A creek runs through the dining room. Not beside it, not under glass in the floor: Clear Creek comes in one wall of the Brook Room and out the other, with the tables set along both banks. It is claimed as the only dining room in the world built around a live watercourse, and whether or not that holds everywhere, there is nothing else like it in California.
The building started as something entirely unromantic. It opened in 1870 as the headquarters of the Grover Lumber Mill, in the redwood country of the San Lorenzo Valley, and only became a hotel in 1920. The timing matters, because 1920 is the first year of Prohibition.
What followed is the least ghostly and most interesting part of its history. The lodge became a resort for organised crime, and the fabric of the building still shows it: under the Brook Room, on the banks of the creek, are stacks of cement cylinders used to hide bottles. By the 1950s the clientele had turned respectable and film people came instead, with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Herbert Hoover all named among the guests.
The ghost most often told is Sarah Logan, said to be the young niece of a former owner and to have drowned in the creek in the Brook Room. Accounts of who she was and when vary, so it is fairer to call it the lodge's story than a record.
The lodge has closed and reopened more than once, so check it is trading before you drive up the valley for dinner.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
