Friday, Oct. 30, 1998 | 10:17 a.m.
Murders at an old ranch, a possible Indian massacre and a 50-foot fish.
That's pretty much the extent of Las Vegas' ghost stories and legends.
If it's a bump in the night, it's probably just another house or hotel going up.
Happy Halloween, indeed.
It seems Las Vegas hauntings are ... dead. But Boulder City? Well, that's a ghost of a different color.
"Legends, hmmm, ghost stories. Well, did you know about the 50-foot fish that lives in Lake Mead?" asks Councilman John Rhodes of North Las Vegas, who offers an explanation for the dearth of deadly tales.
"Well, it is the lack of history in Las Vegas," Rhodes says, "and also, stories are not being passed on."
Rhodes is not alone in having difficulty putting a finger on any ghostly stories or legends in the Las Vegas Valley. Even Las Vegas historian Frank Wright can't dig up any dirt on the dead.
"We don't have a lot of that around Las Vegas," Wright, curator of manuscripts for the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society, says. "I think this city is a little bit young for that. Now, the Boulder (Dam) Hotel had been empty for a long time ... off and on ... and lends itself to that sort of thing."
Apparently.
Boulder City spooks
"There is a body buried under this wall," says Dennis McBride, Boulder City historian. It's the first thing he points out at his newly renovated offices in the basement of the Boulder Dam Hotel in Boulder City. He's not sure about the body -- a psychic "discovered" the spot in 1980.
McBride has studied Boulder's rich history since he was a young boy growing up in the small town 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. And he had heard stories.
"I had always heard the hotel was haunted, and Hoover Dam," he remembers. "In the central portion of the powerhouse, there is a very young man in coveralls, blue coveralls. It could have been anybody that died during the building of the dam."
He also tells the tale of a man who fell to his death while working on the dam in the early '30s.
"Workers said they would open the elevator and there he would be, standing in the elevator," McBride says.
The hotel, according to psychic Patsy Welding, has a spooky vibe. She says she could feel a murder here, a suicide there (owner Raymond Spilsbury's death was ruled a suicide in 1945), trysts and love affairs gone awry. But is that a memory behind you, or the bogeyman?
Out of curiosity, McBride had Welding, a nationally-known psychic, "read" the Boulder Dam Hotel, to see what would pop up. Welding wandered the hotel, beginning in the upper rooms, which once housed such legends as John Wayne and Shirley Temple, and ending, as she said others had, in the basement.
She felt "movement," McBride says, at blank white walls -- a window or door had been there before but not to her knowledge -- and other vibrations. All in all, nothing too scary or out of the ordinary for such an old building. Then she began the descent to the basement.
"She refused to come into the basement," he says.
Instead, Welding compromised and sat on the top landing of the curving staircase, repeating to McBride, sitting next to her, what she was experiencing.
"She saw someone peeking around the corner (at them) ... he wasn't bad but the vibrations were very bad," McBride says. "She wouldn't even come down."
The black cloud of a malevolent presence rolled through the basement, according to the psychic. McBride currently conducts his research at his desk -- which faces the wall where she said the body was buried.
"I've never seen anything -- I'd love to, though," he says. "Sometimes I feel something watching from the door. But it's never been a malevolent feeling down here."
Occasionally, he'll find his door open after he has left it shut in his solitary office in the basement -- or vice versa.
As you walk through the hotel, you notice crevices and steps that don't match the renovation. Doors and windows have been blocked or removed, stairs no longer lead to the rooms they once accessed. Paranormal references state that a ghost may walk through walls, but is merely walking through a door that used to be there. McBride's door is part of the building's original structure, so maybe...
"Rooms are hallways, hallways are rooms, doors are blocked off, it's all different," he says. "I think most (of the ghosts) have passed on to where they were to go in the first place."
Unfortunately for Frank Carroll, curator of the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum (also housed in the hotel), his ghost has decided to pick up a new trade.
"I have one up (in my office) that likes to play with my computer," he says. "I find my computer in various states of disarray, there are different things on my screen than when I left."
The computer hassles are merely that, he says, and nothing terribly out of the ordinary has happened to alarm Carroll about his office guest.
"Older ghosts don't know how to deal with technology," he says. "Things have been moved around on my desk but nothing too bad."
McBride says that the offices Carroll inhabits are the same as those used by a past hotel owner, Patricia Dycks, who also complained about a woman who would come into her office. The hotel was used as a rest home in the late 1960s.
Other parts of the hotel, such as the basement, have been a little more ... chilling, Carroll says.
"You know when someone is there, you just get the feeling someone is behind you," Carroll says. "You are walking down a hall and you can feel something standing in the darkness."
But he has a way to deal with that feeling.
"(It's) just like you wouldn't show a dog you were scared, because a dog would automatically become aggressive," he says. "It's 'Ya, I know you're there' and I just go along with what I'm doing."
But in the past, some have not been as brave.
"The caretakers would not consider going to the basement," Darlene Burk, manager of the hotel since 1993, says, adding that she "doesn't believe in that sort of thing" and in five years of working in the hotel, both during the day and late, late at night, has not had any ghostly experiences. "I just put it out of my mind," she says.
Theater frights
Across the street from the hotel, the Boulder Theater has its own interesting past that some say overstayed its welcome.
Robert Scaringi, owner of the movie house since 1974, says he and his wife Helga have never seen anything disturbing, but have heard many stories about their quaint theater.
The old-fashioned theater, with its original art deco wall sconce, chandeliers and popcorn machine from the 1931 opening still in operation, has a heady past. Will Rogers, staying at the Boulder Dam Hotel, performed at the theater for a few weeks in the summer of 1935, weeks before his untimely death. Boris Karloff performed there during his stay to receive a quick divorce. Stars popped up from Hollywood for the 1934 world premiere of "The Silver Streak," held at the Theater that New Year's Eve.
But with all of the notoriety the theater has attracted, it's an unknown man who haunts the now quiet and nearly empty one-screen theater.
"People say they saw a shadowy-type figure at the bottom right of the stage," Scaringi says. "In 27 years, I can't say I've (seen or) heard anything."
According to McBride's research, a man died of a heart attack on April 7, 1941 during a show and has reportedly been seen lurking behind the screen and making noises where no "body" should be.
Vegas stories
But where Las Vegas is concerned, local historians and longtime residents have only vague recollections of stories and legends. Wright continually gets calls from area residents who live on older property.
"I get calls from people that talk about really strange things that happen around their house," he says. "Recently, someone found something like a cellar, they didn't know what it was, but strange things have happened around their house."
He will look up the history of the location to help the person try to figure out why strange things may be happening.
"Usually I don't turn up anything," he says.
Some of the calls are serious, at least from the callers' perspective.
"Back a long time ago, when Green Valley was first developing, someone was certain an Indian massacre had taken place out there because she felt a strange presence," he says.
"I assured her I had never seen any historical record of any Indian massacre," Wright says. "Maybe she is right, you know, maybe there are spirits of long dead ... ah, maybe not."
But Wright is skeptical of bumps in the night.
"I'm not a ghost believer," he says, adding that in Las Vegas it is even harder to believe. "Partly I guess because there are no haunted houses, aside from the big commercial jobs. Ghost stories, from my childhood, are from old houses, dilapidated Victorian houses with cobwebs. Those are buildings that go back quite a ways."
Wright remembers the Kiel Ranch, rumored to be haunted, but buildings at the ranch -- where neighboring ranch owner Archibald Stewart was murdered in 1884 and the Kiel brothers, Edwin and William, died in a double murder in 1900 -- have since been torn down, as have many of Las Vegas' old buildings.
Gerald Schaffer, president of a local consulting service who has looked into paranormal activity, says he's seen questionable occurrences in Nevada over the past 40 years. Don't knock what you don't understand, he says -- if it knocks in the night, it may be the house settling or...
"Sometimes you may know of something, a specter, an eeriness," he says. "But there is no qualifying what these things are."
Ghostly sightings or an eerie presence could be just that -- or something more complicated we don't understand.
"We don't live in a dimension that truly understands that," Schaffer says. "There is something there, but I don't think we will ever really know," he says.
Not knowing is part of the fear.
And sometimes it is good to be scared. "Well," Schaffer says with a deep- throated chuckle, "it doesn't hurt."
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