If you’ve ever visited Glacier National Park, you’ll know that this place combines breathtaking beauty with a harsh natural environment. Weather can shift anytime, from warm to bitter cold extremes. Perched on a rocky ledge above Swiftcurrent Lake, the Many Glacier Hotel has survived over 100 years of fire, floods, and storm damage. From its start as a rough sawmill site to a classic alpine-style retreat, the Many Glacier Hotel has both a colorful décor and history. According to many visitors, it’s also packed to the rafters with ghostly guests.
The History
Like many places in the Old West, the area surrounding the Many Glacier Hotel had its start with rugged workmen camps. As towns, families, and law and order sprang up, railroad companies like the Great Northern Railway began to promote places with stunning natural scenery as tourist destinations. With glacier fields, northern light views, wildlife such as bears, deer, moose, elk, and mountain goats, glowing purple rocks, and colorful pebbles scattered on Lake McDonald’s shores, the modern 1,583-square-mile wilderness became a protected national park in 1910.
In just a year, the Great Northern Railway Company built the Many Glacier Hotel. Completed in 1915, the hotel gained a reputation as the “Alps of America”. Created like a Swiss chalet, the hotel featured heavy rustic beams with an eclectic mix of rugged American western style, Swiss décor details like external wooden details, and Japanese inspiration. West and East met in an exotic clash of décor. Bearskins lay on the hotel lobby floors, while bison skulls stared down from the railings overlooking western landscape paintings. Airy Japanese lanterns floated from the ceiling above a double-helix-shaped staircase. The design blends reminded visitors that the Great Northern Railway also had ships to ferry travelers to Japan and other Far East countries. Today, you can still visit the hotel. Recent renovations have rebuilt the old double-helix staircase, taken out in 1957, and created new overhead lights that evoke the Japanese lanterns that hung in the hotel until the 1930s.
The Haunting
With a spirit that combined elegance and Wild West travel, the Many Glacier Hotel saw a stream of American and foreign visitors pass through its doors. According to rumors, some of these guests never left the hotel. A small boy felt shocked to find a strange woman wearing a red dress standing in his room. When he caught sight of her, she disappeared. Even hotel caretakers admit that there’s a mystical quality to the place. Steve Lautenbach, who worked for years as a winter caretaker at the hotel, reported that the place “talks to you . . . you have to respect it.” Some think that the creaks, groans, and thuds are just the sounds of an old building shifting and settling. Others claim that paranormal oddities haunt the place, passed down by oral tradition. Several times, a security man and a night auditor have spotted a woman dressed in old-fashioned clothes staring out the windows in the lobby that exit to the veranda overlooking the lake.
Guests report hearing rising voices from an arguing couple on one balcony. When they look out to investigate, there’s no one there. Another night auditor felt ghostly fingers running though her hair as she sat on duty one night. Even more chilling, one historian and folklorist reported smelling a “ghastly”, unexplained smell in Room 2A. Later that night, she heard a gunshot that no one else heard. Are they just spooky stories, or does something really roam the Many Glacier Hotel at night?
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