Tag: ghost

Describe the research process for your book. Did you interview people? Travel? How prominent a role did the Internet play? If you didn’t do new research, how did you learn what you needed to know to write your book?

Disclosed yesterday was the massive amount of time involved in searching the internet for names, places, and details noted in my grandfather’s manuscripts. So obviously, the internet played a major role as it confirmed that of which he wrote, but beyond that pointed in directions that would include interesting contacts–or locations worthy of physical inspection.

Yesterday I mentioned travel for scouting locations that would have interest in these particular historical narratives or mining exploits and locations–some still functioning towns–some merely ghost towns.

One of the interviews that stands out in my mind was the accidental interview we did with the owner of a vintage shop directly across from the Goldfield Hotel and next door to the Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company. She was retelling the story of Elizabeth, the favorite prostitute of George Wingfield and the modern day encounter of an accountant’s unfortunate meeting with her ghost who warned that she “was in danger and to leave immediately.”

Elizabeth was said to become pregnant by Wingfield who for a time paid her to stay away. He later lured her into room 109 where he chained her to a radiator, kept her in food and water, until she (according to one account) died in childbirth. The baby was then thrown into an old mining shaft. Rumors abound that Elizabeth can still be heard in the halls crying for her baby and that the sounds of a crying child can sometimes be heard from the “depths” of the hotel.

There have been so many sightings and other unexplained phenomena at the hotel that it has gained wide media attention and has been featured on Fox Family TV’s World’s Scariest Places. In addition, it has also been the subject of a couple of paranormal investigation television series, including Ghost Adventures in 2004, 2011 and 2013, and Ghost Hunters in 2008.

Interviews with people associated with venues cited in his manuscripts have both been rewarding and eye-opening and certainly the greatest impetus in the development of the manuscripts.