Monterey Hotel

At the Monterey Hotel in downtown Monterey, California, the staff have a ghost who still does his job. They call him Fred. He was a maintenance worker here in the 1950s, the story goes, and he died on the job — and seventy-odd years later he hasn't clocked out.

The hotel opened in 1904, four stories of Victorian brick a few blocks up from Fisherman's Wharf, 69 rooms still taking reservations. Fred haunts it the way a man haunts a building he never stopped fixing. Staff say he mutters about the stairs — about always having to fix the stairs — and he keeps to the back halls near the employees-only section. He's loudest in Room 217, where guests report the TV switching channels and the clock radio coming on by itself. Some say their phones in that room start filling with sevens and fives. Around the rest of the place it's smaller things — an icy touch on the neck, a door swinging open in a room no one's in, an object that moves while your back is turned.

One bellman, by the staff's account, didn't last. He watched a figure walk down a hallway in a mirror, then vanish behind a closed door, and he quit on the spot.

Fred isn't alone. Housekeepers, the mothers especially, say a small unseen hand slips into theirs as they work the upper floors. They attribute it to a teenage girl in a lacey Victorian gown, seen drifting the main staircase. No one knows who she was.

And there's a third. Night staff say a man in a tall hat and a formal early-1900s coat appears in the mirror across from the front desk. He's there for a second, in profile, then gone. They believe he's the hotel's original architect, who died in 1936. No record names him.

Jeff Dwyer, an author who writes on California ghosts, says he recorded a clear "Hello" off the empty second floor, with no guest in earshot.

Three ghosts, three eras, one building. The handyman who won't stop working, the girl who reaches for your hand, and the man who only ever shows up in the glass.