R and R Station Restaurant and Inn

R and R Station Restaurant and Inn

When Sherry and Ray Wingrove bought the R and R Station Restaurant and Inn in Mt. Pleasant, they encountered some unexpected guests who checked into the hotel a century ago - and never checked out.

Now these ghosts from the hotel's past are the lead characters in a documentary film.

The 14 ghosts who reportedly inhabit the 123-year-old inn inspired Greensburg native Roger Marsh to choose it as the location for his first documentary.

Marsh, who has spent three years writing and producing live theater in Chicago, became interested in producing a documentary about the paranormal while working on a book with local UFO expert Stan Gordon.

"I was in town for a few days meeting with Stan about the book, and my sister told me about this great hotel here in Mt. Pleasant. I thought it would be a good location to shoot the documentary," Marsh said.

Even as a teenager, Marsh was interested in the paranormal. He kept journals about reported supernatural encounters and read books and articles on the subject. While working at the Tribune-Review in the early 1980s, Marsh wrote an article about the Baker Mansion, in Altoona, which supposedly is haunted.

"I was looking for another outlet in which to express this interest, and doing a documentary seemed like a natural next step," Marsh said.

"I thought that this was an interesting location with the hotel being as old as it is, and also because of the local color," Marsh said.

All of the actors who appear in the documentary are local personalities. The mayor of Mt. Pleasant, Jerry Lucia, is in the film, portraying a mob boss.

"These are all actual ghosts that are in my hotel," Sherry Wingrove said as she gestured toward the assortment of costumed characters seated at a banquet room table.

Shortly after the Wingroves purchased the hotel, they began to notice odd things happening.

"About six months after we bought the hotel we actually moved in, and then we really noticed strange things happening. When you live here full-time you know when someone is banging on the wall but there is no one actually there. Or there are footsteps in the hall, but no one there to make those footsteps," Wingrove said.

Wingrove wanted to know more, so she contacted the Paranormal Researchers Organization, which researches and investigates the paranormal. She asked psychic Dolores Martell to help communicate with the ghosts.

"PRO tries to give you a logical explanation of what is going on. They are trying to debunk the notion that you have ghosts," Wingrove said.

Wingrove also did research of her own, scouring old newspapers and talking to the descendants of the inn's previous owners.

"I talked to the grandson of one of the former owners, and what he told me was exactly what Dolores said the ghosts told her," Wingrove said.

Terrance Donnelly, an owner of the hotel, and his daughter Ellen are two of the inn's purported permanent gests. Ellen had been shut away in an upstairs bedroom since childhood because she suffered from mental illness. She died when she was 19. Deeply disturbed by her death, Donnelly claimed he could still hear her banging on the floors and the walls. Donnelly died of pneumonia many years later in another upstairs bedroom at the age of 93.

Guests still can hear banging on the inn's walls and floors, Wingrove said.

"I will have guests complain of someone banging on the walls and the floor, but there is no one there. When I tell people that it is a ghost they are kind of shocked," she said.

Wingrove said her guests are intrigued by the ghost stories.

"I just think people want to come in contact with something supernatural," she said.

Marsh hopes to continue his investigation and documentation of the paranormal even after the completion of the documentary.

"The interest in the paranormal, it's now becoming popular everywhere," he said.

R & R Station
19 West Main St.
Mt. Pleasant, PA 15666
724-547-7545
Fax: 724-542-7274