It had begun to snow pretty hard when I stepped inside the Virginia City Visitor Center to drop off newspapers and chat with Liza McIlwee. She is into reenacting and works behind the old bar from the Crystal Palace, now the center’s front desk.
“I was sitting on a bench in front of the Tahoe House next to a guy who said his name was James,” I said. “He was dressed in a suit from the late 1800s, and spoke with an Irish brogue.”
“I don’t know any reenactors that talk like that,” she replied.
“He reminded me of…,” I tried to remember, adding, “I know the guy was somehow attached to the Tahoe House, and I think he was Irish too.”
Liza opened the browser on her computer and typed in Tahoe House.
“Nothing here about an Irishman.”
“He was also a senator or maybe the governor.”
She added them to her search bar and pressed ‘enter.’
“James Fair?”
“Could be. Was he Irish?”
“And a U.S. Senator. Let me bring up a picture of him.”
“That looks like him.”
She smiled, “Maybe you were tlaking to a ghost.”
“No, I handed him a paper to read,” I said. “But when I came back from upstairs, he was gone, but the paper was there, so I picked it up.”
“I’ll bet you I know who it is. I have a friend, Marcus Aurelius Clark, who looks an awful lot like him, right down to the beard.”
She opened her Facebook app and typed something in. Then a group of tourists entered, and she put down her cell phone and helped them.
I sat on the bench near the door to wait.
A few minutes later, when it was she and I again, she looked at her phone and said, “He says no, it wasn’t him.”
We still haven’t a clue who this man was or if he was a reenactor or a spirit returned.
The Old Blog in the Desert 