|
|
Click here for the press release
|
Big Fun! Great Event! |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
Click here to see the silent auction items:
October 28th from 8pm to midnight The Heart Gallery will be hosting a costume ball and recognition dinner at the haunted Beckham Hotel in Mineola Texas. This will be the last public event in this 100+ year old hotel. There will be a buffet, a silent auction (donations welcome), live entertainment, dancing, bobbing or apples, a costume contest and many more games. (The new winery will be open in the lobby area or this event.)
Tickets are a donation of $25 each. (Mature children only please) The hotel is on the corner of 80 & 69 across from the new train station in Mineola.
*The Heart Gallery is a 501C3 that successfully features beautiful portraits of hard-to-place children in an art tour that are in need o adoptive families.
Call 1-866-787-ADOPT or e-mail easttexasheartgallery@yahoo.com for tickets.
To volunteer or donate please contact Suzette Russom 903-365-2950
or Robin Watson at robinandmike@cox.net
The spooky truth about the Beckham:
| The old Beckham hotel faces the
railroad mainline and is currently undergoing restoration as a bed and
breakfast inn. In its heyday the hotel was a genuine railroad hotel for
use by passengers as well as employees of the railroad. Many of the rooms
over look the tracks. The hotel was completed in 1927 after a fire
destroyed the original 1880s hotel. The upstairs ballroom was rocking with
big bands during the 1920s and 30s. Like with most old buildings, the
hotel has its stories of ghosts, bootlegging and late night poker games.
"My grandfather used to be the manager at the Beckham Hotel in Mineola. Back in the late 70's I used to play in the old hotel that has been around since the turn of the century. Late one evening in the abandoned ballroom I saw a lady in a long white dress dancing. I have also seen strange mist and lights on the abandoned third floor. Many people have died there I even seen one man die in the lobby. If you want to do an investigation...This IS the place!!" ~ Chris |
 |
Tom Geddy- Van Zandt County line reports:
Four afternoons a week, budding musicians learn to play guitar, mandolin, fiddle, or keyboards, learn to sing, and learn to write songs in one of the second-floor bedrooms converted into studios. Every once in a while, somebody throws a wedding or a private party at the Beckham.The rest of the time, John and his wife, Nancy, have the 19,500-square-foot hotel pretty much to themselves.
Oh, and there are the ghosts, too.The three-story hotel, built in the late 1800s and rebuilt in the 1920s after a fire, has 29 bedrooms, a ballroom, a restaurant and coffeehouse, a picturesque lobby, space for two gift shops, and a roomy apartment in the back. The block it’s on — full of antique and gift shops, restaurants, and offices — is bounded by Highway 80 on one side and the train track on the other. (You can walk right out of the lobby and get on an Amtrak train that’ll take you all the way to Chicago or Los Angeles; you can come all the way from Chicago or Los Angeles to Mineola, too.)
Ghost stories abound.One of the music students, a no-nonsense cowboy type, stood in the lobby in March 2005, and commented to John that there sure was a party going on upstairs.
John said, no, everyone’s gone for the night.“He said, ‘No, they are up there, because I can hear them,’” John said. “We went upstairs with flashlights and couldn’t find anything. A little later, my wife and cousin came in with their eyes all big, saying they’d been hearing noises. We went up there again and not a thing.”
John claims there are only a handful of reports a year.“We lost a cook once back when we were operating the restaurant. She saw a lady walk up the stairs and turn and kinda smile, and then the lady wasn’t there anymore. The cook quit.
“Once a lady saw a little girl staring from the lobby into the restaurant, and went to open the door for her. There was nobody on the other side. The lady went to a nearby church and came back with holy water to sprinkle in the lobby.”John said he’s not sure if he believes in ghosts.
“I don’t look around for them,” he said. “I have had some odd experiences. Just strange things like hearing noises that can’t be there — like a party going on where it sounds like somebody opened a door and you heard the party — people talking and clinking glasses — and then the door closed.”It’s the music, though, not the notion of ghosts wandering the creaky, wooden floors that defines the Beckham.
Photos from our event:
