This Place Could Be Haunted
3 Things about this photo:
1.) Jonathan took this in the aftermath of a severe thunderstorm in early July 2013.
2.) This is the former site of the Grandview Point Hotel. I, personally, always just called it the Ship Hotel. Because it looked like a ship. The lettering on its front said “SEE 3 STATES AND 7 COUNTIES.” This Ship Hotel has its own chapter in “Pennsylvania’s Haunted Route 30” by Ed Keleman.
3.) The Ship Hotel burned down in an alleged arson a few days before Halloween 2001. I guess that Devil’s Night came early that year.
This Ship Hotel was VERY well known in our region. My family has countless memories of driving past it through the decades. I am sure that yours does as well. If you do a short google search, you will find many photos of it through the years.
I have none of my own photos of the actual Ship Hotel to share with you. However, I wanted to make sure that you know that there is a scenic overlook where the Ship Hotel used to be. The autumn leaves are getting ready to change colors, and this is a cool place to view them.
US Route 30 rambles across Pennsylvania, up and down and side to side. If you travel Route 30 (the Lincoln Highway) east from Pittsburgh, you will ascend and descend through Western PA’s Appalachian Mountains. You will pass the entrance to the Flight 93 Memorial in Somerset County. About ten miles later you will be at the top of a summit in Bedford County. You will read the following on a sign: “LOOKOUT POINT MT. ARARAT / ALLEGHENY MOUNTAINS / 2464 FT.”
When you see this sign, you have arrived at the old site of the Ship Hotel.
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If you continue east, you will travel downhill. After five miles you will pass an entrance to Shawnee State Park in the valley. Jonathan took the top photo the day of a Gaffron family picnic for the Fourth of July weekend in 2013. My sister Annie planned this picnic weeks or months earlier, and she made sure that we had a lakeside pavilion reserved for it.
Good thing. We got the severe thunderstorm warning on our phones right after the grilling started. The storm itself hit about the same time that our burgers finished cooking. The holiday glitter that Annie had sprinkled on the picnic tables blew away in a downdraft. We all took cover. Eventually the “severe” part of the storm passed. Almost all of our food was okay, and we sat down to eat. We had guests – a nest of baby robins on a ceiling beam. Or maybe we humans were the guests? Our pavilion kept us dry – birds included – in the pouring rain. Good job Annie!
After the rain finished, we decided to walk the path that circles the lake. Shawnee State Park’s swimming area is a little bit down this path. So is the beach house/ dressing room/ closest source of indoor plumbing to our pavilion. We entered it to find a young woman in a white dress and several other sort-of dressed-up people.
A few minutes later, all of the dressed-up people held a short wedding on the beach. Then the bride, the groom, and their entire bridal party jumped, fully dressed, into the rain-swollen lake. After a few minutes of this, everybody got out of the lake, stripped to their underwear, then jumped in their cars and drove away.
After all of this excitement, Jonathan and I packed up and headed west back into the Allegheny Mountains. We took Route 30 most of the way home, which meant that we passed the Flight 93 Memorial, as well as beloved Camp Sequanota in Jennerstown (LOTS of memories for the Gaffron sisters there), as well as my alma mater Saint Vincent. But first, we stopped at the overlook where the Ship Hotel used to be.
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We saw several cars parked alongside the road when we came up to the summit. I was glad that Jonathan decided to stop as well. My family drove past the Ship Hotel so many times through my childhood that it didn’t seem right not to stop.
When I was very young, we lived near Harrisburg. My dad often took us up and down Route 30, past the Ship Hotel, to visit our family in the Pittsburgh area. We enjoyed the scenic route. Also, he saved a lot of money on turnpike tolls. After we moved to Somerset County, we took Route 30 up and down this summit for trips to Shawnee State Park.
I grew up picnicking and camping at Shawnee, as did my own parents did before me. (Both of my parents camped at Shawnee as kids. I wonder if they ever camped in the park together at the same time – years before they met each other in Pittsburgh.) During one of these picnics, my Grandma Gaffron told me about her memories of driving past the Ship Hotel with her own family in the 1930’s or 40’s.
And see – here’s what really bothers me about the arson that took down the Ship. It’s horrible that all of those firefighters came out at 2 a.m., leaving their families and putting themselves in danger, to put out the fire. On the side of a mountain. I know what it’s like to have my own husband leave in the middle of the night for a fire call. But also – the Ship burned down in 2001. My Grandma Gaffron passed away in 2006. This Ship was one of the shared memories that I had with her.
So consider that the Ship Hotel could have been haunted. Before it burned down. What happens to a place like that? What happens to the ghosts?
Do the ghosts just vanish? Or do they linger, like the clouds at hang around a mountain summit after a storm?
