Guests at the Gage Hotel in Marathon, Texas are told to ask for Room 10, where people report music, a woman's voice reading poetry, and a tap on the shoulder. The rancher who built the place died barely a year after it opened.
The Gage Hotel in Marathon, Texas keeps 14 rooms in its original 1927 building, and guests who want something to happen are told to ask for Room 10. What gets reported there is music with no source, a woman's voice reading poetry, footsteps down empty corridors, and a tap on the shoulder in a room with nobody else in it.
In December 2018 a guest named Angela Ellis checked into Room 10 with her daughters, not knowing what the room was known for. Her youngest woke in the early morning hours with one of the large framed paintings lying on her chest. It had been fixed to the wall. Ellis wrote that they still have no idea how it got down.
The man the hotel is named for built it and barely got to see it. Alfred Gage came to Texas from Vermont in 1878, worked as a ranch hand in Shackelford County for $12 a month, and ended up holding roughly 500,000 acres of the Trans-Pecos. In 1926 he bought three lots on Marathon's main street and hired the El Paso architect Henry Trost. When the local stock subscription failed to raise the money, Gage covered about $45,000 of the cost himself, though the sources disagree on whether that was the whole bill or half of it. The hotel opened on April 1, 1927 with a dance. The Alpine Avalanche counted 500 to 600 people through the doors in the first four hours, more than had ever been in Marathon at one time.
Gage died in San Antonio on June 23, 1928, following appendicitis surgery. A little over a year after his opening night.
That is who people say is pacing the halls of the 1927 building, and out on the front porch, and in the patio gardens: an owner checking on a hotel he never got to run.
He isn't alone in it. The count is always three. General manager Carol Peterson has described a violin-playing woman with long white hair on the historic section's second floor, and nobody has ever put a name to her, or to the woman reading poetry, or said whether the two are one woman. The third has never been described at all. A visitor wrote in about early 2002, in the old section, seeing what looked like an old cowpoke at the door, going into the washroom. He said it was the only thing like it that ever happened to him.
Nobody died in the building. Alfred died in San Antonio, his brother Edward in Chicago, and the owner-by-owner chain from 1927 to 1978 records no death on the premises.
And Room 10 was never Gage's room. The National Register nomination puts his own office in room #7, down the same second-floor hall. Nobody asks for that one.
