If you’re visiting Lily Dale, North America’s largest spiritualist community, one of the places to stay is The Maplewood Hotel, a reconstructed horse stable that opened a century ago. People see that the place is haunted; stories abound of horses neighing in the middle of the night, and a lady in Victorian clothes floating up the second story staircase. When booking accommodation, people often request a haunted room, but are politely told by the booking agent that the rooms are as clear as the sky on a summer day.
Lily Dale can get quite crowded on the weekends, and it’s nearly impossible to get impromptu accommodations at the Maplewood. But luck was on our side last year, when circumstances dictated that we needed to get to the Valley a day before our scheduled arrival. We had been on the road for several hours and every motel we stopped at was either full or only had smoking rooms available. At 10 pm, we crossed our fingers and my husband phoned to see if there was possibly an opening at the Maplewood. “We’ll even take a broom closet!” he begged the night manager.
Our luck came. There was a last minute vacancy.
“We’ll be there in 15 minutes!” he yelled at her, and we made the 25-minute trip in record time. I don’t know how fast we were going because I kept my eyes closed for most of the ride.
When the night manager saw us arrive with our luggage, he smiled sheepishly. “The room only has a double bed,” he said, and led us to the top floor. Room 42 was a small, boxy space with a wooden floor, a bed, a wooden chair, and a two-drawer dresser.
Exhausted from our journey, we collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.
At some point during the night, we woke up to the creak of a rocking chair and muffled footsteps walking around the bed. What was my husband doing out of bed, rummaging around the room? Maybe he was having a hard time falling asleep and he was rocking himself to sleep. In my dog-weary state, I was too nervous to talk to him. The rhythmic sound of the rocking chair was like a metronome that quickly lulled me back to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I was looking at the chair that definitely had four wooden legs on the floor. When she saw me, she said, “I could have sworn I heard a rocking chair last night.”
“Me too,” I said.
Later that morning, we were able to move into the room we had originally reserved: number 6. A few days later, we overheard a conversation between two women on the front porch of Maplewood. One of them said that she had a very interesting experience in her room last night involving a rocking chair and footsteps around the bed.
“Did you have any luck in room 42?” I asked.
The woman nodded. “I understand that happens to a lot of people,” she said. “On a person’s first night in room 42, they’re going to get a kind of visit, like someone is checking on them and making sure they’re okay.”
I smiled, happy to know that we had evidently passed the test in Room 42 and had been approved by the spirit.
