Recalling the Geiser Grand

Until last summer's road trip with my daughter, I'd never had occasion to stop in Baker City, let alone take time out for a leisurely lunch in a restored historic hotel once known as the finest between Salt Lake City and Seattle.

That place was the Geiser Grand Hotel, and it's where Simone and I made our first stop for a meal on the first day of our trip to Pittsburgh. So it was a pleasant surprise when I noticed that Saturday's Oregonian had a feature story on the Geiser, with a most unexpected angle: ghosts.

Turns out that the Geiser, built around 1889, was said to harbor spirits. And somehow, through a fluke of trans-oceanic curiosity, a Japanese television crew found themselves in Baker City last week, doing some advance work leading up to a live New Year's Eve broadcast back to the island nation.

Seems that about 10 years ago, a New York reporter who stayed at the Geiser wrote about her experiences in a supposedly haunted room and her sighting of an apparent ghost. The story got picked up in the Japanese edition of Newsweek, where members of the crew of a popular Asian TV show spotted it and, well, next thing you know, Fuji TV is sending its own cast and crew to the Northeast Oregon town to do its own story about the Geiser Grand. Their footage aired on a show called "Unbelievable" and it proved so popular that the network returned for a 10th anniversary show and then, yet again, last week.

It's been about six months since Simone and I sat down in the dining room of the high-ceilinged, elaborately decorated hotel to a lunch that included clam chowder and fancy, local mushrooms. Admittedly, menu prices were higher than we expected and, despite extensive restoration efforts, there were some ragged spots in the hotel. But we never even would have known about this piece of Gold Rush history had it not been for a recommendation from a fellow blogger who grew up in the area. So...thanks, Nike B.

Photograph by Motoya Nakamura, The Oregonian