Murphys Hotel

The evidence this hotel offers is a book, and the book is real. What is not documented is the dates written beside the names. Guidebooks have described the register on display here for decades. A full-text sweep of scanned books crossing the hotel's name with "register" and Twain returns about 274 volumes; among them Charles Moore's Mother Lode guide ("the famous on the old hotel register, including Mark Twain, U.S. Grant, and Horatio Alger"), two editions of Barbara Braasch's Gold Rush country ("Examining the old register, you find names of past travelers: Mark Twain, U.S. Grant, Henry Ward…"), Philip Varney's Ghost towns of Northern California and Bill Gleeson's Small hotels of California ("names like Grant, Black Bart, and Mark Twain"). Note what none of those snippets carries: a year. The years come from one place. The 1971 nomination, signed by John P. Lemue of the Calaveras County Historical Society, transcribes the celebrated entries with dates: "Mark Twain - 1877, Horatio Alger - 1877, Thomas J. Lipton, U. S. Grant, and C. E. Bolton (Black Bart) - 1880, John Jacob Astor - 1878, Henry Ward Beecher - 1877, Josh. Billings, Bona [Lipscomb] (one of Napoleons Aides) and E. S. and M. A. Rothchild - 1880, John Hittell - 1867 and John Bidwell and wife - 1877." Mark Twain's 1877 does not work. Albert Bigelow Paine's authorised biography of 1912 accounts for that year without a gap: Ah Sin opened at the National Theater in Washington on 7 May 1877 and Clemens could not attend because of bronchitis; on 16 May he sailed for Bermuda on what his notebook called "the first actual pleasure-trip" he had ever taken; he spent the summer at Quarry Farm in Elmira; on 17 December he gave the Whittier birthday speech at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston. There is no California in it. His documented Calaveras County time is twelve years earlier and a few miles down the road: with Jim Gillis he crossed into the county after Christmas 1864 and saw a lunar rainbow at Vallecito on New Year's night; later in January they went pocket-hunting near Angel's Camp, where his notebook logs "January 27. Same old diet — same old weather", and where he heard Ben Coon tell the jumping-frog story in the bar-room of the local tavern. Paine's biography runs to three megabytes of text; a search of the whole of it for "Murphy" returns two hits, one a New York retainer of Governor Nye and one a photograph caption. The control terms in the same sweep — Angel's Camp and Calaveras — return the passages quoted above. Twain was next door for weeks in 1865. He was not here in 1877. The roster has also drifted. Set the 1971 transcription beside the hotel's present room list and seven of the documented names have gone — Alger, Beecher, Josh Billings, Bidwell, Hittell, Rothschild and, remarkably, Black Bart, the one name every guidebook mentions — while six that are not in the 1971 list have arrived: William Randolph Hearst, Susan B. Anthony, J. P. Morgan, "Samuel Pillsbury", John Wayne and "John Crocker". The 1867 slot kept its year and changed its occupant: John Hittell in the nomination, Pillsbury on the door. Two of the new entries answer themselves. Room 18 is dated 1973, which is not a Gold Rush register year by any reading. Room 9 dates Thomas Lipton to 1880 and then explains him by the tea business and the slogan "Directly from the tea gardens to the teapot" — the tea trade he built in the 1890s, not in 1880. Room 10 dates John Jacob Astor IV to 1878 and explains him by the Waldorf-Astoria, built fifteen years later. The room texts also demote Grant, giving his presidency as 1868–1876; he took office in 1869 and left in 1877. The ghost story is younger than any of this, and its arrival can be dated on the hotel's own website. Archived captures of the front page from December 1998, March 2000, February 2005, June 2008, June 2012 and June 2016 contain no instance of ghost, haunted, spirit or paranormal. The control in the same sweep is the site's own body text, which came through intact in all six: every one of them names the Calaveras Big Trees, and the earliest carry the Sperry & Perry opening of 1856. The first ghost page in the archive is hauntings.html, captured between 16 January and 27 November 2013 and returning 404 by September 2014. It named three spirits: Eleonor, a maid who fell in love with an adventurer who never came back; the Prospector, who "fell" — the hotel's own quotation marks — from the front balcony and is seen hunched over the saloon bar; and the Child, said to be the most active, credited with moving merchandise and playing with the office doorknob. It also stated that "since the nineteenth century tales of paranormal encounters in the historic building of the hotel have been spoken by guests and staff alike", and offered nothing from the nineteenth century in support. The investigations it did cite are recent: California Haunts in 2008 and the American Paranormal Research Association in 2009. The surviving claim on the current site is one sentence, present at least since June 2018: Room 9 "is reputed to be the most paranormally active room in the hotel". The fullest first-hand account is Lanee Lee's, published by Fathom on 30 October 2012, which quotes a named front-desk clerk, Deanna Broglio: "Eleanor is our primary ghost, but guests and staff have reported hearing children laughing and seeing a gentleman ghost." In print the gentleman acquires what the hotel's own page never gave him — a name, John, and a job, former manager. As for mechanism, the hotel has published the mundane explanation itself. The historic rooms have no televisions and no telephones, several share bathrooms down the hallway, and the 2018 version of the same page warned that they "may get noisy as they are located over our lively saloon". On the nightstand of each is a log book, left there, in the hotel's words, "so guests and staff may record any occurances that happen in their presence". A book that collects only the nights when something seemed strange will fill up. The nights when nothing happened do not get written down.