Eating Wyoming: Fine Dining With Ghosts At The Open Range At Sheridan Inn

SHERIDAN — It’s not every day you sit down for a delicious dinner at a fine dining restaurant, only to find out that you might have been dining alongside a ghost. Or maybe even two or three.

That’s what happened to me recently at the Open Range Bar and Grill at the Historic Sheridan Inn, which still has Buffalo Bill Cody’s original bar, said by some to have been given to Cody by Queen Victoria herself.

The dinner itself had been marvelous. I ordered an unusual cut of meat called the Kan Kan chop. Never seen that on a menu before. It is a colossal pork chop cut that originated in Puerto Rico. Some legends suggest the name came from fried chicharrones — crispy fried pork skins, whose fluted edges resemble the bottom of a can-can dancer’s skirt.

All I know is the cut presents itself very well on a plate. It’s like this huge meat mohawk with spicy cubes of flame-grilled pork belly defining the top of the “mohawk” and a rib bone defining the other side.

It tastes a bit like a bacon steak, and it’s as delicious as that sounds. It paired well with the recommended, Hole in the Wall whiskey flight.

It wasn’t until after the meal that the unexpected happened. I’m not one to eat and run, particularly after a great experience, so I was looking through some news article on my cell phone, just enjoying the moment, when I caught this kind of whirling motion out of the corner of my eye.

Next thing I knew, a waitress named Jessica walked over to my table and picked up a water glass that had landed not far from my feet.

Her eyes were bugging out, and she was looking mighty perplexed.

“I was just re-setting the tables in my section,” she told me, explaining that she’s always careful to make sure she sets the glasses up in their proper positions, just to the right of where a diner’s plate will be set.

“When I looked up, I saw the glass was sitting in the center of the table,” she said. “So, I thought, ‘Well maybe I didn’t get it placed right.’”

So, she went back to the table and replaced the glass in the right spot before returning to finish her other tables.

“The next thing I know, this glass is on the floor,” she said.

What Other Restaurant Patrons Saw

Customers at a nearby table were watching the whole thing and told me what they had seen.

Kimber Solberg said the glass kind of scooted rapidly across the table, before tumbling off and landing in front of my table.

One of the people with Solberg was waving his hand up over the table where they had dined, noting a strange temperature difference.

“See it’s cold right here,” he said.

Solberg and her friends had earlier been in what’s known as Miss Kate’s room, after the Inn’s longest caretaker. They had taken note how the eyes in one picture of Miss Kate seem to follow people around the room, wherever they stand.

“It doesn’t matter where you go,” Larry Milbourn said. “Her eyes are always looking at you.”

We took a stroll over to Miss Kate’s room to check that out, and, just like the Mona Lisa in Paris, no matter where I stood in the room, it was as if the Miss Kate’s eyes were always looking right through me.

Jessica, meanwhile, remembered an occasion where a party of diners were talking so loudly over her in Miss Kate’s room, no one could hear her while she was trying to take their order. One of the ladies took a spoon and clinked it against her glass.

Right as she did so, the lights in the room flickered on and off, as if emphasizing the clinking of the glass.

“I told them I thought that was Miss Kate, telling them it’s time to listen,” Jessica said with a smile. “And they finally started to listen!”

Who Was Miss Kate

Catharine Arnold started working at the beautiful Sheridan Inn in 1901 at the age of 22, when the inn was still owned by Buffalo Bill Cody. She had come to Sheridan from Virginia seeking adventure.

She would continue to work at the Sheridan Inn the next 64 years as its hostess and desk clerk, as well as the housekeeper, seamstress, babysitter, and all-around Girl Friday, becoming known as Miss Kate.

Arnold grew a garden behind the Inn for fresh flowers, which she used to decorate all the dining room tables each day. She even lived in one of the hotel’s third-floor rooms until 1965, when the Inn was closed, and, after she died in 1968, her ashes were placed somewhere in the Inn, possibly in one of the walls of the same room she had occupied for so many years.

Miss Kate’s room was eventually renovated, and legends hold that Miss Kate continues to watch over the Inn. Upon occasion, guests have reported hearing a tap-tap-tap sound, like a woman wearing heels, walking on the inn’s wooden floors.

Clairvoyant Truck Driver’s Insights

While the diners who’d watched the glass fly off the table figured that it was Miss Kate not liking the position of the glass, Jessica had her own ideas about who might have been responsible.

That’s because one night she waited on a clairvoyant truck driver who told her that he could see ghosts in the restaurant. One of them was a woman standing near the doorway of the restaurant, wearing a 1950s-style dress.

“That was probably Miss Kate,” Jessica said. “But he said she wasn’t coming into the restaurant itself.”

The truck driver told Jessica he also saw six gentlemen standing at the end of the Buffalo Bill Bar drinking what was no doubt whiskey.

“They were wearing like 1800s clothing,” Jessica said. “And while I was talking to the truck driver, he said they all moved to a nearby table, so they could hear us better.”

According to the truck driver, these particular ghosts were happy that the restaurant had opened once again.

“Before, when it was closed, there was the dark, and there was no music and no voices, no laughter,” Jessica said. “It was just dark and quiet. Having people in here, they can feel the energies and stuff like that so they’re happy the restaurant is open again because they can like live vicariously.”

Down In The Basement …

Pranks happen quite frequently at Open Range, according to General Manager Kali Smith. And not just upstairs in the restaurant.

There’s a basement, too, where lights sometimes turn themselves on and off and doors sometimes close themselves.

“I was doing some training with a new staff member and, as we came down the stairs, I’m showing her where the light switches are,” Smith said.

They decided to leave a particular set of lights on, because Smith was planning to return to the basement to finish up some paperwork in her office.

When Smith did finally go back downstairs, she found doors open that she knows they had closed and lights on in a room she knows had been shut off.

Then, as she came down the hallway, she saw the mechanical room door was also open, and the little soda room door was ajar with the lights on again.

Smith didn’t think much about it. Maybe someone else had come downstairs for something. But, as she went to turn the lights off and shut the door, a different door behind her closed.

“So, I turn and open that door and I turned off the lights again,” she said. “I think I made it about halfway down the hallway and all the lights just turned themselves off.”

Fortunately, there was a light switch right around the corner for her to flip, or she would have been in the dark. Just as she turned that light on, though, all the lights in the hallway switched back on.

“I just stood there, and then I said, ‘Are we finished now?’ And the doors right at the end of the hallway then closed. So, I was like, ‘Okay, now we are finished. All the doors are closed. Thank you so much.”

About Those Footsteps

Smith has also heard a sound like footsteps, akin to a woman walking in heels, tapping up and down the stairs from her office.

“I was on the phone with my banquets coordinator, and I could hear someone coming down the stairs,” she said. “And there was this box that I had ordered for winter uniforms that were the wrong color. I had it in a crate with a bunch of other things at the bottom of the stairs.”

Just as Smith looked up to see who might be coming to her office, one of the tie boxes from that crate bounced off the door and landed on the floor. Smith jumped up to go see who was in the hallway messing with her.

“It was only a few seconds later, and I’m looking around, calling out to anyone who is there, and there was nobody there,” she said. “So, I was like, Okay, I think I’m done downstairs for now.”

Smith said she’s had several other curious things happen while working at the Open Range, but, so far, she’s never gotten the sense there’s any malice involved. The incidents she can’t quite explain feel more like harmless little pranks for attention.

“So, I’ve become very friendly with the things around here,” she said. “I figure that if you just talk to them, it works out better for you. And I do love the stories of Miss Kate. I love that she is really coined as the caretaker of the Inn, and I do think that truly, sometimes these little things could be her saying, like, ‘Hey, this isn’t supposed to be right here. Hey, you need to turn off that light.’”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.