A train passed by on the tracks of the “other” railroad across the river, sounding its warning whistle as it neared the Lothrop crossing.
Annie, a sweet 9-year-old golden retriever, watched as the train disappeared up the valley. Suddenly, Doyle recounts, “she took off running as fast as any dog can humanly go.”
But now she was clearly running away, toward Interstate 90, toward the Clark Fork River, and Doyle didn’t know why.
“I said, 'Get back here, Annie,’ and finally she stopped,” said Doyle, who has since come to understand what was going on. “She looked at me and she looked at that train, and she looked at me like, 'I’m going home. I live over there.’ ”
Annie went back to the inn with Doyle, “but she was just the saddest little dog,” her mistress said.
In August, Annie underwent surgery to have tumors removed from her back and mouth before the reason for her behavior that day was revealed.
Doyle and Garrett were walking with Annie again, this time in the autumn, and this time down the street by Alberton High School.
“A kid comes running out and says, 'Is that your dog? Because that’s my dog,’ ” Garrett said.
Now, Doyle and Garrett had adopted Annie from an animal foster home in Missoula, nearly 30 miles away. She’d been found wandering in the Blue Mountain area southwest of town.
But James Wemple, a senior, knew the dog he’d raised from a pup, the one with the expressive amber eyes. In fact, he’d named her Amber. She was shaved and stitched from her surgery, but there was no mistaking her.
And then the innkeepers learned where Wemple lived - across the street, across the interstate, across the river and across the tracks from the Ghost Rail Inn.
“This was a dog that was lost from Alberton, apparently ran all the way to Missoula, and was lost in the Missoula area,” Garrett said. “We adopted her and just happened to move right here and lived here for almost a year before we connected. The (Wemple) family live just about a mile from us.”
Doyle said she went home and cried for three hours.
“We had to give her back. The boy had her for nine years. He’d raised her from a puppy,” she said.
But the story has a happy ending, thanks to a unique arrangement that doesn’t seem all that strange in this eclectic old railroad town.
The Wemples have Amber back, but each morning when James goes to school, he drops her off at Ghost Rails to play. And he picks her up at night on his way home from basketball practice.
When the Panthers went on the road for a game Friday night, the dog had a cozy place to stay at the inn. When Doyle and Garrett go out of town, well, Amber-Annie just stays home with the Wemples.
“We call her our time-share dog,” said Garrett and Doyle, who think the world of Mike and Kelli Wemple and their son James for agreeing to the arrangement.
At the inn, Annie plays her role perfectly. She pads placidly around the remodeled, two-story bed-and-breakfast that for decades starting in 1909 was a handy stopover for Milwaukee rail hands and passengers.
She greets visitors with tail-waving pleasure and accepts pats, hugs and cuddles with the grace of a well-groomed hostess. She nestles snugly into the hearts of guests who’ve visited from dozens of states and half a dozen countries since Doyle and Garrett opened the Ghost Rails for business in April.
“She has been such a great part of the inn,” said Garrett, the 1991 Montana Teacher of the Year at Target Range School in Missoula and director of the private Sussex School in town for 13 years after that.
“She’s got her own MySpace because so many people were interested in her when she was going to have surgery,” Garrett said. “Everyone wanted to know what was going on with Annie, and she’d get e-mails.”
Just the other day the inn received a Christmas package addressed to the retriever. It came from a lad in Iowa who’d stayed at the inn with his family. Inside was a box filled with the kind of stuffed animals that Annie so enjoys packing around.
Annie surely had a paw in the award Doyle and Garrett were stunned to receive in November. The Ghost Rails Inn was named one of eight “Best of the Rockies” bed and breakfasts in 2008-09 by Bedandbreakfast.com. Only one other Montana inn, the Good Medicine Lodge in Whitefish, has been on the list since it began in 2003.
“We had no idea we were being considered for anything,” Garrett said. “There are some wonderful B and B’s around here, especially some of the ones in Missoula that are just fabulous. It was a surprise to be chosen.”
Bedandbreakfast.com bases its awards on customer reviews. Folks came to Ghost Rails in the summer to fish in the Clark Fork, shoot the rapids in the Alberton Gorge, bike the Hiawatha Trail and then maybe make the quick drive to Missoula for dinner.
Some come for Doyle’s quilting retreats. A longtime teacher and administrator in northern Minnesota, with roots in the Bitterroot Valley, Doyle is a professional quilter who adorns each bed with one of her handmade prizes.
For the price of a motel room in Missoula - it’s $84 a room at the Ghost Rails - lodgers sleep in newly remodeled rooms upstairs and get a hearty meal in the morning.
“We’ve had some great guests here who’ve gone online and given us good reviews,” Garrett said. “I think the thing about this place is, first of all, most people who stay here don’t know what to expect. We’re kind of out of the way, and we’re not as expensive as most bed and breakfasts might be.”
The Ghost Rails sits just across Railroad Street from the Milwaukee depot, which today serves as Alberton’s town hall, its senior citizen and community centers, library and the American Legion hall.
“Modern Comfort in an Early 1900s Ambience” an old-fashioned sign reads on the side of the salmon-pink exterior (the color’s the next thing to change, Doyle notes).
Lodgers stay on the second floor in rooms with Montana themes - a season, horses, buffalo, fishing. The bedroom in front overlooks Railroad Street and the depot is their “Conductor Room.” It’s replete with historic photos of the big orange electrified Milwaukee locomotives that used to roam these hills, and the passenger cars they pulled behind.
Garrett and Doyle bill their inn as “a place where ghostly trains still run on time” and it’s not difficult to look out the window of the Conductor Room and imagine people of yesteryear boarding and disembarking at the depot.
Indeed, the Ghost Rails has ghosts. A guest at a quilting retreat claimed she awakened in the middle of the night and looked out her window to see the town bustling with people. It wasn’t the crowd from the Sportsman Bar up the street either, she said.
“These people weren’t dressed like bar people,” Doyle said the lady said. “They were dressed like they were going to work a long time ago, and they were all coming this way in a hurry to the depot.
“She said there were more people in the street than live in this town.”
Garrett and Doyle say they are skeptics of the supernatural.
“But there are a lot of things that go on here that are tough to explain,” said Garrett. “We suspect there might be - I don’t know how you’d say it - a spirit, a ghost busy up in the rooms, trying to clean them and make the beds.”
They suspect it’s the energy of a former proprietress named Bertha, who died in 1971. She’s harmless and maybe a bit too benign for Garrett and Doyle after their first 10 busy months as innkeepers.
“I wish,” sighed Doyle, “she would really clean.”
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Grace and Thom wrote on Jan 12, 2009 7:27 PM:
" Thank you for your comment, Darlene. The previous owner is a wonderful lady and we still count her among our Albertonian friends. The award mentioned in the article, however, is based on guest reviews received in 2008. The inn was not open in January or February of last year; we moved in February 29th. Please visit bedandbreakfast.com to read the reviews. We also welcome you to stop by the inn and see the many changes. "
Danica Bayliss wrote on Jan 13, 2009 4:12 PM:
" My parents moved into that place in the spring(ish) of 1972 and I was born in February of 1973 there. There was paranormal activity there, even back then! I was moved from my blanket, as a newborn, to the carpet on the floor to several feet away. There was a crying in the ceiling(which she thought was me, being a newborn) that made my grandmother quite ill at ease and she wanted us to leave immediately.
As a teen I became more involved in the paranormal and have a group here in Missoula now. I would love to come investigate the house...some 36 years later! I don't know who is still there but it was always a very benign presence. "
As a teen I became more involved in the paranormal and have a group here in Missoula now. I would love to come investigate the house...some 36 years later! I don't know who is still there but it was always a very benign presence. "
Darlene Bos wrote on Jan 12, 2009 9:26 AM: