Old hospital gathering place for town ghosts

There is an old brick building in downtown Gardnerville rumored to be the abode of many ghosts. Doors slam shut in the middle of the night. Strange smells waft from room to room. Visiting children are tickled by invisible beings. Or so the stories go....

"I was standing in the kitchen with my husband's secretary, and we were questioning the whole ghost thing," said the building's owner, 69-year-old Louise Manoukian. "I said, 'I wish we could just get one sign that they're here.' Just then, the chandelier over the kitchen table stared swinging. Our first thought was that it was an earthquake. But we looked at the other lamp over the refrigerator, and it was not moving."

It's no surprise that the Manoukian Professional Building, at the corner of Highway 395 and High School Street, is the source of so many ghost stories. The hallways carry the fashion of a bygone era: Velvety wallpaper, elaborate banisters, old-fashioned sconces casting light into otherwise dim corners.

The building was erected in 1914 as the Carson Valley Hospital, seeing the births and deaths of some of the Valley's most prominent citizens. When the hospital closed in 1924, the building became a boarding house for teachers working at the high school across the street. That stint ended in 1948, and the building was left vacant for 30 years.

E-Ann Logan, 84, remembers the rumors floating around before she and her husband Glenn decided to buy and restore the building in 1978.

"It was in a state of disrepair," she said. "Kids were terrified to pass it because they thought it was haunted."

Logan said she was skeptical of the stories at first.

"A psychic told me to burn candles in every room," she said. "When the rooms were still boarded, my husband walked upstairs with a flashlight. When he came back, he said, 'I don't think we need the candles. The ghosts like us.'"

But her husband might have changed his mind the night he was working late and heard the doors upstairs slamming shut. When he went to investigate, he found that all the doors were locked. He brushed it off as his imagination, but he wasn't even halfway down the staircase when the slamming started again.

"He decided he had worked enough and that it was time to go home," Logan recalled.

Logan also remembers when a legal secretary brought her son to work.

"She brought her child here from school," she said, "and he kept squirming around and laughing. Finally, he yelled, 'Stop it!' When his mother asked what was going on, he said, 'That lady keeps tickling me!'"

Logan and many others believe the invisible lady was the ghost of May Kinney, a nurse of the old hospital.

"The story goes that nurse May Kinney keeps coming back to visit," said Sue Smith, who plays the nurse for the Haunted Gardnerville Ghost Walk show. "But she is a happy ghost."

Louise Manoukian agrees.

"She protects the children that come in here," she said.

Manoukian and her husband Noel purchased the building in 1985. What were once hospital rooms are now offices for Allstate Insurance, Nevada Landworks, Douglas Counseling Services, and Owens Engineering. Noel has a law office, and Louise keeps her own office in what was the hospital's operating room.

"I'm not afraid to be here alone," she said. "I have closed up the building by myself."

Manuokian said current occupants sometimes smell weird aromas drifting in the air, like perfumes from the 1940s, or the smell of certain foods.

"Mamie Brown ran the boarding house and use to always cook fried chicken and sourdough pancakes," Manoukian said. "I have smelled the fried chicken."

Although she believes the ghosts are benevolent, Manoukian said psychics have told her that some rooms emanate disturbing energies.

"One of them told me that a room upstairs had terrible pain, that someone in there had suffered from gangrene," she said.

But no matter how mysterious the phenomenon, Manoukian has resisted "messing with the spirits."

"When they were in middle school, my daughter and her friends had some sort of seance or something," Manoukian said. "I don't know what happened, but when I found them, they had scared themselves pretty good, and I told them, 'Don't mess with the spirits ever again.'"

Jacquie Manoukian, now 36, remembers the incident.

"It wasn't really a seance," she said, "but some of my friends were bothering the spirits. They kept saying they didn't believe in ghosts, and that if there were beings in the building, they should prove themselves.

"We were all sitting at the kitchen table, and we started hearing noises. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. A chill went through the room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure standing in the hallway. She had long dark hair and was wearing a white dress and green apron... She was there, and then she was gone."

Manoukian said she learned her lesson.

"I don't mess with them. I don't need that kind of proof," she said.