The "Spooks And Goblins Of Gable Park Hotel" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Riding around the area of Lancaster, Pennsylvania known as Quaker Hills and Gable Park Woods with my wife, trying to find the location of what at one time was known as Gables Park Hotel.  

Post Card of the hotel at Gable's Woods.

The Hotel was along Wabank Road which I traveled over for four years while a student at Millersville State Teacher's College.  Little did I know at the time, but I was driving past a haunted house all those years.  Some people in the area believed the hotel was haunted for years.  Seems that the family who lived in the hotel in the 1950s would see white footprints crossing the floor from the window.  They were white footsteps from the limestone quarry across the road. The residents also said they would hear a door slamming shut every night at midnight and an old bloodstain that could not be removed from the wood floor of the bedroom.  

After supper at Gable's Woods, August 8, 1902

Another neighbor reported looking up at the old abandoned hotel on the hill and thinking that witches could have lived there.  The history of the house is interesting.  A local real estate entrepreneur by the name of Jacob Gable Jr. built the hotel in the 19th century.  He died in 1903 and was buried with his wife Alice in the cemetery between what are now the Quaker Hills and Gable Park Woods developments.  

Taking a walk near Gable's Woods, August 8, 1902

The large residence served as both the Gable family house as well as a hotel after being built.  The Betz family purchased the building from the Gable family and later rented it to Richard and Pauline Miller.  Patricia Miller Pabon, daughter of the Miller's, grew up in the building in the 1950s.  She said that there were so many rooms in the house and was told that it was a hotel at one time.  

Gable's Park Lake, August 8, 1902

Yvonne Riggs grew up in a house next to the hotel.  She remembers the ghostly cemetery stories as well as a story about her brother who was 12 years old at the time.  He used to walk around the house and would hear a woman screaming even thought the house was vacant and run down.  Bernadine Lucas remembers visiting a friend who lived near the hotel and stopping to look at the abandoned house on top of the steep hill.  It looked like witches could have lived there.  

Near Gable's Woods - August 8, 1902

The photograph I have of the residence/ hotel shows an impressive building with three floors with a wrap-around balcony on the second floor.  On either side of the residence were steps leading from the ground level to the balcony on the first floor.  The house/hotel was eventually torn down in the 1970s, a few years after I had graduated from Millersville.  The photographs I have found of the place show an exceptional house/hotel on a incline near what appears to be the Little Conestoga Creek which flows nearby.  The history of Lancaster County is very interesting, and from time to time stories arise that make it even more interesting.  I recently read a story titled "50 YEARS AGO (1906) that was published in the Thursday, May 3, 1956 Lancaster New Era and told of a group of teenagers who hid in the woods at Gable Park in hopes of breaking up parties in the woods.  The constable descended on the park and fired shots into the air.  I imagine the group disappeared rather quickly.  Can you imagine doing that today.  The constable would lose his job instantly.  Such were the goings-on around Gable Park Hotel.   Oh, for the good old days!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

Another view of the Gable's Wood Hotel

This is what I believe to be the waterway near the Hotel.