Mickey Bradley '87 and Dan Gordon '87 team up to write Haunted Baseball
Mickey Bradley and Dan Gordon met as freshman, became friends as sophomores, and really got to know each other their junior year, when Bradley was Gordon’s dorm R.A. But other than the occasional run-in over hall sports, there was little talk of baseball, let alone writing a book together.
“Mickey’s a Yankees fan, named after Mantle,” Gordon said. “And I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Red Sox fan. So I think we felt the less said about baseball, the better.”
After graduation, Bradley moved on to graduate school and embarked on a career as a freelance corporate writer. Gordon won a Watson Fellowship and spent a year studying baseball culture in Japan, Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. When they reconnected at their 10th ReUnion in 1997, they talked about their current writing projects and, eventually, the prospect of working on a book together. That conversation eventually led to Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends, and Eerie Events, published by Lyons Press in September 2007.
The two began researching the book in earnest at spring training in 2005, eventually interviewing more than 800 major league baseball players, managers and coaches, as well as stadium personnel and fans. They wrote three chapters, outlined about 30 others and, with a literary agent, presented the book proposal to several publishers.
The pair accepted an offer from Lyons Press in January 2006. They continued their research and writing for the next year and submitted a manuscript on Jan. 1, 2007. The book was released on Sept. 1 and, as of December, was headed toward a fourth printing.
“We liked the idea of ghost stories as a way of capturing baseball’s tradition and past,” Bradley said. “And catching some of the behind-the-scenes stories that players share with each other, but fans don’t always hear.”
Tales from the Vinoy Hotel fit the latter category. Players from many teams had first- or second-hand stories about ghostly goings-on in the Tampa Bay landmark. Other stories the authors heard included accounts of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig haunting a St. Petersburg ballpark, Yankee outfielder Johnny Damon being held down by a ghost in his home, numerous team curse legends, Roberto Clemente’s premonitions of his own tragic death in a plane crash, and ghosts running wild in Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Dodger Stadium.
Bradley and Gordon aren’t the only Unionites connected to the book. Anthropology Professor George Gmelch, a former minor leaguer who has published several books on the culture of baseball, introduced the pair to his agent and offered helpful tips on research.
“He even shared his own story about spreading his father’s ashes on the San Francisco Giant’s home field,” Gordon said.
In so doing, Gmelch joins major leaguers including Derek Jeter, Willie Mays, Coco Crisp, Alex Rodriguez, Jim Thome, Derrek Lee, Mike Piazza, Michael Young, and dozens of other famous athletes whose stories and perspectives are included in Haunted Baseball. Some are strong believers while others are more skeptical. As for the authors, they maintain a neutral tone throughout the book.
“We’re not looking to endorse or debunk,” Bradley said. “We’re just sharing these great stories that can be enjoyed as fact or lore. Readers can decide for themselves.”
EXCERPT: From Chapter 5, "Stompin' at the Vinoy"
Embedded in Washingtonian palms and crowned by an octagonal tower festooned with archways and intricate ornamental plasterwork, the Renaissance Vinoy Hotel is a landmark on the St. Petersburg waterfront. The plush rooms and postcard-perfect vistas have always attracted the rich and famous, including Babe Ruth, who is known to have lived a lavish existence in the hotel during numerous Spring Trainings. Today the Vinoy is the visiting team hotel for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
But movie stars and ball players are not the most famous guests at the Vinoy—ghosts are.
Relief pitcher Scott Williamson had never heard of the Vinoy being haunted when he stayed in an old section of the hotel with the Cincinnati Reds in mid-June 2003. But he ended up with an experience he says he’ll never forget. “I turned the lights out and I saw this faint light coming from the pool area. And I got this tingling sensation going through my body like someone was watching me, you know? I was getting a little paranoid.
“Then I roll over to my stomach. And all of the sudden it felt like someone was just pushing down, like this pressure, and I was having trouble breathing. So I rolled back over. I thought, ‘That’s weird.’ I did it again, rolled back on my stomach. All of a sudden, it’s like I just couldn’t breathe. It felt like someone was sitting on me or something.”
This time when Williamson rolled onto his back, he opened his eyes. “I looked, and someone was standing right where the curtains were. A guy with a coat. And it looked like he was from the '40s, or '50s, or '30s—somewhere around that era.”
“ESPN caught onto the story the next day,” adds Williamson. “And then a buddy of mine went and did research on it. He came back and told me, ‘You’re not gonna believe this! There’s a guy who died in that hotel. His name was [Benjamin] Williamson. He actually owned the hotel property before it was a hotel.’ I’m like, ‘What’s his last name?’ He goes ‘Williamson.’ I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ ”
Former Toronto Blue Jays reliever John Frascatore heard for years that the Vinoy was haunted, and his family’s first stay at the hotel vindicated the stories. Midway into the Jays batting practice, Frascatore got an urgent phone call from his wife. “You get the travel secretary on the phone!” she told him. “I’m not staying in that room anymore! That room is haunted!”
The kids had just brushed their teeth when five-year-old Gavin reported something strange. “Mom, the water keeps turning back on.” Kandria headed into the bathroom to find that indeed, the water was on. She shut it, turning the knob tight. Moments later, water was again flowing from the tap. Again she shut it off. Over the next couple of minutes, the faucet turned on by itself repeatedly and the toilet flushed three or four times. Thoroughly spooked, the family fled without their luggage. When they transferred to a room in the new wing of the hotel, front desk staff told them “that stuff happens all the time” in the old wing.
When Frascatore mentioned the incident to his teammates, several chimed in with their own Vinoy ghost stories – flickering lights, locked doors that opened themselves, and strange noises in the night.
Given the huge role of travel in professional baseball, it’s not surprising that hotels like the Vinoy come to occupy a good deal of ballplayers’ imaginations. Life on the road can be as empty and lonely as Wrigley Field in the postseason. Players—many of whom are superstitious about the game to begin with—pass the time by telling each other stories. But that still doesn’t explain why so many players claim firsthand experiences at the Vinoy, or why these experiences are often similar, or just plain inexplicable.
Jay Gibbons’s encounter there still gives him the chills. In town with the Baltimore Orioles one summer, the right fielder made a beeline for his room to catch some rest. He set the alarm clock on the bedside table, then washed up and prepared for bed. As he reached for the lamp, he noticed the clock he’d just set was now off. He sat up to reset it and discovered the cord draped over the dresser with the prong resting over the clock. “It kind of freaked me out,” says Gibbons, “because the outlet was near the floor. How the hell did the plug get from down there to the top of the dresser and just stay there? Because I didn’t even move the clock.” It’s an incident Gibbons hasn’t forgotten. “I haven’t turned the lights off since at that hotel!”
Devil Ray pitcher Jon Switzer had an alarming experience of his own the first night he stayed at the Vinoy. He and his wife Dana were staying on the fifth floor of the hotel when they awoke from a sound sleep to what sounded like a rat scratching from within the wall. The noise continued for a few minutes, then stopped suddenly. Fifteen minutes later, the scratching returned, so loudly that they sprung out of bed and turned on the bedside lamps.
It was at that moment Jon and Dana saw the artwork hanging above their bed come to life. The painting depicted a garden scene with a woman in Victorian dress holding a basket with her right hand. According to Jon, her left hand, which had been by her chin, was now scratching the glass desperately to get out. The couple stared in disbelief for about three seconds, then raced out the door.
Vinoy stories have become so legendary that it seems every player in the majors has one to relate. Infielder Geoff Blum describes ghosts hovering above players’ beds and personal belongings moving around in the room. Outfielder Mike Cameron knows of players getting “locked out of their rooms and seeing things that they normally don’t see.” “Almost every team I go to,” says veteran closer Todd Jones, “when they stay at the Vinoy, they say it’s haunted. I’ve heard that the walls breathe in and out.”
Why would the Vinoy be haunted? Stories abound of tragic fires, mysterious deaths, and lonely-hearts suicides, all alleged to have taken place in the hotel decades ago. Oakland A’s star Eric Chávez heard the hotel was “an old hospital back in the war days.” Gift shop workers told Kandria Frascatore a Romeo-and-Juliet-type saga of star-crossed young lovers whose romance was forbidden by the adults around them. They killed each other at the hotel and now haunt its hallways and rooms.
But according to hotel historian Elaine Normaille, none of these events actually happened. Nor could she substantiate any record of Benjamin Williamson dying on the property after he sold it, or staying there after he transferred ownership. Although a skeptic herself, Normaille recognizes that the place has become a magnet for paranormal groups who believe that the hotel is full of ghosts.
Just as the visiting team clubhouse at Tropicana Field is full of jumpy, bleary-eyed ballplayers in need of a good night’s sleep.