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Relics Restaurant & Roadhouse at Historic Rainbow’s End
This past spring, a 15-person crew from The Travel Channel’s show The Dead Files took over Relics Restaurant & Roadhouse at Historic Rainbow’s End for an entire week, closing the restaurant for three days. The team, including famed medium Amy Allan and retired homicide detective Steve DiSchiavi, was there to investigate the oft-repeated rumor that one of Sedona’s oldest dining establishments is haunted. (Relic’s opened as The Gibson House in 1946.) The results will be revealed during the show’s season finale in the spring, but Relics co-owner Joe DeSalvo says the team’s conclusion was that the building is absolutely haunted.
“There are several presences here, but we know the names of just two of them,” says Joe, who, along with Executive Chef Karen DeSalvo, has owned the steakhouse for 13 years. “One is Frank Gibson, who homesteaded here in the early 1900s. He’s the restaurant’s steward. The other ghost is Elizabeth, but we don’t know anything about her. And you’ll see on the show that there are spirits here resulting from the fact that this was a sacred spot for Native Americans.”
Joe himself is a longtime skeptic when it comes to paranormal activity, though that has changed in recent years. Ever since he purchased the place, customers have come to him with photos featuring strange apparitions and “orbs,” which some people believe are otherworldly in origin. Joe has collected some of these photos in a brochure and posted them online so curiosity seekers can make up their own minds. He says most of the ghost stories have come from diners, though the restaurant’s staff has had their fair share of unexplained experiences. Joe’s office assistant claims to have seen Frank Gibson as a full-bodied apparition before she was even aware he was the restaurant’s original owner. Karen watched a cup fly across the kitchen in broad daylight and has felt a presence brush past her. (For those interested, the Lawson Room tends to see the most activity, though there’s a table in the Roadhouse reserved for ghosts and set with antique Tiffany china.)
Regardless if you believe in actual ghosts, Relics does have an eerie vibe. Joe and Karen spent nearly $1 million renovating the 7,000-square-foot space when they purchased it, exposing stone walls, knotty-pine plank ceilings and original flooring. Joe enjoys antiques (the restaurant’s General Store – the oldest part of the space – doubles as an antiques shop), and authentic period pieces such as lamps and furniture can be found throughout the restaurant. Relics’ enormous wooden bar was purchased from actress Ann Miller, who had a home in Sedona. The bar features lion heads with spooky glowing red eyes. Locally, Relics is perhaps best known for being an exterior location in the 1965 Western film The Rounders starring Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda.
Relics Restaurant & Roadhouse at Historic Rainbow’s End offers ghost/history tours daily at 4:30 p.m. by appointment only for $5 per person. To celebrate the restaurant’s haunted history, Joe and Karen are hosting two masquerade balls Oct. 28 and 29. One party is open to the public while the other will act as a fundraiser for the Humane Society of Sedona. Relics will also screen the season finale of The Dead Files next spring. Visit www.relicsrestaurant.com or call 928-282-1593 for details.
Tours of Jerome
The dainty moon, surrounded by a freckle of stars, hung high over Jerome’s Cleopatra Hill. To the south, silent strobe-like lightning backlit bloated clouds. There were five of us gathered on a cracked concrete slab near the site of the former Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino. Jason Voss, a ghost hunter with Tours of Jerome, rolled a set of dice on the ground. “Is there anyone there?” he called out. Through the static on his radio scanner came the clipped, foreign voice of a man. “Did anyone else just hear ‘si’”? asked Jason.
Yep.
Tours of Jerome, which was founded in October 2008 by Ronne Roope, a former historian and archivist for the Jerome Historical Society, offers several haunted tours. We took the two-hour Just Jerome Haunted Tour, complete with electric-and-magnetic-fields meters, aka ghost meters, and there were definitely a few goose-bump-inducing moments. For example, Jason took us on a mini tour of the Connor Hotel with its ominous second-floor windows that look down on Main Street. He told us stories about what people had experienced in the hotel’s 12 rooms, then we entered room No. 1 at the far end of a narrow hallway. In the small room with the flowered wallpaper, our EMF readers lit up and began to beep. “People have reported the sensation of fingernails scratching their arms in this room,” said Jason, a little too matter-of-factly.
When we left the hotel, it was dark outside, and the walking tour led us to the Holy Family Catholic Church, which was built in 1896. Jason pointed out a vessel that allegedly holds the finger bone of the church’s saint and told us about the eccentric priest who hid money all over the church and collected women’s shoes – but only for the right foot. At every stop along the way, Jason relayed
stories of the fires, landslides, epidemics, murders and mine accidents that make up Jerome’s storied past. We wandered down a dirt road to learn the story behind La Victoria Glass Studio, “Mexican Town” (Jerome was quite segregated in its heyday) and the nearby apartment complex (with a red porchlight). The complex is rumored to be haunted by a beautiful prostitute named Sammie Dean who was found strangled after she turned down her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. Nearby, there’s the infamous Cuban Queen Bordello, which is boarded up, Jerome’s “sliding jail” and the aforementioned Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino, which closed after the great landslide of 1936. All of this is done in the dark with only the dim lights from town and Jason’s flashlight illuminating the route, adding to the spooky atmosphere.
The tour took us to the outside of the Liberty Theatre, which opened in 1918. The theater now primarily functions as a gift shop, but when it’s open, you can fork over a few bucks to see the cinema that seated 536 people until it closed in 1929. There’s a creepy story about a ghost warning a town resident about a disaster taking place in front of the theater; the next day, a concrete eagle on the theater’s façade tumbled to the ground, narrowly missing schoolchildren waiting for their bus.
The tour concluded with a glimpse into the window of what used to be the women’s jail and a stroll down an alleyway that housed the “cribs,” a row of closet-sized rooms with cots and washbasins that comprised one of the town’s two red-light districts. Jason showed us photos of what the cribs looked like when they were still standing, and it gave new meaning to the term “office space.” By this point it was nearly 9 p.m., and there were very few people on the streets save for a group of Pokemon Go enthusiasts searching for ghost Pokemon. Clouds had begun to move in front of the moon, making it feel like Halloween in August. Jason says paranormal activity on the tours increases during the days leading up to a full moon. A collective shiver went through the group.
For those looking for a more immersive paranormal experience, the Jerome Grand Hotel offers ghost tours on select weeknights to guests only. After the tour, guests can keep the EMF meters and infrared thermometers for the entire night in the hopes that they will continue discovering spirits. The hotel, which sits on a hill and seems to overlook the entire town, was built in 1926 as the United Verde Hospital. The 30,000-square-foot, five-story building opened in 1927 and closed in 1950. It stood empty until it was purchased and restored in 1994. Even if you aren’t staying there, it’s worth it to stop in for drinks or a meal at The Asylum Restaurant (which is decked out with a coffin at this time of the year), and then take a peek at the hotel’s self-service Otis elevator. The elevator has never been modernized and remains the oldest original self-service elevator in Arizona. While you’re at it, look through the ledgers at the front desk. They are filled with stories of ghost sightings that are sure to make your skin crawl.
Tours of Jerome offers tours seven days a week. The two-hour Just Jerome Haunted Tour is $35 per person. Tours depart at dusk. For details, visit www.toursofjerome.com or call 928-639-4361. The Jerome Grand Hotel’s Jerome Ghost Hunt happens on select weeknights from 6 to 8 p.m. Tours are open to hotel guests only and cost $30 per person. For details, visit www.jeromegrandhotel.net or call 928-634-8200.
More things to do in Sedona in October
