TALES OF TERROR

Red Lady

The Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver, Canada is infamous in the local Vancouver community for being the supposed residence of a fashionable apparition named the "Lady in Red". This ghostly figure is said to glide along the 14th floor of the hotel, and has allegedly been seen by many a hotel guest and employee.

The legendary "Lady in Red," according to public relations co-ordinator Brenda Meikle, is both part of the hotel's history, and integral to its character. The ghost is believed to be Jennie Pearl Cox, a regular at the swanky hotel's ballroom in the 1930s and '40s. According to Meikle, her spirit took up residence in the hotel after a fatal car crash in 1944.

 The Lady in Red is a friendly spirit, and no- one who has seen her has reported to have felt afraid.

"She's been seen passing through elevator doors on the first and fourteenth floors," says Meikle, noting that the 1st and 14th are the only floors that have dummy shafts.

 "We've also had a family of Japanese tourists call the front desk, concerned that their assigned room was already occupied," says Meikle. The occupant the family described finding in their room? The lady in red.

The Red Lady of Huntingdon College is a ghost said to haunt the former Pratt Hall dormitory at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. According to Windham and historian Daniel Barefoot, there have actually been two ghosts alleged to have haunted Huntingdon College. The first appeared in the late nineteenth century, while the college was still located in the town of Tuskegee, Alabama. She was described as a young woman wearing a scarlet dress and carrying a scarlet parasol who walked wordlessly up and down the halls of a women's dormitory late one night, bathed in a red glow. This apparition, according to Windham, ultimately left the residence hall and disappeared from view as she passed through a gateway outside. The alleged identity or origin of this wraith has never been determined, and she was apparently never seen again.

The second Red Lady, according to Windham, was a former student named Martha (according to Windham) or Margaret (according to another source; no last name for this alleged person has ever been offered) who had reluctantly come to Huntingdon from New York, because her father's mother had attended Huntingdon when it was in Tuskegee, and his will specified that she must attend his mother's alma mater. Martha did not especially want to come to Alabama, but her father's fortune was large and she knew his deep love for his home state. Martha, according to the legend, was dressed in red when she arrived, and she brought with her red draperies for her windows and a red spread for her bed together with other accessories of the same color. Although many of her fellow students asked her to explain her apparent obsession with the color red, Martha always demurred.