Ghost Stories: Unexplained Encounters in Pocatello

This summer, I went ghost hunting at one of the most notoriously haunted hotels in the United States. The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, is best known for inspiring Stephen King’s The Shining. Its long corridors, creaking floors and stories of guests who never quite checked out made it an ideal place to search for the supernatural.

My husband and I spent three hours investigating supposedly haunted rooms and passageways with electromagnetic field detectors, spirit boxes and other ghost-hunting equipment.

I wanted to be scared. I wanted ghost stories to tell. I wanted something I couldn’t explain. I left entertained rather than convinced. As it turns out, I might not have needed to travel hundreds of miles to find a good ghost story.

From the basement of The Yellowstone Hotel to the hallways of Idaho State University, some of Pocatello’s most familiar buildings have unsettling stories of their own.

In the early 1990s, a busy college bar, The Wild Side, occupied the space now home to the Union Taproom. Carlen Donovan, now a lecturer in the English department at ISU, worked there as a barback, keeping the bartenders supplied with ice, clean glasses and fresh kegs of beer.

One busy weekend night, Donovan hurried into the basement to replace an empty keg while music and dancing continued overhead. After changing the keg, she walked out of the cooler toward the stairs. From the darkest corner of a nearby storage room came the unmistakable sound of an acoustic guitar.

It wasn’t a song, exactly. It sounded like someone practicing, playing something resembling classical or Spanish guitar. Donovan wondered whether someone had slipped inside from the nearby railroad tracks to escape the cold.

But no one was visible.

Then the sound moved.

“At that moment, the sound of the guitar ‘moved’, and it sounded like the person playing it was standing close behind me, like they were standing on the stair above,” Donovan recalled. “I turned quickly, and there was no one and nothing there, but the physical feeling of another person in my space persisted.”

Donovan fled upstairs and, from that night forward, refused to enter the basement alone. Only afterward did coworkers share their own stories about the building, including objects thrown from empty hallways and figures emerging out of the corner of an eye. She hadn’t known about The Yellowstone’s haunted reputation before the incident.

“I trusted my own senses a little more knowing that they hadn’t been ‘primed’ by others,” Donovan said.

Paranormal investigator Colleen O’Hara also has stories about The Yellowstone. During an investigation approximately eight years ago, O’Hara said her team used 24 cameras connected to three security systems. Although the recordings appeared to work during the investigation, she said the files were missing when she attempted to download them the next day.

“Everything has been wiped clean on all three of them,” she said. “It just disappeared.”

For former ISU custodian Haley McMichael, working alone in the Administration Building late at night was routine. Her shift ran from 4 p.m. until 12:30 a.m., and most of the building didn’t bother her. But something about the entrance to the president’s suite made her uneasy.

“I always felt sad and there was tension and a weird feeling around my neck and throat,” McMichael said.

One night, while moving chairs to clean the baseboards, she spent longer than usual in the area.

“For no reason I suddenly felt every hair on my body stand on end and I felt a pressure on my neck and shoulders, like I couldn’t get up, something was pushing me down,” McMichael said.

McMichael initially thought she was having a panic attack.

“I ripped off my headphones, turned on all of the lights in the entire suite, locked it behind me and went out to smoke,” she said.

Sometime later, Donovan asked McMichael whether she had experienced anything unusual in the building. After hearing McMichael’s story, Donovan returned with information about a reported murder in the same area. According to the account McMichael received, a secretary had been shot and killed by her estranged husband while working in the president’s suite.

Learning the story made McMichael feel more sadness than fear. She never experienced the same physical pressure again, although she occasionally continued to feel uneasy in the building.

O’Hara has also investigated ISU’s Administration Building. She believes her team encountered the presence of an angry man associated with the reported killing. She said the atmosphere was so uncomfortable that even skeptical students participating in the investigation became uneasy.

The Administration Building isn’t the only campus building O’Hara believes is haunted. She has investigated Graveley Hall, Frazier Hall and several other campus buildings. At Graveley, O’Hara described encountering what she believed to be a male presence in the basement, near an area she identified as a former science laboratory.

Unlike many of the spirits she encounters, this one wasn’t particularly friendly.

“He’s a bad guy, and he messes with people. He was a bad guy in life,” O’Hara said.

She claims the presence communicated its story to her team.

O’Hara, 62, says she began investigating paranormal activity at age 12 alongside her mother, whom she describes as a psychic medium. She estimates she has participated in thousands of investigations. Despite her belief in spirits, she says she looks for ordinary explanations first.

“I never take anything at face value,” she said.

Sometimes, strange noises turn out to be loose plumbing or an old building settling. Other times, she believes something less easily explained is happening. And not every investigation lives up to its reputation. O’Hara said her team’s experiences at Frazier Hall were less dramatic than the stories surrounding the building had led her to expect. Perhaps even ghosts don’t always live up to the hype.

When I visited the Stanley Hotel, I hoped to encounter something that would make me question everything I thought I knew. Instead, I returned home with very little I couldn’t explain. I still consider myself a skeptic. But there’s something unsettling about hearing these stories from people who weren’t searching for ghosts. A bartender changing a keg. A custodian cleaning baseboards. Ordinary people doing ordinary things in places we pass through every day.

Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they experienced, and maybe there isn’t.

Donovan put it better than I could.

“I don’t know what a ghost is. I don’t know if a ghost is. But I’m comfortable with the uncertainty,” she said.

And perhaps that’s what makes a good ghost story so much fun.