In Brief
Chase on the Lake is a lakeside resort in Walker, Minnesota, with a two-lane bowling alley in the basement. The lore says that basement was once a morgue for soldiers killed nearby in 1898 — and the jukebox down there still powers on by itself.
The Full Story
The basement of the Chase on the Lake resort in Walker, Minnesota holds a two-lane bowling alley. The lore around town holds that the same basement once held bodies.
The story reaches back to October 5, 1898, when the Battle of Sugar Point was fought a few miles across Leech Lake. It's recognized as the last armed conflict between the U.S. Army and American Indians. Seven soldiers died there, and ten more were wounded. The persistent local account is that the original Chase Hotel served as a temporary morgue for the dead before they could be shipped to Fort Snelling in St. Paul.
No period newspaper or county record confirms it. Even the people who tell it hedge, because the geography is hard to pin down and the lakeside hotel that carries the name today didn't open until 1922, more than two decades after the battle. But the story keeps arriving anyway, and it has settled on the basement: now the resort's two-lane bowling alley, where staff say the jukebox switches on and plays to an empty room. One Cities 97.1 headline put it plainly — a morgue turned bowling alley.
The hauntings cluster upstairs, too. Guests and night staff report children running the upper hallways, phones that ring after they've been unplugged, and a 1920s grand piano in the lobby that plays by itself. An employee named Wilma described it starting up while she worked the late front desk. A grandfather clock in the lobby is said to have spat its own key out of the lock. Paranormal investigators who've worked the building say they captured the voices of a stable boy and rougher figures from its lumberjack and Prohibition years.
There's a quieter, sadder fact under all of it. Bert Chase, who built the lakeside hotel with his wife Louisa, lost his son to pneumonia on May 27, 1922 — eleven days before the grand opening he'd billed as one of the grandest events in the history of northern Minnesota. The hotel began its life beside a fresh grave.
The building that stands now is younger than its ghosts. A fire gutted the hotel in 1997, and the current resort opened in 2008 on the old footprint, with new rooms and a new restaurant. One reporter spent a night there looking and felt nothing. "Who am I to say if it's haunted?" she wrote. The stories were already there, waiting for her.
