DEAR EDITOR

Ruby Still Roils Bisbee Dreamers, Especially on This Day of the Dead

SOMETHING WOKE ME. I struggled up out of the open pit of sleep, brushing away the cobwebs of a dream to sit up in bed in the darkness in the Oliver House, a 100-year-old bed and breakfast perched on a hillside in Bisbee.

"What was that?" I asked, disoriented by the strange surroundings.

"Someone yelling down in the street," my wife, Elissa, muttered sleepily.

"Some drunk most likely."

So I subsided into the bed, into the dream, into the night.

I woke at dawn on Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and lay in the cozy, old room, with its air of antique secrets. Then I dressed quietly and stole silently down to the common room for breakfast.

An assemblage of eggs, bacon, toast and juice crowded a side table, and owner Dennis Schranz crowded a side chair. Round and bespectacled, he sat expectantly as a lawn gnome. I had wandered, unknowingly, into the lair of an old-time storyteller.

Turns out, the Oliver House is the most haunted hotel in Arizona.

Twenty-seven people have died in the Oliver House, insisted Dennis, relishing the figure. He doesn't tell guests about all the deaths when they check in. He waits for breakfast.

That's when he tells them about the ghosts. And Nathan Anderson.

And Ruby.

It seems that Nathan Anderson, an executive in the mining company that owned Bisbee, was having an affair with Ruby, the wife of a local policeman.

Ruby was a fetching girl-freckled and witty, stuck in a dying mining town infamous for its fires, intemperate millionaires and desperate miners.

Every so often, Ruby and Nathan would steal away to the Oliver House for a night of reckless passion.

One night, they hurried down the hall to Room 13, desperate for one another.

Other boots thudded down the hallway after them. A shot rang out and Nathan Anderson lay dead in the doorway to Room 13, a .45 caliber bullet hole in his forehead.

The people in the common room jumped up as the murderer burst into the room and started shooting, killing three or four guests before fleeing into the night.

Ruby vanished.

So did her husband.

Soon after, the ghosts showed up.

Rocking chairs creaked on the veranda. Boots echoed in the hall. Guests shivered in Room 13. Voices sounded in the hallway.

The decades passed. World War I. The Great Depression. World War II. Elvis. The Beatles. Michael Jackson.

Dennis bought the Oliver House. He hired a nice girl to help run the place. Pretty girl. Lively. Interesting. The ghosts reacted, especially in Room 13. Guests would check in and flee first thing in the morning. The girl saw a woman standing by the bed in Room 13. So Dennis brought in this ghost-buster group from the University of Arizona, with detectors to pick up supernatural energy fields. They got some strange but inconclusive readings. Then the girl who saw Ruby's ghost just vanished. Later, Dennis was researching the ghosts of the Oliver House when he dug up a picture of Ruby. That freaked him. She looked exactly like the vanished girl, right down to the freckles.

I listened for two hours as Dennis meandered through his story. I didn't believe a word of it, but I admired his style. Storytelling's a lost art-we must treasure its practitioners. Finally, he rose and shuffled off, a human Halloween trick or treat.

Elissa appeared a moment later.

For no particular reason, I remembered the shout in the night.

"Did someone wake us up last night?" I asked.

"That's right," she said, remembering. "Someone yelling a woman's name."

"A woman's name?"

"Ronda?" she said, struggling. "No. It was 'Ruby.'"

THAT WAS MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, when the ghosts of summer trembled in the vivid leaves of autumn. I called recently, intending to use this ghost story to introduce an issue brimming with fall colors. But the Oliver House has new owners. They say Dennis sold the place and vanished. They'd heard he died, but thought perhaps he just spread that rumor so no one would come looking for him. This is, after all, Bisbee.So savor the fall colors. And if you stay the night in the Oliver House, please give my regards to Dennis or Ruby or whoever goes bump in the night.