death on the stairs.

Now, this was over a century before CSI, where David Caruso would slap on his sunglasses and say,”Looks like these raftsmen….Are going up the river.” But they still didn’t want to leave evidence lying around where anyone could find it. So they buried the body somewhere near or under the hotel.

Do NOT go racing out there with a shovel in the middle of the night. Probably this is an old legend, and anyway, if you get caught, the police will immediately know who put this thought in your head.

According to the story, the bloodstain on the stairs stayed. Attempts to clean it off were unsuccessful, and it remained until the place burned down again in 1936. By then, it had been out of business for a while, and it was a ruin that children used to play in…But not after dark.

The property is part of Riverview Park now. It might make an interesting field trip, to go out to the field where a haunted hotel once stood, and do a few tests to see if there are ghosts there.

I’m not only concentrating on ghosts. I’ll be teaching about UFOs, which have also been seen in the county, such as the ones over Farrandsville many years ago. And cryptozoology, the study of unknown creatures…Like the Giwoggle, a werewolf-like monster from the Keating area, or the Kettle Creek monster, a water monster in the Susquehanna about 1890. Clinton County has it all.

And I’ll be passing this information down to the next generation soon. Meetings begin September 12, and I’m still taking applications. If you know a teen who might be interested, have them contact me at the library—570-748-3321, or ross13@rosslibrary.org. It’s going to be a good year.

 

Check Also
Close
Back to top button