Strange Guests at the 'Ghost Hotel'

Hair raising noises in the dead of night...bone-chilling apparitions and ectoplasmic manifestations"...tall part of a "spectral vortex"...at Augusta County's "Ghost Hotel." This is how Waynesboro News-Virginian reporter Charles Culbertson described the 240-year-old brick mansion west of Staunton owned by Bill and Marie Easton.

It is not so much that over a period of several years the family experienced extraordinary phenomena, although there was some of that, too. What distinguishes the Easton's home from the "ordinary" haunted house is the frequency of incidents, and the number of spectral beings that have caused them. As Culbertson noted in a front page article in 1989, the couple and their children had to share their place with a "battalion of noisy, sometimes nasty spirits."

The events began even before the Easton's moved into the house in 1967. A month before they took occupancy, they were moving some furniture and sat down downstairs to take a break. Both Bill and Marie heard footsteps upstairs, in a set pattern; four steps forward, then four back. There was no one else at home. When the footsteps repeated, the couple left for the night. After moving in, this phenomena reoccurred a number of times, but a source for the sounds was never found. One evening Marie heard someone call her name. She walked into the front room and asked Bill what he wanted. He told her he hadn't said a word. On other occasions, it appeared as if the spirits in the house wanted to help keep things cleaned. The dishwasher would start up by itself, and the vacuum cleaner did, too.

In 1972, when the Easton's daughter was two-and-a-half-years old, she told her parents that she had two friends, named Mark and Amy. They were invisible, but the daughter played with them as if they were real. It was at about this time that Marie told a parapsychologist about the strange happenings at her house. He suggested a seance be held to see is he could root out the causes of the ghostly appearances.

A medium was brought in and "made contact" with the spirit of an old Black nanny who was "upset over the death of her young mistress." The mistress apparently had fallen in love with a young man who rode off to fight in the Civil War and never returned. The mistress "grieved" herself to death, and the nanny went to her own grave grieving for the mistress.

Further probing by the medium unveiled that the young man had died in a fierce battle and his "remains were charred beyond recognition. "The soldier's name, the medium said, was Mark and his lover's name was Amy. At that, Bill Easton "bolted out of his chair." Mark and Amy were the names of the imaginary friends of his daughter. "The hair stood up on the back of my neck," he was quoted as saying. "There was no way the medium - or anyone - could have known about my daughters invisible friends, and the odds of coming up with those two particular names were astronomical."

Later in the seance, the medium said the nanny said there were many ghosts in the house. In the weeks and months afterwards, more manifestations surfaced. Once, in the middle of the night, the family was shaken awake by an "enormous crash from downstairs." "This wasn't just a 'bump' in the night," Bill later said. "It sounded like someone took a tray full of dishes and slammed it on the floor." Bill and his teenage son searched "every corner and crevice of the house, but found not even a wine glass was out of place."

Another night, Bill was reading in bed when he heard a single note being played on the piano downstairs. No one in the family was downstairs. He got up and walked to the head of the stairs and listened as the note was played over and over. "I didn't even bother to go downstairs," he said. "I knew I wouldn't find anything, so I just went back to bed."

Most incidents were harmless, though perhaps a little scary. But then one night in the late 1980s, a ghost or ghosts seemed to turn mean. On a bitter winter night, Bill put the family dog in a room in the cellar to shield him from the cold. He locked the door from the inside with a heavy, 18th century sliding bolt. At midnight, the dog started howling uncontrollably, arousing Bill and Marie. Bill took a pistol and walked down to see what was the matter with the dog. When he entered the basement room, he found the sliding bolt had been thrown back, the door was standing open, and the dog had run outside.

He tried to coax the dog back into the house, but it wouldn't come, so Bill rebolted the door and went back to bed. The next morning, when Marie went to the basement to do some laundry, she found the cellar door open again, only this time the bolt had been shattered. "It was smashed to pieces," Bill said. "And this wasn't some flimsy sliding lock you buy at a hardware store. It was a huge, oaken bolt that would have taken an enormous amount of strength to shatter." An investigator from the Augusta County Sheriff's Department said it appeared the lock had been smashed from the inside.

And so it goes on. The guests at the ghost hotel continue their shenanigans. Bill and Marie Easton seem resigned to it. "When you live through 22 years of those things happening, you say 'what else is new?"' says Bill. "It's something we've lived with most of our adult lives, but it hasn't made us feel uncomfortable."