Things that go thump in the night

I read “The Spirit of Tombstone” [Oct. 30] and was reminded of my ghostly experience in Bisbee, Ariz., during spring vacation. After spending a day in Tombstone, my sons and I headed south to Bisbee. We stayed at the 100-plus-year-old Copper Queen Hotel, dubbed the oldest continuously operating hotel in Arizona.

At check-in, we received a copy of the hotel flier regarding the hotel’s ghostly residents. Our floor, the fourth, had allegedly been the location of mischievous acts by a boy ghost whose mother had worked at the Copper Queen during the town’s mining heyday. That night, after reading before falling asleep, I set my reading glasses on the window sill above my bed. The window was open only about an inch, because the night was chilly.

Sometime in the night, my glasses somehow fell onto my face and woke me up. In consideration of the juxtaposition of the fourth-floor legend and my secular/empirical nature, I replaced the glasses on the ledge but decided to do this without opening my eyes, just in case there might be something to observe that I might not want to see.

The next morning, my sons and I spent some time reading the hotel’s voluminous guest ghost-sighting journal. In an entry dated 2002, I found the following for Room 402, our room: “Do not open the window .... Weird things happen.”

WENDY SALAYA

Long Beach

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THANK you to Rosemary McClure for her article on Tombstone. It seems like a great place to go if anyone wants to be entertained by gun violence, but personally, I prefer to vacation somewhere that offers something different from what I see too much of on the evening news each night.

Let me know if in the future Tombstone offers visitors something other than glorified violence; I might visit.

KENNETH MICHAEL WHITE

Upland