Ghost Hunters, "Inn of the Dead"

Ghost Hunters, "Inn of the Dead"

I learned something new from this episode.  I learned how to pronounce the word "cupola," which is a word I've only ever seen in print.  I always assumed it was pronounced just like it looks - "cup" like a cup, and "ola" like "Crayola."  Turns out it's pronounced "coop-ola" instead, with a long U.  Ya learn something every day!

The word "cupola" came up a lot in this episode, because one of the reported haunting was from a former employee, Fred, who hanged himself in the cupola.  Gruesomely, he hung himself at the start of a long holiday weekend, and his body was not found for many days.  At which point, things were apparently pretty bad.

A current employee reports that once on a whim as she was locking up for the night, she called "Goodnight, Fred!"  And heard a long, moaning, "gooodniiiiiiiiight" from the cupola.  Yep, I would have been out of there like a Looney Tunes cartoon, leaving behind an Erika-shaped hole in the nearest wall.

Another employee lived in the basement for years, and eventually hanged himself down there.  People report feeling uneasy in the basement, but who wouldn't?  Come on, show me the basement where people DON'T feel uneasy.  It's a basement!  It's just darned creepy.

The Orleans Inn turns out to have a long and gory history, actually.  In addition to the two relatively recent employee deaths, a prostitute named Hannah was murdered in the front yard.  And mobsters used to store illegal gin in the inn during Prohibition days.

I have to take back something I said last time about being frustrated that Jason and Grant didn't try and film the light flickering.  This time around we have the same situation, with something (or someone?) unseen blocking out a thin sliver of light at the far side of the basement.  The cameraman turns around to watch it, and… yeah, you can't see a darned thing.  I guess the IR lights they use for filming washes out any thin slivers of light.

But we return to one of my original grievances, which is the "turn on the flashlight for yes" thing.  If you unscrew a flashlight until it's easy to turn on, then it's also going to be liable to flicker on and off just from ambient vibrations, slight drafts, metal connectors warming up or cooling off, and so forth.

But then again, I got chills when Hannah answered in the affirmative that someone was upstairs.  The timing of that sequence is just wonderful.  So there's that.

Given the colorful history (both long ago and recent) of the Orleans Inn, I was hoping for a little bit more in the way of evidence.  Jason and Grant heard a scream, which was caught on camera, but frankly it sounded like coyotes to me.  And they got a chilling EVP from the cupola, that really did sound like "cut me down."  (Oh Frank, dude, if you wanted someone to cut you down, you shouldn't have killed yourself in the first place, jerk!)  But all in all, a fairly satisfying ghost hunt.