My relationship with my dad was a fraught one throughout my life. He was a recovering alcoholic, sober for 19 years, until he wasn’t. After an accident at work that dislocated his shoulder, he became addicted to prescription pills, which ultimately led him back to alcohol. My mom gave him many chances to get sober before she divorced him.
Dad was a bit of a rebel. Fully tattooed, down to his knuckles, leather jacket wearing, motorcycle riding. Despite butting heads, we bonded over horror movies, a shared interest of ours. I got my taste in everything from him, and as a School of Visual Arts dropout, he had good taste. I wish he would’ve stayed in art school; he was really good, and selfishly I think I would’ve made a good nepo baby. But alcohol got in the way. He ruined his connections and ended his art career before it started. However, that didn’t stop him from turning our house into his personal art project, with walls decked out in murals, abundant collections, walls painted orange. It was maximalism before it was trendy, and it was how I grew up.
After my mom served him divorce papers, my dad took off on a cross-country road trip on his Harley Davidson, going from our home in San Diego to where I was in New York City. I talked to him on the phone every night of his journey, where he would drunkenly atone for his sins and regale me with tales of barfights along Route 66. He begged me to join him on his journey; he’d pay for the plane ticket and everything. I couldn’t. I was only 21 and still in college; it was the middle of the semester. I didn’t really want to be there while he got drunk by himself anyway.
He made it as far as Missouri before turning back. He never made it to New York, instead staying holed up in a haunted hotel in Gallup, New Mexico. The hotel was a spot in the desert, straight out of an old Western, and was frequently used for various film shoots. In addition to that, it had a reputation for being haunted. It seemed like the kind of spot my dad would thrive in.
Two weeks into his stay at the hotel, I got a FaceTime call from my mom early in the morning. It was exactly what I expected; my dad had died. He drank himself to death in that haunted hotel, another ghost for the collection. I didn’t cry, I was the one talking to him every night, so I knew exactly how bad his drinking had gotten. It was only a matter of time.
My mom and sister visited the hotel years later. The people working at the hotel remembered my dad. How could they not? It must’ve been entirely traumatizing for them to find his body. Apparently on his last night, my dad ordered a steak to his room. When room service delivered the steak, he handed them a tip with tears in his eyes. “Pray for me,” he told them. He was gone by the morning. Hearing this story was what made me realize that perhaps his death was more intentional than a random night of alcohol poisoning.
Years later, my mom is watching the Discovery Channel when she sees an ad for Ghost Adventures. Apparently, an episode was airing that night about the hotel where my dad died. They’d be hunting for ghosts in that Gallup hotel. Maybe they’ll meet my dad, I thought. I watched the episode that night. It was mostly fabricated stories, but my dad’s death was mentioned as “the suicide in room 214.”
The reenactment actor looked nothing like my dad; he didn’t have a single tattoo. And there wasn’t a drop of alcohol in the room, just bottles of pills. They not only didn’t ask his family for permission, they also got the facts wrong. I was a little offended, but mostly I was weirdly proud. My dad loved ghosts and anything spooky, so I’m sure he would’ve been thrilled to be featured as a ghost in a haunted cowboy hotel.
After I watched the episode, I made the very Gen-Z decision to make a TikTok video about it. “I don’t know if you guys watch Ghost Adventures,” I told my audience. “But the hotel where my dad died was on the latest episode.” I then talked a little bit about who my dad was, and why he was at the hotel. It blew up on the app, getting about 100,000 views before I deleted the app a few months later. I’m not a big fan of social media and the sheer amount of people listening to my story was overwhelming. It was a niche audience, but it was nice while it lasted.
I reached out to the Ghost Adventures guys. They never got back to me. I think they were worried I would sue them or something. For the record, I was never planning on doing that, or chastising them in any way, I mostly just wanted to collaborate and maybe talk to my dad’s ghost. But I digress. As surreal as it was seeing that episode, I think it’s best to let my dad be. He had a difficult life, and if his final resting place is a haunted hotel, well, I think that’s what he might’ve wanted.
Shortly after my dad’s death, I went on my own cross-country road trip. With a childhood friend driving, we went along Route 66, me scattering my dad’s ashes at every gas station we stopped at along the way. My friend was already making the journey for school, so I tagged along to try to make some sense of my father’s headspace when he went on his own journey. Eventually we stopped at the hotel in Gallup, where we planned to stop for just one morning at the tail end of our trip. It was a gorgeous spot, truly. The lobby was adorned in furs and looked even more like it had been transported from a Western.
I didn’t stay long, and I didn’t talk to anybody, but I took it all in. I didn’t plan on going to the room where he died. I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to see the place for myself, the same place that my dad texted me pictures of mere days before he died. I didn’t want to bother the staff for any kind of grand tour or séance. I figured it was probably traumatic for them to find a dead body in their room. So I numbly walked through the lobby, feeling a sense of peace.
This was the last place my dad ever stayed. This was the spot where he finally succumbed to his demons. And this was where his ghost was now, hopefully, resting. I truly hope that wherever he is in the afterlife, if he is a ghost at this haunted hotel, or if he’s finally at peace, he’s happy where he is. At least happier than he was in his lifetime. Regardless of how he treated us, he deserves at least that.
Rachel Meghan is a mother, book critic, and writer based in Providence, RI. They have been featured in Poynter, Vulture, Rue Morgue, and Books by Page, among others. They love horror movies, musicals, weird books, and their family.
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My sister and I traveled to California a couple of years ago to see family and spread our Dad's ashes in various places he lived and loved. He died in 2020 — different circumstances, but similarly we had a fraught relationship with our father. But during this trip, where we spent hours in the car traveling around northern California, we kept having experiences that felt straight out of a horror movie: almost running out of gas in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a power outage at an old motel during a big thunderstorm that lasted all night, finding one lone box of Sees chocolates (our Mom's favorite) sitting on a pile of t-shirts in the middle of an airport gift shop, where seemingly no other Sees candies were on display anywhere that... That's just a handful of the bizarre occurrences we encountered. Thus, my sister and I decided that these were signs that our Dad was actively "haunting" us on our trip, which amused us greatly.
We ended our week-long, multihundred mile long, ash-scattering tour of northern California by getting matching dagger tattoos to commemorate our special trip, our bond as sisters, and our challenging relationship with our father.
Reading your story hit on many levels. Thank you for sharing it.
I loved reading your connection to your dad. Thank you so much for sharing. I hope he is at peace knowing he left a wonderful piece of himself behind in you.