The Ghost in Room 308

Ghosts. Are they real? 

Nervous laughter is the conventional response to this question. We’re not superstitious, are we? 

I’m not superstitious, but I do believe in ghosts. Just not the banging-doors and glowing-in-the-night kind. 

Let me explain. A few weeks ago, I drove down to Pipestone from Minneapolis, arrowing 200 miles southwest toward the South Dakota border and climbing a thousand feet in an imperceptible but consistent rise. I spent nearly the whole drive on the phone with my mother as she kept deathbed vigil beside one of history’s kindest and most intellectually inquisitive Uncle Jacks. As I write this, I’m preparing for the funeral. 

I was pilot to a carful of ghosts. Most were Ukrainians, my mother’s uncle and aunts: John, Stella, and Irene (the latter two of whom I’ve never met). And, of course, Katie, my grandmother, whom I loved fiercely, and who died when I was little, having survived cataclysms on two continents, and who spent her final years mainly in the company of her own troubled ghosts.

Outside the car, ghosts innumerable. All of south and central Minnesota is Dakota country. In the southwest, the ghost of Alexander Ramsey shapes everything you see. He was the former superintendent of Indian Affairs and the state governor who prosecuted the US-Dakota wars of the 1860s. This was the period when he declared, “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” Largely, that’s what the government did.  

As a fourth-generation New Yorker, I’m shocked by all the parts of this story. I lived for a decade in my south Minneapolis Victorian home before I realized it sat on Dakota land. That is, land appropriated (stolen) in an 1805 treaty, written in English and unreadable by its Native American signatories. 

And where was my family back then—the mother of the mother of the mother of Jack on his deathbed? Family legend holds that my Grandma Kaye’s parents came from a sect of the Russian Orthodox church called the Old Believers: puritans of the Russian Orthodox Church. What were they doing in 1805? Suffering from state persecution, suffering from starvation? Beats me. 

As I passed through rolling cornfield after rolling cornfield, I tried to picture the prairie that would have once been here. A landscape that should have been booming this time of year with the mating calls of prairie chickens. In Minnesota’s Public Land Survey, from 1847–1908, surveyors counted 18 million acres of prairie. A little over 1 percent of that ecosystem remains here today. 

Do prairie chickens have ghosts? Is it ever worth arguing with anyone about ghosts? 

Most people will tell you there’s no such thing as ghosts. But I think America is actually ghosts on top of ghosts, ghosts all the way down. 

And I thought that before I saw Charlie the surveyor, ghost of room 308 in the Calumet Inn, in Pipestone, a few doors down from where I would spend the night. 

The Binderful of Ghosts 

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.  Died on Valentine’s Day night, 1944, in a fire in room 308. Guests have been arguing about his ghost ever since.  

A white plastic binder sits by the registration desk at the Calumet Inn, right beside a creepy doll in a white dress. Guests who have ghost encounters write down what they’ve experienced. The hotel dates back to 1888, and the binder is three inches thick. 

Most of the stories involve Charlie. He leans in doorways, he makes phones ring, he claps the toilet lid up and down in the night, he playfully nudges people, he appears in mirrors, he writes in dust. 

Other stories in the binder concern other ghosts, possibly the Reverend Orcutt, who also died in the Calumet. Inexplicable music, rocking chairs that rock all on their own. That sort of business.

Sometimes the binder describes the side effects of contemplating ghosts. A girl named Cassie—later grade-school age, to judge by her handwriting—was retrieving a bottle while babysitting her little brother, Tanner. When a door in the room slammed, she peed her pants and called the police.  

YouTube bubbles with videos by amateur ghost hunters stalking the ghosts of the Calumet Inn. This grand red-rock hotel is, economically speaking, kept from ghosthood itself by this paranormal interest. There’s the ParaFriends weekend spring event, the every-Saturday-night summertime Pipestone Ghost Walks (which include the Calumet), and the annual October Pipestone Paranormal Weekend, with its candlelight Calumet Inn walkabout and cemetery tour.  

In 2014, something legitimately scary and extensively documented happened at the Calumet. It was briefly infested by the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay—no relation to Alexander Ramsey—who came to tape an episode of the Fox series Hotel Hell. Ramsay is chiefly remembered by staff for promises unkept, but on camera he appeared in his customary fits, as if possessed, yelling and sputtering. He ultimately painted a room green before returning to his celestial celebrity firmament. Still, reruns of the episode bring a certain number of guests. 

The Calumet’s new owner, Tammy Grubbs, sees all this excitement as dollars in the ledger toward fiscal survival. Grubbs took possession last August as the four-story Victorian property stumbled toward abandonment.

The circumstances were, in fact, more dire than that. The building’s signature red stones were falling off a rear wall and threatening to create more ghosts from local townspeople. In turn, the city of Pipestone had given the hotel six days to either begin repairs or evacuate the premises.  

Grubbs, a talented painter with long brown hair and a patient, persistent manner, had been brought on by the previous owners because of her long career turning around failed restaurants.  

“I think I’ve saved the Calumet from shutting down four times since I got here,” Grubbs told me when we sat for a few hours one afternoon in low chairs not too far from a cradle filled with dolls, one in a hideous state of decay. (Grubbs is not above giving the paranormal fans what they want.) 

“I was always drawn to the Calumet because of its history, because of what it meant to the town,” Grubbs continued. “I couldn’t imagine Pipestone without the Calumet.”

The Calumet rose at a time when  four different railroad lines all happened to pass through the town. This great number of passers-through inspired the building of a great and grand hotel, the Calumet, as well as a number of other local attractions surprising for a prairie town, like an 800-seat opera house. Contemplate the Calumet today and it looks like a pink fortress, a castle painted in blood—something more fitting to Milan or Transylvania.  The stone itself represented the main business of the town: quarrying it, selling it, putting it on the many railroads, and also sleeping and seeing opera in it. 

Grubbs’s first act at the Calumet was to hire stonemasons to fix the exterior stonework. To pay for it, local fans established a “Save the Cal” fund. 

As part of act two, she turned the breakfast area into an all-day coffee shop and café. She decoupaged the tables with fascinating bits of Pipestone and Calumet ephemera, from early menus to archival news bits. Her broader personal vision involves turning the whole of the architectural gem into her own art project of murals and hallway galleries, full of her own art and pieces from other artists. One Calumet room, for example, features a Grubbs mural of a prairie farm, with a red barn and ethereal clouds overhead. Another room displays her take on Viking ships cresting the waves.

And then we come to Charlie’s room, 308, where Grubbs has painted a mural of a surveyor (like Charlie) with his equipment. That’s where I witnessed him—right on the wall, just as Grubbs has seen him in repeated encounters.

“He’s one hard worker, and he likes us, so that helps,” Grubbs told me patiently, in the way of someone asked to tell the same story 10 times a day, month after month, year after year. 

He particularly likes to compel Grubbs to chase him all over the hotel to stop the playing of phantom music. 

“My dream is to have each room in this hotel interpret a story about Pipestone,” Grubbs said. “Starving artists always have to have a side thing. And when I got here and the Calumet was on the verge of shutting down, I thought, This gorgeous, wonderful artist building needs someone to come in and turn it around.” 

In my day and a half in Pipestone, I observed Grubbs’s own supernatural powers. She doesn’t look too unearthly, with her frank, dark eyes and her taste for the kind of practical clothing that allows you to both get up on a ladder and seat guests for dinner in the same hour. But if living without sleep is a supernatural power, Grubbs has it. I saw her registering guests, making coffee, and helping employees around the clock.  

She told me, then, how she came to take ownership of the hotel. She had been working on the turnaround and saw the property heading toward financial trouble. Every time a utility—like the gas or electricity—was about to be shut off, she transferred it into her own name.

“I felt kind of like a pirate,” she said. “I had climbed aboard this ship that was abandoned at sea”—a ghost ship, as it were— “and then was just trying to keep it going.”    

The Ghosts of the Three Maidens

The Calumet Inn takes its name from the Calumet, a ceremonial pipe traditionally made from pipestone. The rock has likely been quarried for some 7,000 years by tribes who traveled here from all over North America. 

The town is called Pipestone, as is the county. The historic water tower in the northeast corner of town was fashioned in the shape of a traditional calumet. Everything in this small corner of the state is a pipe or a pipestone or at least pipestone-colored because it’s made from Sioux quartzite, the harder rock that’s kith and kin to the sacred rock. 

“It’s a small-town treasure,” says Larry Millett, the state’s preeminent architectural historian.  “I remember the first time I went to Pipestone, I knew there were going to be a lot of local stone buildings. But to actually see them is another thing. It’s a very expensive granite. You only see it in buildings like the Van Dusen mansion in Minneapolis. And if you look closely, you see it wasn’t carved much. It’s too hard. It’s tombstone-quality granite. But obviously the quarries were right there, and they had masons who knew how to work it.”

Millett got on a roll about Pipestone. “I always tell anyone who goes down there, go to Sioux City, Iowa, to the Woodbury County courthouse, where Purcell & Elmslie”—the same architectural firm that designed the Purcell-Cutts house, by Lake of the Isles—“did all of this over-the-top terracotta ornament. It’s magnificent. And go to Blue Mounds State Park. Oh, and stop and see the Jeffers Petroglyphs.”  

Blue Mounds State Park holds a 1,250-foot-long arrangement of rocks that line up with the sunset and sunrise on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. It’s the Stonehenge of North America. And it lies within 30 minutes of Pipestone. 

The Jeffers Petroglyphs Historic Site, a 7,000-year-old collection of some 5,000 rock carvings sacred to Native Americans, is older than Stonehenge. It lies within an hour and a half of Pipestone. 

The Pipestone quarries—now the Pipestone National Monument—once held their own petroglyphs, carved into the red cliff wall behind a set of boulders thought to symbolize three sacred maidens. George Catlin, the famed portraitist of the West, arrived in 1836 and wrote these notes on the Dakota territory: 

It is evident that these people set an extraordinary value on the red stone, independently of the fact that it is more easily carved and makes a better pipe than any other stone. For whenever an Indian presents a pipe made of it, he gives it as something from the Great Spirit. And some of the tribes have a tradition that the red men were all created from the red stone, and that it thereby is ‘a part of their flesh.’ Such was the superstition of the Sioux on this subject, that we had great difficulty in approaching it, being stopped by several hundred of them, who ordered us back and threatened us very hard, saying ‘that no white man had ever been to it, and that none should ever go.’

Nonetheless, Catlin pushed past. He eventually came to the boulders known today as the Three Maidens. Native visitors would leave tobacco and other tributes before touching the rock.

“The veneration of them is such that not a spear of grass is broken or bent by his feet within four or five rods of the group,” Catlin observed. “The surface of these bowlders I found in every part entire and unscratched by any thing, and even the moss was every where unbroken, which undoubtedly remains so at this time, except where I applied the hammer.” 

For this bravura act of cultural vandalism, pipestone gained the geological name “catlinite.”

The Three Maidens petroglyphs were chiseled out by a man named Charles H. Bennett in 1888 or 1889, either because he was trying to protect them or because he wanted them to decorate his lawn. There they remained until his death in 1926. 

A number were lost. But today the  remaining Three Maidens petroglyphs live inside the visitor center of the Pipestone National Monument, in front of a beautiful mural of both the monument and the vivid and nearly extinct prairie, made by none other than Tammy Grubbs.

The Ghosts in the Pipe Keepers’ Headquarters

Bud Johnston was born in 1942 and grew up traveling to the Bad River reservation in northern Wisconsin with parents who survived the Indian School years. This was the period when the federal government forcibly removed children from their tribal homes and forbade the learning of Native American languages and the practice of Native religions. 

“It was hard for me,” Johnston said when I talked to him, first onsite, and later over the phone. He has the mellow vibe of a true child of the ’60s, and a way of standing a bit more solidly than most people do, legs wide and loose, as if he’s about to catch something very big from the sky. “My mother, all my aunts and uncles, denied being tribal. I really hungered for my tribal stuff, though. ‘Buddy,’ they said, ‘why don’t you ditch that Indian stuff and pass for white?’ But I wouldn’t do that. I would get in a lot of fights. It was not cool to be Indian in those days.”  

He first spotted a pipestone pipe as a child. “I was digging in my grandpa’s stuff,” Johnston recalled. “He said, ‘Oh, my son, you shouldn’t monkey with that. We use that for saying our prayers.’ I said ‘Where’d it come from?’ He said, ‘Somewhere in Minnesota.’” 

For a time, he saw Native culture only distantly. A hobby fixing up $30 cars led to a career fixing airplanes for airlines across the country.  Some 40 years later, after connecting with urban Indians in San Francisco and transferring to Sioux Falls on a new United route, Johnston saw another pipe. A passenger was carrying it through the airport, and they started talking. That’s how Johnston heard of the ancient and sacred quarry in Pipestone. 

“‘Holy shit,’ I said. ‘I gotta get a quarry permit.’ I got some tools; I got my tribal ID badge. You have to show your tribal ID before you can even talk about the pit.”  

That discovery set Johnston on the road to founding his “multi-lineage” organization for the preservation of pipe culture, The Keepers of the Sacred Tradition of Pipemakers. Any member of  any tribe can join. So can Lutherans, Catholics, atheists, or anyone else who wants to support the pipe traditions. 

The Pipe Keepers headquarters sits halfway between the Calumet Inn and the Pipestone National Monument. It occupies the old Rock Island railroad depot—you’ll know it by the 30-foot-long steel calumet that Johnston built out front. Reader’s Digest called it the largest smokable pipe in the world. 

The building may not be much of a secret. But most people don’t know that the headquarters was paid for by Stanley Crooks, the powerful and longtime leader of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, until his death in 2012. 

“He said, ‘I was going down I-90, and I didn’t plan to come up here,’” Johnston recalled. “’But I went to the Pipestone Indian school, and before I got rich, I was a pipemaker. What are you doing here?’ I told him I was going to protect the quarries for all tribal people and educate people about the pipe.” 

Crooks wrote a check the very day Johnston first opened a Pipe Keepers checking account.  “Pipes have been used by over 500 tribes for ceremonies for over 3,000 years,” Johnston told me from his Pipe Keepers headquarters. Here, he sells pipes and Native art and teaches others how to make these religious items. 

“They’re used for everything. If you want to ask for guidance in your life for any kind of decision—you want to move, you want to go to war, you want to buy a car, you want to sign an agreement—you’d do a pipe and ask for help. They’re labeled peace pipes by some people, because they were used in treaty signings. But they’re much more than that.” 

When Johnston started the Pipe Keepers, he said, the nearby Pipestone monument included a wall plaque that claimed Native Americans had quarried pipestone there for just a few centuries. 

“I call it propaganda,” Johnston said. “And I did the research and showed them the scientific papers to get them to change it to thousands of years.” 

Pipestone pipes from Minnesota have been found in Ohio’s Tremper Mound, dating to around the year zero. And polished stone beads, between 4,600 and 5,600 years old, have been found in Florida’s Thornhill Lake mounds. 

Spend enough hours in Pipestone and you begin to perceive a kind of equation: Time plus ancestors equals ghosts. The Pipe Keepers headquarters is full of them, Johnston said. They play with his wife’s hair when she’s working the cash register. They turn guest-book pages when visitors are milling about. One even slapped his mother-in-law’s ex-husband, who kept digging in the fridge. 

“Spirits don’t normally do that; for them it takes a lot of energy,” he said. “But this guy was very irritating.”  

Johnston told me that tourists—the Pipestone Chamber of Commerce estimates around 50,000–80,000 pass through town a year—see the ghost-hunting apps on their iPhones light up when they visit the Pipe Keepers building. 

Then there’s the sacred quarry grounds of the monument. “Many people who visit us go and walk the trail, and they’ll see a spirit sitting up by the falls.  I’ve had lots of feelings out there myself. We put tobacco down and say a prayer.”  

Johnston knows a guy who has formed a scientific explanation for the spiritual goings-on. “He monitors satellites, and he says every time the satellite goes by Pipestone, it glows red. He feels that’s because of the pipestone, which has a lot of iron oxide in it. It causes a thinning of veils between the different dimensions.” 

Johnston said I should be sure to invite all you readers to bring a group and make your own pipes. “Take a few minutes; feel the energy that’s here,” he said. “I think it’s a life-changing event.” 

The Ghost in Room 308

Charlie did not wake me up. The creepy dolls in the cradle by my room remained unmoved, as near as I could tell. I did have a feeling of profound reverence walking the circle trail through the pipestone quarry. But I get like that, especially when there are soaring red-rock cliffs with the mist from a waterfall clouding toward them, feeding green lichens. 

I did, however, have a real-life encounter with the world beyond the grave. 

It happened when my mind was full of my Uncle Jack, and all the ghosts I left behind in New York, which I now found had been packed along with me in the portable chamber of my very own head.  

The circle trail of the monument was partly closed for flooding, and after walking the longer segment that remained open, I went to see another small trail. I took three steps in, peering past the silvery heaps of leadplant to the cliffs beyond, when a prairie chicken leapt up practically under my feet, like a hot-air balloon. Its orange neck sack puffed up to the size of a tennis ball; its tail fanned out. It was like fireworks. 

A prairie chicken, here? I wouldn’t have expected that. Most of the prairie chickens have disappeared in this corner of the state, along with the prairie itself. Was I confused by a rogue pheasant? Was I seeing things?

I ran my sighting by Bud Johnston, who confirmed this kind of thing happens. “Lots of people who come here see spirits, all different, all over town.” 

Maybe Pipestone gives us only the ghosts we can handle?

---

If You Go (Ghosting)

Were it closer to California, Pipestone would be overrun with New Age types chanting inside pyramids strung with crystals. But because it occupies the quietest and most distant corner of respectable Minnesota, Pipestone doesn’t get the visitors it deserves. Here are five of our favorite haunts.

The Calumet Inn

Are you brave enough to sleep in Charlie’s Room? If not, no worries: Art-filled ghost-free rooms abound. Do be sure to take a glass of Chardonnay and peruse the binderful of ghost stories: It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 

104 W. Main St., Pipestone, 507-825-5871, calumetinn1888.com

Keepers of the Sacred Tradition of Pipemakers

Look for the world’s largest smokable peace pipe, then zip in to buy some Native crafts. Or make some yourself with Bud Johnston. 

400 Hiawatha Ave. N., Pipestone, 507-825-3734, pipekeepers.org

Pipestone National Monument

Walk the circle trail through the sacred land, and pop inside to see the petroglyphs and enjoy the educational exhibits. At the rear of the building, a shrine/shop run by various Native tribes sells Native artworks. Or look for a pipe-carving demonstration by a skilled pipemaker. 

36 Reservation Ave., Pipestone, 507-825-5464, nps.gov/pipe

Lange’s Café

Open since 1956, Lange’s makes road trip–worthy pies with meringue crowns three times as tall as the pie itself. It also serves up all the blue-plate specials of yesteryear, like hot beef sandwiches with loads of gravy, and perfectly sticky caramel rolls. 

110 8th Ave. SE, Pipestone, 507-825-4488, Lange's Café

Blue Mounds State Park

A mere 22 miles south of Pipestone stands a 1,250-foot-long rock “mound” that lines up with the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Kids may prefer to watch the Minnesota Bison Conservation Herd. Don’t worry, they live on the other side of a fence from the hiking trails. You can also book a $10-per-person safari-style tour with a ranger and see them up close. 

1410 161st St., Luverne, 507-283-6050, dnr.state.mn.us/bluemounds