Our Stay in the “Haunted” Room at the Historic Gakona Lodge

What????…and Our Ghost Hunting Mis-adventure

A humorous tale of the night Ray and I stayed at the Historic Gakona Lodge in the “Haunted Room.”

A Long Drive

It’s approximately 400 miles from our house in Anchorage to the cabin in Chicken. Under the best road conditions it takes us 7 hours to reach the cabin. We drive from Anchorage to Glennallen along the Glenn Highway (AK-1). We turn north on to the Richardson Highway (AK-4) then turn right onto the Tok Cut-off (AK-1). Once we reach Tok, we turn right onto the Alaska Highway (AK-2). The last step is to turn left at Tetlin Junction onto the Taylor Highway (AK-5) where we still have 60 miles until we reach the cabin.

Construction of the ALCAN

The ALCAN is a Military Acronym for the Alaska-Canada Highway. Considered crucial to the WWII efforts construction began in March of 1942. The story of its construction through the interior of Alaska and Canada could be an entire series of blog posts. If you would like to read more, please check out the following links:

Building the ALCAN

Building the Alaska Highway

The Hidden History of the Black Regiments who built the ALCAN

The Construction of the Alaska Highway, 1942: The Role of Race in the Far North

Historic Roadhouses

The ALCAN was notorious in its day for being a slow, treacherous, multi-day slog through mud and mosquito infested terrain. Roadhouses and lodges sprung up along the way to offer food, services and lodging to travelers. As the road and vehicles improved over time, many of these went out of business.

Historic Gakona Lodge

One of the most famous along the ALCAN that still remains is the Gakona Roadhouse. At the junction of the Gakona and Copper Rivers, it is the oldest continually operating roadhouse in Alaska. One of its other quirks is that it is purportedly haunted by a tobacco-loving ghost, foot-stomping-ghost.

John Smoking his Pipe

http://national-paranormal-society.org/gakona-lodge-and-trading-post/

Most people think that the ghost is John Paulsen, a former business partner of the lodge who liked to smoke a pipe and often stayed at the lodge. People often claim to hear heavy foot-steps in the hall when staying in the room. The smell of tobacco smoke, particularly pipe tobacco, is prevalent, even though the lodge has been a non-smoking establishment for some time.

Our night in the “Haunted Room”

As previously mentioned, it can be quite the ordeal to get out to our cabin under the best conditions. Early in the season when the roads are still in bad shape and the days are shorter, it’s good to break up the trip. In the spring of 2013, we decided to stay the night at the Gakona Lodge. It was the first weekend they were open, and we were their only customers staying in the lodge that night. Having heard the ghost stories, we were game to stay the night in the room with the ghost.

After having dinner and drinks at the bar with the proprietors (really nice folks), Ray and I settled in for the night. Ray is a cigar smoker, so he even left out a cigar, hoping to show the ghost some good will.

Now, I should mention, we’re used to sleeping in a king-sized bed. At the time we stayed at the lodge (not sure if there have been changes), the bed was a full. You can imagine, it took a bit for the two of us to get comfortable. But we were tired after the drive, and anticipating a longer haul the next day. We climbed into bed, wondering if we would experience anything paranormal.

Sleep Talking

One of my own personal idiosyncrasies is that I sometimes talk and move around in my sleep. It happens on a frequent enough basis that Ray is fairly used to it.

WHAT Did You Say?

On this particular night, I sat up and pointed at a corner of the room and started yelling something. To this day, I don’t remember what, because I was completely asleep.

Ray jumped out of bed and shouted, “What?”

This woke me up. I was still sitting up pointing at the corner.

I yelled, “What?”

The next few minutes devolved into a shouting match as we both yelled, “WHAT?” at each other while Ray fumbled for the light switch. Of course, there was nothing in the room with us.

We both laughed afterward. Thank goodness we were the only people in the lodge. Ray gives me grief to this day that he missed his chance to mess with me because he wasn’t awake enough to yell “Ghost,” instead of, “What?”

Thanks for reading. So excited to announce that the pre-sale of the Dark Land starts April 16^th. Can’t wait to hear what people think about my Alaska backcountry horror adventure. Sign up for my newsletter to get sneak previews of The Dark Land, and of the sequel…