BATES MOTEL
Location: The Bates Motel is located fifteen miles east of Fairvale, California and twenty-three miles west of Hitchcock, California on Old Highway 10, a forgotten stretch of highway off Interstate 10 between Los Angeles, California and Phoenix, Arizona.
Description of Place: The Bates Motel is a simple one story L-shaped motel with ten rooms, each with its own bath and telephone situated upon forty acres of arid desert and a nearby swamp resulting from the Colorado River. Upon a small hill in back of the motel is a two-story Gothic Victorian with three bedrooms, attic and full basement. The basement has an exterior entrance.
Ghostly Manifestations:
While the Bates Motel looks boring and isolated, it is the Bates house in back
that resembles the traditional haunted house. Perched ominously from a hill over
the old hotel, it stands looming over the hotel as a wizened architectural
nightmare to its morbid and blood-soaked past. The rational and the wary do not
go near it, but for some reason, the intimidating edifice remains a source of
fascination for the lurid and deranged individuals who would poke into its past.
The house was the childhood home of Norman
Bates during the tumultuous years that America was at war. As the Allies fought
the Axis Parties over the plains and in the woods in Europe, Norman lived in
happy solitude with his mother, and after her death, he never left it. The house
became his own world. Spending just over twenty years in a mental hospital
through the Seventies and Eighties, he returned to it to find it darker and
suddenly less than inviting. He told anyone who would listen that in some form
or another, his mother was back.
At the time, there had not been a single
person renting the house for several years according to his physician, Dr. Carl
Brandon. The few who had tried never stayed very long. They reported feelings of
uneasiness in the place, sensations of being watched and the unavoidable
perception of not being alone in the old house. Police officers from Fairvale
were sent out several times looking for intruders, but never found anything. The
isolation, which Norman had once welcomed, became an uneasy guest to the people
who tried renting the house.
During the Seventies, Warren Toomey had been
hired to run the hotel in Norman’s absence and to a lesser degree to serve as
caretaker. Constantly chasing sex-starved teens looking for a place to hide out
of the Bates House, he was also encountering individuals who could vanish at
will. At times, he could see someone pulling the curtain back from the bedroom
window overlooking the hotel. He’d race up to catch trespassers in the empty
house, but no one was ever up there. Thinking they were racing out the back
door, he started barricading the back door to trap the intruders inside and
returning with as many of the largest guys he could find, but still the
intruders managed to evade him.
Down in the hotel, infrequent guests reported
water faucets that turned on and sensations of being watched. Toomey had a
series of plumbers constantly replacing the tub fixtures in the bathroom in Room
#1 because he was finding it running full blast when no one was staying in it.
On one occasion, he reported the vague glimpse of a dripping naked woman behind
him in the reflection of the bathroom mirror. From the motel office, Toomey
claimed to hear someone moving around inside the apartment next to the office
even when it was supposed to be empty. By chance, he discovered an old peephole
behind a picture in the back room and as he used it to sneak a look at his
mysterious guest, he discovered someone looking back at him from the other side!
Several years later, Alex West seemingly upset
the ghosts by updating and renovating the house and motel. The crew carrying out
the construction left for town to get lunch and drinks and instead brought
stories about the grounds being cursed. Equipment sometimes didn’t work or
inexplicable events happened. One carpenter was nearly seriously injured when a
wall fell the wrong way and an undiscovered electricity cable underground
electrocuted a few men. In the late afternoon hours, the general contractor
reported seeing individuals lurking around that shouldn’t have been there.
When he’d go to confront them, there’d be no one in sight.
Barbara Peters, one of the first guests in the restored hotel, told friends several months later about a redheaded ghost that visited her room when she stayed at the hotel. In order to stay a part of a conversation in personal ghost stories, she described meeting a rather attractive girl with red hair she thought was very real. As she signed out of the hotel, she enquired to West on how she could get in contact with the young woman who she had been a friend with. West revealed to her that there were no current guests at that time with red hair.
"She was pretty adamant the girl she spoke with had been real." Alex mentions. He adds that no attempt has been made to rebuild the house, but on some days, he hears a creaking noise from up on the hill, as if someone was up there rocking a chair on the front porch.
History: Jacob and Paul Bates were brothers and natives of Plainfield,
Wisconsin at the turn of the century. They were drafted together and both served
tours of duty in Europe and abroad. After World War One, they reunited in San
Diego, California and united their military pensions to purchase forty acres of
worthless desert land near Fairvale a mere hundred miles away. In 1929, Jacob
Bates wanted to be a rancher and raise horses, but first he wanted to woo and
win the heart of Gloria Norma Spool, a lovely dancer eight years his junior. He
built her a grand house out near Fairvale and promised it to her if she would
marry him. Jacob and his brother eventually became estranged. The younger
brother reportedly had eyes for Gloria or thought Jacob was wasting time on her
than working on their plans to build their ranch. Nevertheless, Paul Bates
vanished and supposedly returned home to Plainfield. In truth, it was discovered
that he had been murdered by Jake and buried in the grounds near the house.
Jacob and Gloria married and they had a son
named Norman in 1932. Gloria convinced him to build the hotel to support them,
but soon it became apparent that he was using the hotel to fraternize with
younger girls, among them her own sister, Emma. Emma reportedly even abducted
young Norman at one point to protect him from the fights between his parents and
began thinking he was her own son. She was institutionalized in the Kern County
Mental Hospital shortly thereafter. Strained by her husband’s infidelities,
Gloria Bates murdered Jacob and made his death look like an accident at the
hotel.
At some point, Gloria stopped using her first
name and was entirely going by Norma. Her pregnancy with Norman had been
difficult and had damaged her kidneys; she couldn’t hold her urine and was
constantly racing for the bathroom. She developed a love/hate relationship with
her son, which colored his later adult life. They enjoyed an isolated existence
together living off the hotel, but the new interstate in 1950 ruined that. The
redirection of traffic was a frantic time for Norma as she tried to figure out
what to do to for money. She began seeing a beau named Chet Rudolph and made
quick plans to get him to marry her. Socially maladjusted, Norman saw him as an
obstacle for his mother’s affection and in an irrational state poisoned them
both. The Fairvale police in a hurried effort to close the case erroneously
called it a murder-suicide.
At some point, Norman, pressed by the
realization of what he did, stole his mother’s corpse and began treating it to
keep it in a semblance of life. His neurosis escalated as he began impersonating
her in order to keep the illusion that she was still alive. The combination of
the dual personalities he was keeping added by his effort to keep it secret
pressed him resulted in him killing two young women (the number could be higher
as there was a number of unexplained murders in the area). Norman’s secret
life came to an end in December 1960 after his third victim, Marion Crane, who
was wanted for embezzling money in Phoenix and was being sought by the police.
Norman was institutionalized in the Kern
County Mental Hospital shortly after Emma was released. His release in 1983 did
not sit well with the family members of his murdered victims, especially the
sister and niece of Marion Crane. A few more deaths and vanishings occurred, but
whether they were done by Norman is a matter of debate. Circumstantial evidence
pointed toward Crane’s relatives as well as to Emma Spool whose dead body
Norman turned out to be keeping in the basement as he had with his mother.
Nevertheless, he was re-admitted into the hospital in 1986 after a fruitless
attempt for a new life with Maureen Coyle, one of the victims. Her death this
time was a contributing factor to his new breakdown.
Norman was released again in 1990, but instead
of returning to the hotel, he moved in with and married Dr. Constance Forbes,
his therapist. They had a daughter, Gloria Bates, but unknown arsonists burned
down the Bates house near the Hotel in 1990. Unverified rumors claim Norman,
trying to erase the sins of his past, was behind the arson.
This was not the end of the hotel, however. When Norman died in 1992, he willed the house to Alex West, a young socially restrained man he had befriended while in the hospital. Alex restored the hotel on his release with the help of Willie Brandon, the granddaughter of Norman’s doctor, and Henry Watson, a contractor which he had befriended.
Identity of Ghosts: The majority of hauntings seem to be from Gloria Norma Bates, Norman’s mother, who may be connected to the house from the years her body was kept in it. The ghost of the red-haired girl could be one of Norman’s unidentified victims.
Comments: Psycho
(1960/1983/1986/1990)/Bates Motel (1987)
Hauntings loosely
based on the former O'Hare Mansion in Greencastle, Indiana and Old Metz
Elementary in San Antonio, Texas.
Norman Bates based loosely on Ed Gein (1906-1984)