The Greenbrier Restaurant in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, keeps three ghosts in a 1939 log lodge. The one everyone knows is Lydia, a bride said to have hanged herself over what's now the bar, after her groom failed to show. The truth about the groom is worse.
The general manager at the Greenbrier Restaurant in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, keeps a stop on her tour by the bar. She walks guests over to a beam above it, points up, and shows them the rope burns worn into the wood. A woman named Lydia is said to have hanged herself from that beam, back when the building was a lodge and the beam was a rafter on the second floor.
Here is how General Manager Rachel Saults tells it: "On the day of their wedding, she went to the altar and he never showed. Well, she was heartbroken, she came back to the lodge, she took a rope upstairs to the second floor and then threw it over the beam, right here, and hung herself."
The lodge opened in 1939, a log building for hunters and travelers passing through the Smokies. Lydia was a bride-to-be staying there in the 1930s, the story goes, waiting on a wedding that fell apart at the altar. She was buried in an unmarked grave, denied consecrated ground because she had taken her own life.
Except the groom never jilted her. Park rangers found his body in the mountains a couple of days later, mauled to death by an animal. Some tellings name a mountain lion, and say the timing was too neat to be chance. Lydia's spirit, they hold, had taken the cat's shape and hunted down the man who was supposed to marry her.
She is a gentle ghost, by every account. Diners on the staircase describe a small, sad figure on the upper landing that isn't there when they look again, and staff hear a woman crying somewhere above the dining room. She isn't the only one. A grumpy old man is said to sit in a back corner and complain about the noise, and a little boy, staff lore has him drowning in Gatlinburg's first swimming pool, long since filled with concrete, is felt under the bar. The staff leave jacks by the staircase for him to play with.
There is one more piece of the Lydia story. After she was buried without a marker, a caretaker at the lodge was woken night after night by a whisper telling him to "mark my grave." He finally gave in and set a stone, and the whispering stopped.
Which makes the rest of it strange. The lodge that couldn't give Lydia a headstone became a restaurant that prints her story for every guest who sits down, and when the season is right, the bar mixes a lemon-and-lavender martini and calls it The Lydia. The woman buried in unmarked ground has her name on the menu now.
