"Barbee Hotel popular night spot" P.V. Sheridan: The Barbee
Hotel was the night spot for many miles around. Probably the only place that
served alcoholic beverages in about a ten or twenty mile radius. And it was
legendary for the parties and the drinking and the carousing. That’s about all
I know. Never frequented the place.
The
"Barbee Hotel." The hotel was originally called "The
Ormond."
"Kids sneak into Barbee Hotel" [Did you ever go to the Barbee Hotel?] Betty: Lots of times when I
wasn’t supposed to be there. Well, that’s where everybody went. One time a
bunch of us went down there—my mom was there, Ida Hughes was there, and Nell
Clifford was there, and some guy was down there that Ida Hughes didn’t like,
and she took a glass of beer and threw it in his face. She said "I never
did like him, anyway." We did sneak down there. But we were kids; we’d do
like all the other kids did. We weren’t any different.
Little girl
("cousin Rosamond") with the hotel in the background.
"Barbee Hotel haunted by ghost of girlfriend" Bob Sheridan: Then there’s
the story about the Barbee Hotel. In the ‘20’s, that was the big hangout for
the mob. And they’d bring their girlfriends up there and everything. Al
Capone, John Dillinger—Jesse James didn’t make it because he was dead.
Anyway, they would bring their girlfriends up there. Well, somehow, one of the
guys sneaked out of Chicago with somebody else’s girlfriend. They came to the
hotel. Her boyfriend came hunting for them, and caught them in the room in the
hotel, and he shot her. She was killed. Even since the hotel’s been remodeled,
people can still hear her moaning sometimes during the night, and that’s to
this very day.
"Wrought-iron bridge crossed over the channel" P.V. Sheridan: Was that wrought-iron bridge there [near Barbee Hotel]
then? The one that went over the channel? Betty: Yes. One time cousin Mariette and I got mad at each other, and
wouldn’t cross the bridge at the same time. So I walked under it—which was
the dumbest thing—and she walked over it. And I got cuts and everything else
and Mariette just walked over it. But she was bigger than me, though. We always
had fun there.
Apparently,
the bridge was a good place to take pictures.
"Haunted house near Barbee Hotel" Betty: That one place we went
down to was always haunted. It was where the Landing is now, next to the Barbee
Hotel, but it was an old house, nobody had lived in there for a long time. We’d
go down there to tell ghost stories. Uncle John and Wesley Gall would go down
there before us and scare us to death. And we knew they were going to be down
there; we knew that! But we still got scared. P.V.: That was the house that
used to have bats flying around it. I was afraid of it, and I was afraid of the
bridge. Betty: It was awful. It
really was a scary place.