Visit Terry Montana

KEMPTON HOTEL
204 Spring Street
Terry, Montana 59349
Telephone: 406-635-5543
Ghostly Activity Level: Low

HISTORY: The Kempton Hotel is the oldest continually operating hotel in Montana. Owners Russell and Linda Schwartz believe the original eight rooms were probably built in 1902 since the millwork is identical with that used in the 1902 construction of the Franklin Hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota. An addition with thirty-four rooms was completed around 1911. The builder’s name is uncertain, although he was probably a member of the Kempton family who ranched south of Terry. Berney Kempton, an early proprietor of the hotel, was a famous rodeo champion and roughrider who toured Europe and Australia with Carver’s Wild West Show. Guests have included Theodore Roosevelt, Calamity Jane and the famous historian and naturalist George Bird Grinnell.

PHENOMENA: The clink of china and the sounds of dinner being served have been heard from the old restaurant late at night. A guest reported that his doorknob rattled as if someone were trying to enter. When he opened the door, no one was there. The sound of heavy furniture being dragged across the floor has been heard from the attic. The jingle of spurs has been heard in another room. A skeptical guest came down one morning to report that “something” had grabbed his toe during the night.

I love the ambiance of historic hotels, haunted or not, so when Jim Schaefer, Executive Director of Custer Country Montana, Inc. told me that the Kempton Hotel, one of the oldest in the state, was haunted, I just had to drop in for a visit.

The big white hotel is impressive, even after more than a century of exposure to eastern Montana’s harsh weather. At the time of its construction it must have been spectacular. Most rooms at the Kempton Hotel had their own sink, unheard-of luxury at a time when pitchers and slop basins were customary. The hotel’s elegant restaurant, where Mrs. Kempton served dinner to her guests every evening, featured linen napkins, tablecloths and fine crystal. Although the restaurant closed in the mid-1940s, older residents of the area recall it as a wonderful place to celebrate on special occasions.

The Kempton Hotel still offers comfortable accommodations for long-term residents and tourists who wish to explore the nearby Terry Badlands Wilderness Area. In season, the hotel plays host to hunters from all over the region. Owner Russell Schwartz has spent years gradually renovating the hotel while retaining as much as possible of the original décor. Even Mrs. Kempton’s favorite floral wallpaper has been carefully preserved in two of the rooms.

My friend Frank and I arrived at the hotel early one January afternoon. No one was at the registration desk, so we looked around the small but cozy lobby with its comfortable furniture and paintings of cowboys on the walls. A minute or so later a young lady came in and introduced herself as Beth. I explained my project, and was delighted to learn that Beth had read my first book, Haunted Montana.

Beth began to develop an interest in paranormal research after a visit to Alcatraz at San Francisco. The old prison, now a museum, is considered to be one of the most haunted properties in the country. During her visit, she had placed a hand on one of the horizontal bars of a cell. Something she could not see put a cold hand over hers. Beth has also had an experience or two in the five years she has worked at the Kempton Hotel.

“One time a guest in Room 18 heard his doorknob rattle,” she recalled. “No one was there when he opened the door, but he heard footsteps run down the corridor. I was coming around the corner at the time and whoever it was would have had to go right past me. I saw no one, and I didn’t hear any footsteps.

“Another guest took photos one night in the old dining area and got orbs and vague figures. That’s where people have heard the sounds of dinner being served when no one is there.

Then there are rooms in the back part of the hotel where there is a lot of static electricity. When I’m making the beds I get shocked a lot. Mrs. Kempton did the wallpaper herself. She cut out all the flowers and pasted them on the wall. That may be one of the reasons why the hotel is haunted. Beth is probably correct, since the upstairs bedrooms retain much of the original 1900s décor. Paranormal researchers theorize that energy can be absorbed by the fabric of buildings or their furnishings. If conditions are right, anyone who happens to be in the room might be able to sense those energies.

At that point, Russell’s sister Peggy arrived. I asked her whether she had ever sensed anything odd at the hotel.” My sister and my cousin feel a presence,” Peggy replied, “and my sister thought she saw someone one time. I hear lots of things here late at night, people walking up and down the hallways. One night I heard huge thumps and bumps like furniture being moved. I wondered why anyone would be moving their furniture at night. It was like a big dresser being dragged across the floor.

It was weird. I asked the people in that room why they were rearranging furniture at night, and they said they hadn’t been. I don’t believe in ghosts and I’ve never seen a ghost, but I definitely heard someone moving furniture, and it was big furniture.” “Do you remember what room it was?” I asked her. “It was right above my room,” she replied. “It would have been Room 18.”“That’s the same room where the doorknob rattled,” Beth stated. She offered to show me around upstairs, and I followed her up the wide staircase. She pointed out Room 18. I tried the doorknob, and it did not jiggle. Even if vibrations from a heavy coal train or a passing semi-truck could have caused the rattling, that would not explain the retreating footsteps heard by the occupant of the room–and which Beth, who had just come around the corner and had a clear view of the empty corridor, had not heard.

I took a couple of photos down the hall, and then followed Beth to one of the rooms where she felt an unusually high level of static electricity. The moment I stepped inside the room, the hair on my arms stood up. If I’d had an EMF meter along, I’m sure it would have registered a high electromagnetic field. I wondered whether there were high-powered transmission lines near the hotel.

Strong electromagnetic fields are found in many places that are reputed to be haunted and are thought by many researchers to provide some of the energy needed for various phenomena. Beth pointed out the early 1900s floral wallpaper that had been one of Mrs. Kempton’s favorite patterns, and then led me to the attic staircase.” I won’t go upstairs. It makes me feel paranoid,” she explained. “Maybe it’s the lighting.” The lighting looked normal to me, but I decided that my arthritic knee might not make it up the steep stairs. I made a mental note to ask Russell about the attic. If a level-headed young woman like Beth felt uneasy up there, perhaps there was a reason.

As it turned out, there was a very good reason. When I caught up with Schwartz later, he told me about the tragic deaths that had occurred in the attic during the deadly Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. Montana was among the hardest-hit states, with most of the deaths in Prairie County occurring late in the epidemic, during the winter of 1919-1920.

“During the epidemic, the attic was used to house the overflow of patients from the hospitals,” he explained. “My grandmother, who started working for Mrs. Kempton at a very young age, said that they put cots in the attic for the patients. My uncles felt that the ghosts in the hotel were those who died during that terrible time. Maybe some of the sounds people hear of furniture being dragged across the floor actually come from the attic, not the rooms on the second floor.”

By the end of the1930s, the hotel was already regarded as haunted. At least one local resident, now in his late 80s, recalls hearing the stories when he was a young cowboy working to repair a damaged wall between rooms 20 and 22. “During the Depression,” Schwartz said, “whenever there was an overflow of guests, they were put up on cots in the attic, just as they had been during the epidemic. A cook who worked for the hotel at the time used to help with the cleaning up there. I’ve heard from at least two sources that she saw the ghost of a woman in a white gown in the attic. It wasn’t a formal gown, more like a white dress. She could see through her.”

“That sounds similar to the white uniform nurses wore during the epidemic,” I commented. “Perhaps one of the nursing staff died.” Newspapers from that time period are hard to find, but research might reveal whether a local nurse had caught influenza from her patients and died.
“We keep things like baby cribs up there now where we can get at them easily,” Schwartz continued, “things we need for guests. One of our guests brought his dog along one time. The dog was running around snooping, and he started up the stairs that go to the attic. All of a sudden he stopped and turned right around and came back down. He sat down by his owner and whined.
He wouldn’t go back up there. He wasn’t scared, but he wasn’t going up. We joked that ‘Well, the spirits are active now.’

“Another night we had a couple of hunters who definitely weren’t ghost believers. When they came down the next morning, one of them was absolutely convinced that something grabbed him by the toe in the middle of the night and kind of shook him a bit, in a humorous way. It woke him up and he knew something was there. He said, ‘Look, I didn’t believe in anything before, but there’s a lot of things we don’t know, and I know I was woken up when something grabbed my toe.’

“Sometimes we’ll find lights turned on that aren’t ever on. That happened again just a few days ago. Or we’ll hear odd noises, especially from the attic or rooms 18 or 29. A guy who was in room 22 heard spurs jingling on two or three separate nights. It didn’t make any sense, because nobody wears spurs inside any more, but he was an old cowboy and he knew what they sounded like. He had me convinced he heard it. He couldn’t tell whether the sound was coming from the room or the attic above.”

Given the hotel’s lengthy history, the ghost with the jingling spurs might be almost any of its early guests, but Berney Kempton seems to be the most likely candidate. Kempton was a rodeo champion and roughrider. According to Tom Stout’s Montana: Its Story and Biography, v. 3 (1921), Kempton, who was half Sioux, joined “Doc” Carver’s Wild West Show in the late 1880s. Not yet twenty, he performed before royalty and heads of state in most of the great capitals of Europe and, in Australia, even lassoed kangaroos. Berney Kempton died at the age of 72 in 1942, sitting in a chair in a corner of his own hotel. If Kempton’s spirit lingers, it’s probably because of a strong emotional attachment to the hotel.

Was Kempton also the prankster who once hid one of the hotel keys? “We had a key go missing about five or six years ago,” Schwartz told me. “It was the key to a door at the front desk. We kidded people about the ghosts taking the key but I was wondering how I could replace a key they don’t make anymore. You can’t even get those keys. Within about a month, Beth was walking near the desk in the back office, and the key was lying in the middle of the floor.”

It takes a considerable amount of energy for spirits to move objects, and I was reminded of the high levels of electromagnetic energy in some of the rooms upstairs. “Beth told me that she often gets electrical shocks when she makes the beds in those rooms,” I said to Schwartz. “Are there high-powered transmission lines nearby?” There were none, and he had already ruled out the heating system as a source. I asked him about the phantom sounds of dinner being served in the old restaurant.

“My mom said she’d heard about the sounds of dinner being served from Grandma,” Schwartz replied. “Later she heard it herself on two occasions. The first time she thought someone had come into the lobby with a box of china. Both times it happened early in the evening, about dinner time. Guests talk a lot about strange noises, but it’s an old hotel. If there are ghosts here,” he added, “they’re all friendly ones.”

If you visit Terry, you’ll find a wide variety of things to do, including hiking, wildlife photography, sightseeing and exploring the spectacular Terry Badlands Wilderness Area just three miles northwest of the town. The world-famous Evelyn Cameron Gallery is there too, and the Prairie County Museum. If you feel a mite peckish, drop in at the retro-’50s Badlands Café and Scoop Shoppe, owned by Inger and Arline Koppenhaver, and meet jovial host “Badlands Bob” van der Valk. The chili’s great! And be sure to check out www.visitterrymontana.com for more suggestions.

This article has been reprinted with permission from the writer and publisher and is one of the chapters in the upcoming book: “More Haunted Montana,” by Karen Stevens, Riverbend Publishing, October 2010