If you’re visiting Lily Dale, the largest spiritualist community in North America, one of the places to stay is The Maplewood Hotel, a reconstructed horse stable that opened its doors a century ago. People saw that the place is haunted; stories abound of neighing horses in the middle of the night, and a lady in Victorian clothing floating up the second-floor staircase. When booking accommodation, people often request a haunted room, but the booking agent politely tells them that the rooms are as clear as the sky on a summer’s day.
Lily Dale can get quite crowded on the weekends, and it’s almost impossible to get makeshift accommodation at the Maplewood. But luck was on our side last year, when circumstances dictated that we needed to arrive in the Valley one day before our scheduled arrival. We had been on the road for several hours and every motel we stopped at was either full or only had smoking rooms available. At 10 pm, fingers crossed my husband called to see if there was possibly an opening at the Maplewood. “We’ll even take a broom closet!” he begged the night manager.
Our luck came. There was a last minute vacancy.
“We’ll be there in 15 minutes!” he yelled at her, and we made the 25-minute drive in record time. I don’t know how fast we were going because I kept my eyes closed for most of the ride.
When the night manager saw us arrive with our luggage, he smiled sheepishly. “The room only has a double bed,” he said, leading us to the top floor. Room 42 was a small, boxy space with a wooden floor, a bed, a wooden chair, and a two-drawer chest.
Exhausted from our journey, we collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.
At some point during the night, we woke up to the creaking of a rocking chair and thumping footsteps walking around the bed. What was my husband doing out of bed, searching the room? Maybe he was having a hard time falling asleep and he was rocking to sleep. In my dog-tired state, I was too nervous to talk to him. The rhythmic sound of the rocking chair was like a metronome that quickly lulled me back to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I was looking at the chair that definitely had four wooden legs on the floor. When she saw me, she said, “I could have sworn I heard a rocking chair last night.”
“Me too,” I said.
Later that morning, we were able to move into the room we had originally booked: #6. A few days later, we overheard a conversation between two women on Maplewood’s front porch. One of her said that she had a very interesting experience in her room last night involving a rocking chair and footsteps around the bed.
“Were you in room 42 by any chance?” I asked.
The woman agreed. “I understand that that happens to a lot of people,” she said. “On a person’s first night in room 42, they’ll get kind of a visit, like someone is checking on them and making sure they’re okay.”
I smiled, happy to know that we had evidently passed the test of Room 42 and been approved by the spirit.