BETHEL – Macky Chapman thought she was alone that night.

It was in the early 1970s, and Chapman was working as a waitress at the Bethel Inn. “I was closing up, and it was fairly dark,” she said.

“I looked up to Table 7, and there was a woman sitting there. She looked fairly old-fashioned. She was just sitting there looking at me.”

“When I looked back, she was gone.”

Chapman, a quiet woman with a kind smile, has worked in the dining room off and on for more than 30 years. She later learned that hers was not the only otherworldly encounter at the inn. There have been many other sightings, and not just of the woman at Table 7. Most occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s, she said.

The Bethel Inn is among 12 “ghoulish getaways” listed on the New England Inns Web site. The site lists six tips for ghost sighting, including keeping a notepad to make sketches of any apparitions that may make their presence known. It notes, though, that ghosts often appear “misty,” without any real color.

According to Chapman, however, the inn’s unpaying guests are anything but ethereal. They do not appear as unexplained cold spots; they do not make people’s hair stand on end.

They are not grotesque or malevolent. Most often, they make themselves known through phantom noises or things glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. Other times, they are simply people who should not, or could not, be there.

Victuals and spirits

Some of these ghostly guests seem to linger in hope of a bit of food or drink. In the 1980s, a chef was working through the night to prepare for a function the next day. “He looked up, and there was a man standing there,” Chapman said. “It startled him, and he looked down. He looked back up, and he was gone.”

A ghost in the South Dining Room waits, as though expecting service. “People have said in the South Dining Room that the lights will come on at odd hours at night, and they’ve seen someone sitting there,” said Chapman.

Unexplained noises have also been heard in the tavern.

Some of the sightings may be linked to former inn guests. An elderly guest named Mrs. Oats excused herself to use the bathroom during dinner one night. “When she didn’t come back, they went and checked on her,” Chapman said. “She died in the bathroom. Years later, someone went in the bathroom, and they came back out and told Ida, who was the hostess at the time, that this woman was in there primping in front of the mirror. They asked her name and she said Mrs. Oats.’ Mrs. Oats had been dead for quite some time.”

Guests have complained about disturbances on the second floor as well. A trustee of the Bingham Fund, which saw the inn through financial difficulties in the 1960s and 1970s, refused to stay in Room 11 after one such incident.

A New York City businessman had stayed in Room 11 every spring and fall for years when he traveled to Bethel to attend meetings. One day, after locking his door as he was leaving his room, he returned to find it open. He locked it again and retired for the night. In the morning it was open. “He wouldn’t sleep in that room again,” Chapman said. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with that room.”

Chapman also told of two elderly women, friends who shared a room at the other end of the hall. They complained that the sound of people moving furniture in the attic above them was keeping them awake at night. The manager had the attic locked, keeping a key for himself and giving one to the head housekeeper. No one else had access to the attic. Still the noises continued, she said.

Someone at peace

The Bethel Inn was built in 1913 by Dr. John Gehring and five of his patients. In its early years, the inn was a temporary home to those who sought Gehring’s help. According to a Bethel Inn brochure, Gehring sought the mountain air of Bethel after suffering a mental and physical breakdown. After recovering, he opened his home to wealthy and distinguished sufferers of “nervous disorders.”

A plaque in the inn’s lobby calls Gehring “an unusual physician,” possibly because the treatments he administered included chopping wood, weeding gardens and attending formal dinners at his home. Not all of Gehring’s patients responded well to his method, though. One distraught woman in his care hanged herself in the kitchen dumbwaiter not far from the spot where Chapman saw the lady at Table 7.

Could Chapman’s ghost be that unfortunate soul, as the inn’s brochure suggests?

Sunlight fills the spacious dining room through a window next to Table 7. Nothing in the room suggests the presence of a ghost. There are no cobwebs or dark corners, no eerie feelings of something amiss.

“I didn’t get the feeling of anyone being upset,” Chapman said. “I just had the feeling of someone that was at peace and just came to visit.”