By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

One of the ghosts of City Hall is a former mayor with a long, sad face. At least, that's the report of a veteran city employee whose interest in history was stirred by his ghostly encounter.

He said it happened when he was working late about 11 p.m. last January.

"I was walking down the hall to the bathroom," he said. "There were only a few people in the building and I thought at first it was the guard since he wears a kind of long jacket. He looked so much like a person that I tried to talk to him.

"The ghost was standing at the top of the stairs between the mayor's office and the council chambers. He seemed to be staring right at me or beyond. Then he just sort of did a slow dissolve."

Our ghost reporter refused to let me use his name because everybody might think he's crazy. In any event, he felt the ghost looked familiar. So after he finished his business in the bathroom, he went around to where the portraits of former mayors hang in a foyer.

"When I saw the picture of Mayor Fred Wright, I knew he was the ghost. They both had that long, sad face."

Mr. Ghost Watcher said he didn't know anything about Wright so he began studying history. It turns out that Wright got elected in 1930 just as the Great Depression set in. He had been a city engineer.

"I learned that Wright was a workaholic," said Ghost Watcher. "I was really struck by the sad look on his face, as if he wished he could finish something he started. There was a housing shortage at the time. Mayor Wright public housing is named after him.

"He got tuberculosis and became very ill while he was in office. The doctors recommended an ocean voyage so he took a trip to Tahiti. He died on the way back. His body lay in state at City Hall for two days.

"There haven't been many funerals at City Hall — only Mayor Wright, Mayor John H. Wilson and Mayor Neal Blaisdell. Also Gabby Pahinui and Sunny Chillingworth, not because they were famous musicians but because they were city employees."

Ghost Watcher said that as far as he knows, nobody else has seen Mayor Wright since he died. But a ghostly mother and daughter appear regularly to a longtime City Hall guard and other employees:

"City Hall is on the site of the home of missionary Henry Dimond. He did a lot of traveling interisland. His house had a widow's walk where his wife and daughter would look out for his ship.

"The managing director's office is right on the site of the widow's walk. I was attending a meeting at about 8 or 9 p.m. and went to the kitchen to get some coffee. I saw a young girl in the hall and asked whose daughter she was. It was the ghost. Usually the mother and daughter are seen together but sometimes the girl goes out alone."

Another spooky place at City Hall is the basement where the morgue was once located. The Ghost Watcher said none of the dead have come back to life down there but it's a chicken-skin place that is now used for storage.