Vanguard: Halloween Treats From Vanguard—Spooky Exclusive New Screenshot – And A Haunted Hotel During The Summit Visit

The crystal chandeliered lights in the elegant ballroom flickered eerily. I glanced around uneasily. "Quit that!" hollered the captain behind me. The lights glimmered off and back on and then steadied to their usual glow. The ghost of the game had struck again. But wait! This was no game...was it life imitating art or the other way around. And is Vanguard's Tree of Woe an offshoot of the Halloweenish visit we Community Reps were treated to at the historically rich and apparently haunted US Grant Hotel in San Diego that Sigil, creators of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, booked us into? Wait...Tree of Woe? Let me explain.

The Tree of Woe is the delightfully spooky natural gibbet located in the swamps of the Fallen Lands. The description and effects are still top secret, and the Vanguard devs couldn't tell me much...but a picture is worth a thousand words...so turn your gaze left and see what's in store for Vanguard aficionados. The dangling corpse seems to promise at least a ghost and undeadly delights, much the same as the hotel we stayed in. And here is where life imitated art. Okay, I don't have much more to tell you about the Tree of Woe. That's all Sigil will say for now, except to expect at least one kind of dreadfully spooky environment such as the Tree of Woe in the game. After all, the makers of EverQuest, who gave us the eerily haunted Kithicor Forest, could be expected to provide us with equally spooky thrills in Vanguard, right?

But who'da thunk they would go so far as to book us innocent (yeah, right!), unsuspecting reporters and representatives of the community into a haunted hotel. Honest, I wouldn't lie to you about a thing like that. Here's the story.

We had finished wining and dining in one of the smaller banquet rooms on the basement level of the US Grant Hotel, where Cindy Bowens, Community Relations Manager at Sigil, had booked the 21 of us to stay. Superb meal, but I'm sure you have read about it and seen photographs of it from the various fansites of Vanguard...some very good stories actually...go read them. The first incident happened on the elevator. About three of us got on the elevator along with the banquet captain, to go to the main floor for continued libations and fellowshipping. I think either Rikh from Vanguard Live or Arnie from OGaming, Valeria from VG Stratics or Veakari from The Syndicate guild were there with me. I was a little taken aback by what happened, especially when I put it into perspective later. The elevator started just fine - remember, we only had one floor to go up. Then it started bumping and shaking. I was a little scared, since I had been trapped in an elevator once for six hours by myself and I am mildly claustrophobic. I didn't want that to happen again.

Anyhow, the elevator started and stopped, started and stopped. The banquet captain, a soft-spoken, attractive, young woman, smiled apologetically at us. "It doesn't usually happen this way," she explained, somewhat mysteriously I thought. Then she called out, a little sharply, "Please stop that." The stopping and starting didn't cease right away and, in a few minutes, she said, "Come on, stop it now," in a sort of wheedling tone. Immediately, the elevator steadied itself and winded its way smoothly to the next floor, dutifully opening its doors and disgorging us on the marble floor or the hotel foyer.

I thought it was a little strange, but there were libations to be drunk and fellowshipping to be done, so I was off chatting happily away with Vanguard reps and devs. At some point, not too far into the libations, and probably due more to the fact that I had had two hours sleep the night before and had traveled by air and car for seven hours to get to San Diego, I started to get very drowsy. Wanting to recheck something with Cindy before I went to my room, I looked for my itinerary for the trip, where I had typed all my notes, the complete Sigil schedule for the Summit, and including the names and positions of all the reps, the names and positions of all the Sigil folk, the dates, gates, times and flight numbers of all my flights and connections to and from San Diego, and my husband's telephone number (in case I got hit by a San Diego bus and...you know the drill). It was gone. I panicked, then remembered I had gotten it out to give someone some information at the dinner. It was fairly safe to bet I had left it in the small banquet room.

Down I went back to the banquet room. My heart sank as I saw the banquet captain taking the last of the tablecloths off the tables. She was sympathetic to my story and when I described the piece of paper and what was on it, she brightened. "Hang on," she advised and dashed away. What could I do but sit and wait? I won't swear to it but I am positive the lights flickered. Hey, that's nothing in Calgary. The downtown buildings positively dance in an early winter chinook. But here in sunny, calm San Diego...?

Cathy, as such was her name, dashed back, waving my itinerary in her hand, crumpled and a little coffee-stained, but intact. She had rescued it from the jaws of garbagery. She chatted as she folded linen, asking questions about the Sigil "conference" and what Vanguard was all about. I told her and she kept chatting. Then she confided that sometimes late at night (it was close to midnight) it made her nervous being down here on the banquet floor by herself.

"Why?" I wondered.

"Fanny Mae, you know," Cathy, the banquet captain, replied. I got out my reporter's notebook and took down the story.

It seems that the lovely wife of the intrepid Ulysses S. Grant was an heiress of sorts, and it was her family's money that built the hotel in 1867. It had a riotous history right from the beginning, and those interested can access the link at the bottom of this article for more information. However, my interest was in the ghost of Mrs. Grant and why she was haunting the hotel and what made Captain Cathy so sure the ghost was really a ghost and not just a combination of late nights and hard work.

"One night I was having a hard time," Cathy told me. "I went into the bathroom and sat in one of the cubicles, after making sure no one was in there. Then I let loose, sort of ranted and raved, getting it all out of my system. All of a sudden, the toilet next to me flushed. I jumped up. 'Who's down here?' I called, and peered under the cubicle wall and looked through the cracks. There was no one there. I rushed out of the cubicle and checked again - but there was no one there." She grinned at me. "And the toilets here are not sensor flushers, if that's what you're thinking."

I hadn't been thinking that at all. Having had my own experiences, I was plenty interested and more than a little convinced. However, a flushing toilet is not a cornucopia of evidence.

Cathy told me that all the staff on the lower level knew about the ghosts. Apparently there's more than one, but Fanny Mae is the main spectral inhabitant. There were lots more stories too. Like the night, just like tonight, that Cathy had been cleaning up after a banquet in the Crystal Room, which is the main ballroom of the hotel. It has beautiful crafted light sconces all around the room, plus the overhead chandeliers, which were on dim at the time. Cathy kept getting the feeling she was being watched, but she put it down to tiredness...her shifts are long and she works very hard. She went out of the room to take linen to the laundry area, then returned to the room to start resetting for another event the next morning. Suddenly, the wall lights glowed brightly for a moment, as Cathy wheeled to see who had turned the switch up. No one was there. As she watched...the lights dimmed again.

Then there was the time that she was walking past one of the meeting rooms and saw figures inside the room. Thinking it must have been booked without her knowledge, she went in and immediately realized her mistake. The room may have been booked for an event, but it was not any event that would ever appear on the US Grant's booking sheets. "They were figures all right," Cathy said, "but not real solid...not that I could see through them, but they were kind of flimsy." The thing that made her run out of the room, though, was when a man in a white shirt suddenly appeared right behind her, looking a little out of sorts. At this point, Cathy knew, without a doubt, that it was time to go home.

Then there was the new guy who worked in the lower level kitchen. He had been walking down the hallway bringing some delectable goodies to one of the rooms. What he saw on the stairway landing puzzled him, so he went to the booking agent. "Is there a children's event going on that I don't know about?" he asked him.

The agent was puzzled. "Not that I know of. Why?"

"Well, there are a bunch of kids dressed up in funny clothes playing on the landing and a lot of people walking around in the hall. I thought it might be a specialty event." When the two men went back to look, no one was there and the hallway was empty.

Not only is it common knowledge amongst the lower floor staff about the ghosts, but many of them take it for granted (if you'll pardon the expression). I asked Cathy why Fanny Mae would haunt the hotel, when apparently she hadn't lived here for any length of time. Cathy wasn't 100% sure...but she knew Fanny Mae was angry. There was a rumor, she told me, that U.S. Grant, being not that different from some of the other presidents, had lodged his mistress at the hotel. That would surely explain Fanny Mae's ire.

"She's okay, though," Cathy told me. "Mostly I accept her, be polite to her, and don't get in her way. I know she won't hurt me."

"And how," I asked, a trifle uneasily, "do you KNOW that?"

Cathy shrugged. "I just know," she said. "After all, she let us have control back in the elevator when I asked her nicely, didn't she?"

I gulped. "You mean that was...?"

Cathy smiled and turned to leave. "Yup, Fanny Mae." Before I could say anything, she was gone. I went to the hallway and nervously pushed the up button on the elevator. I could have sworn I saw all kinds of things floating around, but it surely was just the late hour and my eyes were blurry from weariness, right? Surely, Sigil wasn't testing us Community Reps to make sure we were strong enough of heart to play the game? As I wrestled with these soothing thoughts, the elevator door opened. In a bank of four elevators, the door that yawned invitingly at me was the same one we had traveled up to the main floor, the three of us Vanguard folks, Cathy...and Fanny Mae.

I decided I didn't want to use that elevator, so I pushed another button. After a moment, the same elevator door opened. I reasoned...it hasn't had time to go anywhere. I waited a good five minutes, heard the gears or whatever they are on elevators whirring. Pushed the button again. The same door. This was not coincidence.

I looked around for someone to go up in the elevator with me. The hallway was as quiet as a tomb. I wished I hadn't thought of that. Because of a very sore leg, I couldn't use the stairway. I was trapped. I went and sat in a seat that faced into very revealing mirrors, with the Crystal Ballroom to my left. My heart was beating fast and I totally forgot that I was a (reasonably) hard-nosed reporter here to find out the facts on this third generation MMO being developed by the folks at Sigil. Cindy wouldn't just strand us here in Hotel California...I mean U.S. Grant...would she? I heard the elevator bell ding. I hurried as fast as my leg would let me...and saw the door of the elevator OPPOSITE Fanny Mae's elevator closing. And shortly after that, Fanny Mae's elevator door slid quietly open, waiting for me.

Now I was really spooked. And for all you know...I may still be sitting in the lower lobby of the Hotel US Grant in San Diego, CA, waiting for the right elevator to come and get me.

Thanks, Cindy - and thanks, Sigil - I now know what they mean when they refer to Vanguard Live! It's the parts of the game that aren't undead...er, I mean dead.

All photographs of the US Grant Hotel, exterior and interior, are from the US Grant Hotel, San Diego, CA website. Go here to access their website. And stay there when in SD - it's a beautiful place...reeking...yes, reeking with history.