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(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the August 2006 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.)

When my husband Neil and I became the newest owners of Tioga Pass Resort in May of 1963, the legend of Gardisky's ghost was handed to us along with the back door key.

"The place is haunted," said Ray, the former owner. "Al Gardisky, the Russian guy that built this place, still comes around."

Yeah, yeah, I thought, not yet understanding how young and dumb I was at twenty-eight when all I'd done to earn a living was take shorthand, type and file. "By the way," I asked. "Where are the cooks and waitresses? Upstairs?"

"They won't be here for a month," Ray said. "We open this weekend and you're the cook and waitress."

"Oh," I said, and sank down on a stool that looked like a tree stump.

Neil, who could fix anything, seemed not to hear and looked around eagerly. "What's the most urgent project?" he asked.

Ray glanced around in a sort of general way. "Everything," he said. "But first, you'll need to dig out the workshop."

He pointed to a mound of snow outside that looked like a two-story igloo, covered with fifteen feet of snow.

We didn't die that first season, as I'd thought, and we made it through another season and another after that. We designed a new menu and I included a story about how Al, with the help of a mule and a winch, built the big main lodge and the lower log cabins with the tall, straight lodgepole pines he'd cut and hewed to fit.

At night in front of the fireplace, we told our cabin guests how Al made a fortune and never used a bank. When he'd pay a bill he'd disappear and come back minutes later with a fistful of cash.

We'd whisper, "You know his fortune has never been found and the old timers tell us he still comes back to guard it." The kids loved it. But through the haze of hard work and long hours, we hadn't heard or seen anything unusual.

Then, one early November night after all our employees had left for the season, Neil and I were there alone waiting for the storm that would close the road for the winter. Snow had begun in the early afternoon and by eight o'clock that night a foot had fallen.

Then it stopped. The wind scattered the clouds, and moonlight glittered on a drifting, unbroken surface of virgin snow. Nothing moved. No car could get through until morning. There were no customers, no employees, no questions. The hush was delicious. I poured each of us another cup of coffee and we sat at the cafe counter talking quietly about our plans for the winter.

A sound from outside interrupted us, the crunch of footsteps on snow. Then, another sound we'd heard all summer: the thump of one of our employee's footsteps on the back stairs. The upstairs door slammed, we heard the heavy sound of someone stomping down the hallway overhead. The employees' dorm room door slammed shut.

"Damn," Neil said, "I thought they'd all left." He walked through the kitchen and opened the backdoor. After a long pause he said, "Come and take a look."

The back stairs were blanketed with snow, there were no footprints. Upstairs, the outside door was still padlocked.

"Al's here," Neil said. "It's time to go home."

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