More Changes Haunt Historic Hotel

Someone familiar with the antics at the Glen Tavern Inn in Santa Paula might have dismissed the scene as stage-setting for the murder mystery weekends that routinely attract guests from as far away as San Francisco.

A more suggestible sort might have concluded that the hotel was, as its proprietors claim, haunted.

Promptly at 2 p.m. on a recent Friday, all the hotel’s bed linens, a few dresser doilies and the comforter that had graced the bed of the inn’s most notorious ghost disappeared. The hotel’s staff and management also vanished.

The disappearances, however, were neither stage-setting nor hauntings.

Hotel manager Dolores Diehl had abandoned her 15-year lease, laid off a staff of 25 and returned the bed linens to a rental company. She had ended a two-year fight to make money on the hotel, a dark, rambling structure in which Alfred Hitchcock would have been more at home than Leona Helmsley.

“It was like losing a part of my family,” she said.

The change marked yet another bump in the perennially bumpy road for the pre-World War I landmark that by Diehl’s count has changed hands at least six times.

Having reverted to owner Mel Cummings of Oxnard, the hotel remains open to overnight guests but its dining room and bar are closed.

Cummings said he was negotiating this week with restaurateurs interested in managing the dining room and bar and an adjoining banquet room. He also is advertising in the Wall Street Journal and other publications to sell the historic hotel for $2.2 million.

In addition, Cummings was weighing offers to turn the hotel into a health spa or a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility similar to the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage.

“I would prefer not to have the use change,” said Cummings, who bought the Glen Tavern in 1983. “But I’m a businessman. What can I do?”

Diehl blamed the inn’s most recent troubles on last October’s stock market crash and this summer’s screenwriters’ strike. As recently as two years ago, film and television crews shooting scenes in Santa Paula and Ojai accounted for 60% of the hotel’s business, she said.

The crash and the strike forced Diehl to fall behind on her payments to Cummings, she said. She also fell behind on city bed taxes and had difficulty raising the hotel’s already cumbersome annual fire insurance premium of $35,000.

“I feel that the business was successful,” she said. “It’s just that my overhead was tremendously high and with these other issues happening, I just couldn’t make it.”

The news upset some Santa Paulans, who noted that the hotel--a gem of the English Craftsman architectural style--is the only Ventura County hotel on the National Register of Historic Places.

“There aren’t many grand old hotels left,” Santa Paula historian Judith Triem said. “So many of them got torn down or burned down.”

Apart from its historic importance, the inn embodied the sort of easygoing life style that has drawn people to the quaint town.

“It’s a part of the community from the past that’s operable in the present and that gives a nice, warm feeling,” said Dana Elcar, artistic director of the nearby Santa Paula Theater Center. “I think it’s important that it succeed.”

At first, it did.

When built in 1911 by a consortium of Santa Paula investors, the Glen Tavern--then known as the Santa Paula Hotel--was the only game in town. A block from Santa Paula’s train depot, the inn swelled with guests attracted by the town’s newly established oil and citrus industries.

Later, the hotel profited from guests brought to Santa Paula by another burgeoning industry--the movies. The film industry often shot movies in the Santa Paula and Ojai areas, local historians said. Actors, directors and film technicians had to stay at the inn.

During Prohibition, according to some accounts, the inn’s third story, which had an expansive view that could take in advancing law enforcement officers, was turned into a speak-easy that offered gambling and all the attendant vices.

In World War II, the inn was converted to housing for female war employees at Port Hueneme. Later, it became a boarding house, offering permanent lodging to unmarried schoolteachers, widowers and retired couples.

Times got tougher in recent years. Fairy McCann, whose stepfather, Charles Estep, took over the inn in 1917 and eventually turned it over to her, said she twice has initiated foreclosure proceedings since selling the hotel in 1974. Cummings said he lost a lot of money while running the hotel because he had no experience operating a restaurant or bar. And Diehl filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings just six months after leasing the hotel in May, 1986.

Diehl, a 54-year-old nurse and licensed nursing home administrator, originally planned to convert the hotel into a rest home but was deterred by the expense of necessary improvements.

Despite its many lives, the hotel has received the most attention as a hotel. It attracted the likes of John Barrymore, and noted Polish pianist and composer Ignace Jan Paderewski. Rin Tin Tin had his own room--room 307--during filming of the 1926 movie, “The Night Cry,” in the nearby Ojai Valley, McCann said. Other luminaries who supposedly stayed at the inn were Harry Houdini and Clark Gable.

More recently, the inn has become better known for guests who may not have checked out. Psychics who were brought to the inn by Diehl have sworn that former guests haunt the place. Between three and nine spirits, depending on the psychic, supposedly call the inn home.

The most notorious is a spirit known variously as T.J., Calvin or Wilbur, said Richard Senate, who teaches a ghost-hunting course at Ventura College. The ghost, who resembles Buffalo Bill, is believed to have been an actor who was shot to death at the inn during the 1920s, said Senate, who has researched the ghost lore during 50 visits to the hotel over the last two years.

The actor was gambling on the third floor and winning heavily, said Senate, who is director of the Albinger Archeological Museum in Ventura. Then his opponents found five aces in the deck from which he had been dealing.

“They realized that the man had been cheating,” Senate said. “Angered about this, they shot and killed him.”

One of Senate’s students claims to have captured an image of Calvin while photographing his room--also Rin Rin Tin’s room--two weeks before Halloween, 1986.

“There’s a misty, weird figure with a goatee, and it even looks like he might be playing cards,” Senate said.

Cheryl King, an Ojai mystic and a friend of Diehl’s, claims to have seen the figure in the same room during the same period.

“He had the string tie, shoulder-length hair and handlebar mustache,” King said. “I saw him once on the television screen and another time across the wall above the brass bed.”

Calvin isn’t the only spirit at the inn, according to hotel employees.

Across the hall, in room 306, lives the spirit of Jennifer, a woman who died at the hotel in the 1930s. In the next room the ghost of Houdini makes doors mysteriously open and close. On the second floor roams Ellen, the ghost of a perfume saleswoman whose presence is accompanied by a sweet, flowery smell.

“She’d knock on the door and climb into bed with people,” Senate said. “She was supposed to be French.

“I thought the Queen Mary was haunted but it’s only got five ghosts and this has nine ghosts in a much smaller area,” Senate said. “I’ve never been to a place with more recurrent phenomena.”

Whatever the explanation for the ghost-sightings, Los Angeles actress Mona Charles was glad of them. They lent credibility to the murder mystery weekends that she and nine other actors have been staging for $300 per couple at the hotel since early 1987.

“It was very easy for us to create an eerie feeling because of the dark wood and the hotel’s age and the ghosts,” she said. “Nobody had trouble changing their sense of reality.”

The inn was such a convincing setting for foul play that Santa Paula police, responding to a report that a body was being carried from the hotel, raided one of Charles’ murder-mystery weekends.

“It was theater in the round to an extent I never thought possible,” Charles said.

Every day is not Halloween at the inn, however. Visitors who expect cobwebs and cadavers will be disappointed.

The rooms, which are furnished with the same Early American knockoffs that one would expect to find at an ordinary motel, are decidedly tame. Only brass plaques announcing that Rin Tin Tin slept here or Houdini there hint at a more colorful past.

If the Glen Tavern Inn seems much like any other old hotel, there is good reason, McCann said. The inn’s longtime owner claims much of the its lore has been fabricated in recent years.

“No Houdini,” McCann said. “And, of course, there’s no ghost. That’s just something to talk about. . . . That’s all advertisement.”

Diehl countered that the hotel may not have been haunted in McCann’s day. “All I know is that my staff saw a lot of things happening that couldn’t be explained,” she said.

If that’s true, it didn’t hurt business.

Until Diehl’s departure on Sept. 9, the hotel had been fully booked all but three weekends through Christmas. If she had held on, the hotel would have turned around, said Cummings, who owns what he describes as six “low-end” Ventura County hotels.

But Diehl doubts that, claiming that she couldn’t pay bills long past due. “I wasn’t gaining ground,” she said.

She said she expected initially that Cummings would act as a partner, providing financial assistance as needed. She asserts in a lawsuit she has filed against Cummings that he agreed to split the cost of installing an elevator, the expense of which prevented her from turning the hotel into a rest home.

Cummings said he and Diehl “talked about that in the beginning, but that disintegrated.” In the end, he said, she agreed to assume upkeep and other expenses.

Meanwhile, Charles, the weekend-murder maven, said she is negotiating with the Pierpont Inn to hold her events there. A trial run last weekend went smoothly, she said.

And what about Calvin’s comforter?

“I felt sentimental about it so I took it with me,” Diehl said. “I took the ghost, too.”