Early morning
sun blazed a piercing spotlight through the expansive glass entrance as I my
head snapped painfully up from my deadened arms. My bleary eyes slammed shut
again and my arms; alive with the maddening tingles of receding numbness, were
momentarily unwilling to so much as wiggle until the tiny travel alarm I kept
beside the switchboard started buzzing. Great, it was time to make the morning
wake-up calls and I really didn’t feel like doing so myself.
I hustled
into the tiny kitchen behind the lobby desk to turn on a pot of coffee and
discovered that Lydia must have already done so, for a freshly brewed pot
awaited my most grateful indulgence. As I sat back at my desk, a steaming cup
of caffeine in hand, the swish of the lobby door let in the refreshing scent of
morning and I looked up to greet whomever had entered. But no one had.
These things
happened at the Santa Rita.
When I took
the job as overnight concierge they hadn’t said it would be easy. They said it
would be interesting. And that it
was. I think it’s what kept me spending every Friday and Saturday night there
for my last five months of high school.
I’d made two
successful wake-up calls (by that I mean the guests hadn’t spewed obscenities
at me for granting their request to be awakened, or angrily hung up) when the
tantalizing aroma of molasses drifted past.
“Mornin’, Jonesy!” I called to the night janitor/watchman.
“Mornin’, Ma’am,”
he answered around an ever-present pipe, as he pushed an enormous dust mop
across the gleaming lobby floor and I giggled. It tickled me that he called me
that.
Elderly and
quite sprite, Jonesy had worked at the Santa Rita more than thirty years and
had told me all about the signs, as
he called them. Though Lydia always scurried from the room, I hung around and listened,
spellbound, when he’d speak in a voice as smooth and rich as the smell of his tobacco.
“Lydia’s got
coffee on already,” I told him and he stopped in his tracks and cocked his
head.
He stepped
up to the counter and winked a sea-green eye “Ah, I expect she’s running late
today, Ma’am. I ain’t seen her.” He
tipped his grey fedora and resumed his dust-mopping.
“You’re kidding, right?”
He came
around the counter and picked up my empty cup “No, Ma’am.” He said before
shuffling into the kitchen. I stared at the silent switchboard as he got
himself a cup of coffee and refilled mine. He knew just how I liked it.
“Maybe I
sleep-walked and turned it on myself” I mused. I’d set it up for the morning
when I’d started my shift the night before, so that had to be what happened.
Jonesy
leaned against the wall, looking much like Morgan Freeman did in the The Bucket List
and took a sip, “Maybe.” He shrugged
These things
happened at the Santa Rita.
Over time,
Jonesy told me about the signs, eight in all, that were what he considered
proof that the building was inhabited by disquieted spirits (are they ever not disquieted?). I thought he had a
real convincing list of reasons.
After a nine year old
had been seen swimming in the pool all day, he was found inexplicably drowned
at the bottom, early the next morning. His parents; awakened from a long night
of drinking, had not been aware of his whereabouts and promptly went to the
roof together and jumped, landing just feet from where their son was pulled
from the pool.
Several years later a
prominent businessman celebrating his thirteenth wedding anniversary shot his wife
to death after an argument and called room service for another bucket of ice
before hanging himself in the elevator shaft.
It was a few years
after that when three young men, in town for (this one still gives
me chills) a U of A
seminar on Native Americans, were all found dead in their rooms from “apparent
sudden heart attacks”.
Not long
after I worked there the building was razed and word got out that the Santa
Rita Hotel had been built over an ancient Indian burial ground. I don’t know if
Jonesy ever knew how right he probably was. I hope so.
Have you ever or would you ever work at a haunted place?