In Brief
The Sagamore Resort sits on its own island in Lake George, New York, and its staff swear it keeps four ghosts — one from the 1880s, one from the 1950s, one with no era at all, and a man named Walter who rides the elevators and is solid enough to bump into.
The Full Story
A staffer at The Sagamore, the grand resort on its own private island in Lake George, New York, once walked into someone by the elevators outside the Trillium restaurant. There was no one there. Then the man slowly came into focus: portly, a walrus mustache, a three-piece brown suit with a gold watch fob across the vest. The staff named him Walter. He rides the elevators, takes a few steps out, and is gone.
Walter is the one people meet most, and he is far from the only one. Each ghost at the Sagamore belongs to a different decade, which is the strange part — the resort burned to the ground twice and was rebuilt twice, and the dead seem to have come from every version of the building.
Trillium, where Walter turns up, was a men's parlor in the early days, a room for smoking and cards. The 1880s couple keeps to that part of the house too. They are thought to be among the first guests the hotel ever had, and they are seen coming down from the second floor to take a seat in the reception area before they fade. They never speak. They simply repeat the arrival.
The current building dates to the early 1920s and was expanded around 1930, the third Sagamore on the island. The first opened in 1883 and burned in 1893. The second went up in 1894 and burned in 1914. Each time, fire took the building, and each time, the owners rebuilt. The Colonial Revival structure standing now drew its design from George Washington's Mount Vernon, and it is the only one of the great Adirondack resorts still running. The name itself came from a character in The Last of the Mohicans.
There is a boy, too, said to have died chasing a golf ball into the road in the 1950s, who plays pranks near the Club Grill and the golf course. No record confirms his death; it is told as lore, with no name and no documented year. TODAY once ranked the Sagamore among the ten most haunted hotels in the country.
And then there is the woman in white. A prep cook at Mr. Brown's looked up to find a tall woman with sandy-blonde hair in a long gown walking toward him. She spoke to him. Then she walked straight through him and was gone. He quit that day and never came back.
