The Horton Grand Hotel

The tour once visited the Horton Grand Hotel in the Gaslamp District. It's a really pretty hotel, and has a quaint little bar called Ida Bailey's that they were hoping would get some business from the tour. We used to actually start the tour in the hotel bar. I'd walk down the stairs and gather people, then bring them into the courtyard where I'd talk about a "sea monster" that washed up dead in Coronado. The point of the story was to say that ghosts may not be so far-fetched since sea monsters exist. It wasn't such a bad story, but it was really just filler.

Then I'd take people to the stairs and talk about Ida Bailey and Roger Whittacre and how they are supposed to haunt room 201. One of the other guides once stayed in that room and found his loose change had been stacked neatly while he slept. His wife claimed to have nothing to do with it and he said that she didn't know about the stack that was in a tin box. It was also found neatly stacked.

Ida Bailey was a well known Madam in San Diego. Her brothel, the Canary Cottage, stood somewhere near where the Horton Grand is now.

The horton grand used to be two hotels, and one of them had a saddlery on the bottom floor. Sunshine, a paper mache horse, was brought outside to model the wares, and now she stands beneath the stairs where I used to give part of the tour. You can see her through the window on Island Street (I think it's Island).

After Historic Tours of America Opened up their Old Town location, I couldn't wait to start the tour from their. It was a much nicer place to start and end the tour from, and there was much better parking. Before, I had received quite a few calls from people who wanted us to hold the tour because they were still looking for parking. Imagine doing that for something else like a play, or plane reservations.

So then I'd talk about the sea monster on the way downtown. It made a lot more sense to me because anything you talk about on the trolley has to be pretty light and fluffy since the trolley is so non-conducive to ghost stories. Plus, you could see Coronado from the road. I'd also talk about the Horton Grand, but that was just to fill time.

Now the houses you go into on the tour are over 100 years old and they're filled with antiques, so I'd always have to admonish people not to touch anything. For the longest time, no one seemed to pay attention, so I had to come up with some attention getting way of saying it. What I came up with was this: I'd tell people that time and again I had warned groups not to touch anything, yet still they did so If I catch anyone touching anything, I would beat them without mercy. This always got a laugh. Then I'd point to some woman in the group and say, "I see you were excited by that....See me after the tour" which got more laughter.

I delivered all these lines very dryly and over time I think I found stuff that worked.I tried a lot of things that didn't work as well as I had hoped, but after about a year of doing the tour, I had honed it to jokes that were pretty much garanteed to work.I tried to keep the ghost stories serious and somber, but when we were on ther trolley, I felt it was time for some comic relief.One of my proudest accomplishments was comming up with transitions to the stories which before were just thrown together. I also came up with a little back story about myself and whomever was my driver that night. It joined both us and the houses together into a funny story that also involved David Hasslehoff and Cathy Lee Gifford. More about that later.

When I started my tour we'd have a safety announcement play that would admonish people not to smoke, lean out of the trolley, and not to drink alcoholic beverages. That's when I'd take a swig of water out of my handy flask.I'd Introduce myself and the driver and ask just one little thing of our guests. I'd ask that if they enjoyed the tour to please name their children after us... all of them.

Now I'm sure that doesn't come accross well in print, but It never failed to get a laugh. The sheer rediculousness of that request combined with the dry delivery made it a never-fail joke. One of the hosts I trained didn't understand how it was even a joke, but I got her to try it anyway and it worked even for her.