Waiting For My First Taos Ghost

By Carol Mell, 10-29-08

	Caption: Laughing Horse Inn is reported to be a place long haunted by ghosts but when I went there to talk to the owner, the place was abandoned, like it had been empty for years. WOO-HOO!

After so may years in the Southwest I should have seen a ghost, chindi or skinwalker by now. Navajo friends tell me I am tone deaf in that regard. No Navajo will live in our old house in Fort Defiance because of a Biligaana, or Anglo, ghost. Could they have seen those pesky “cadabotts” and “goinies” my daughter Emily always claimed were under the bed?

I decided to take matters in hand and go looking for a ghost but when I asked around I just felt jealous. Everybody but me has seen at least one.

Heather Anderson has seen them all her life in Taos. Her favorite was the “man in blue” who ran into the yard of the Laughing Horse Inn around 1982 just as she and her teenage friend were getting into the hot tub.

“He saw us and looked surprised, like he had just come through a time warp or something,” said Anderson. “He had on a cavalry uniform with tight boots, pants with the stripe down the leg, a sword at his side and a crossed-sword insignia on his buckle and hat. We were naked and we watched him turn beet red.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“We don’t think so either,” they said.

“Where should I go?” he asked.

“We told him to go upstairs and we could hear him jingle as he ran,” Anderson said. “Then he disappeared.”

One month later Anderson’s father found the man in blue in his bedroom saying he wanted out of the military. Not realizing that the man was a ghost, her father talked of patriotism and honor but when he put his hand on his shoulder, it passed through and again the ghost disappeared.

Just two weeks ago Anderson said her brother asked about the ghost at the Inn and was told that he still comes around. I called but the line was disconnected so I went over. I asked some workmen building a coyote fence next door about the ghost.

“No,” one guy said, “I grew up here and I never heard of that. There used to be a bar across the road though run by the devil himself. He had a tail and everything. My Dad used to like to drink there.”

“Okay,” I said, backing away slowly.

The Inn was deserted. It looked like no one had been there in a decade. There were carved horse heads laying around the yard and a blue altar with a man’s picture.

Equine jaw bones hung from the rickety fence. Creepy. The man in blue can keep that place.

Being white is no excuse not to see a ghost. Even my retired actuary friend Gary Oline has seen, or rather, felt one. Oline is a history and John Wayne buff but hardly the kind of guy who believes in hocus pocus. He swears that just after he and his wife, Barbara, moved to their retirement home on the Talpa ridge in 2003, strange things began to happen.

Now, locals will tell you of a ghost woman who rides a white horse across Talpa Ridge toward the river some nights but Oline believes that his ghost followed him there from Arkansas.

First it was a chair that swiveled toward the wall every morning for a week followed by electric alarms always set for 9:30, bad odors, open doors, one real scaredy cat and one violently spilled drink.

“One afternoon, on the patio, I was having a highball,” said Oline. “My arm was hit and the drink went flying. I couldn’t explain it. It was like something hit my hand.”

Some nights Oline heard a radio and recognized the voice of a World War II announcer but never could make out the words. When he looked for the sound it was not there.

The ghost only bothered Gary leading Barbara to conclude that their specter was Gary’s Aunt Lee from Arkansas.

“She was over 100 and she died mad at Gary for putting her in a nursing home,” Barbara said. “The ghost did annoying things to him just like Aunt Lee would. I didn’t feel threatened until the day all four burners on the stove went on, even the one that never worked so we had to get rid of her.”

A workman at the house got in touch with his ghost buster sister who prescribed an outdoor shrine for Aunt Lee.

“Gary sacrificed a cigarette and we put a feather and maybe burned some sage and told her to go away. We haven’t had any trouble since,” Barbara said.

Some people have all the luck. I know they say you should be careful what you wish for but some dark evening when the stars are out, just once, I’d like to see that woman riding across the ridge toward the river on her white horse.