Fire Walker The Haunting of Tijuana Fats Mary’s footprint, highlighted with white chalk. Photo by Leigh Ann Henion By Leigh Ann Henion You’re walking on a cold and rainy afternoon in Blowing Rock. Leaves dance around you, cling to the wet sidewalk just long enough to make you envision that they are dipping an invisible dancing partner. You realize you’re hungry, or maybe you need a drink to warm your belly. You see a light behind a fence, a walkway that leads to somewhere glowing with amber light. It looks inviting so you move closer. The restaurant covered in vines and clinging green ivy looks interesting. Like a hacienda from a Mexican history book. Its thick ceramic tile roof and stucco walls look slightly out of place in the storybook scene of the Southern Appalachian resort town, but you are intrigued. You enter into a bar. You are led down a hall covered in brightly colored bead board until you enter a room to your left. It feels like a treasure box. Chestnut wood covers the floor and the walls. You’ve never seen anything like it. You’re sure they don’t mill wood like this anymore. You pause by the fireplace and feel a strange sensation that someone is in the room, but the waitress that has been assigned to you has gone to fetch your drink order and you are the only one in the room – or are you? You ask the waitress how old the building is. She doesn’t know. But sensing your curiosity and uneasiness, she points to the slate hearth of the fireplace. Indented in the solid stone there is the distinct outline of a child’s foot. You glance at it, look questionably at the waitress and then, as the reality strikes you, you return your stare to the hearth. It is not poured concrete like the curb outside that reads Megan-n-Danny ’03, or the kind that you left your handprints in as a gift to your mother. It is solid slate stone impressed with a human footprint. Your heart skips a beat. “It’s Mary’s,” the waitress tells you. This scene happens all the time.Mitzi Darden, the owner of Tijuana Fats doesn’t remember how she knows that the child that left a seemingly impossible sign of existence on the restaurant’s stone hearth was named Mary. But she does know that Mary still lives there. Tijuana Fats has been in operation for 20 years, and Mary has been with Darden from the beginning. When Darden refers to Mary, she does not use the word ghost; she refers to Mary as just another member of her restaurant family and occasionally, she will call Mary a spirit. However you want to refer to her, most anyone who’s spent time in Tijuana Fats after hours believes she is real – and she is treated as such. Mary gets her own stocking placed on the hearth during Christmas holidays. “My staff won’t put it up, but I make sure she has one every year,” Darden said. She explained her employees’ hesitation saying, “They’re fascinated and afraid at the same time…It’s the unknown.” The building occupied by Tijuana Fats has been a restaurant for years, even before Tijuana Fats. Prior to that, it was an upscale clothing boutique. Originally it was a residence – one that nearly burned down. That is how Darden believed Mary died. On a recent afternoon, three couples dined in what Darden referred to as Mary’s room. They struck up a conversation with each other and dined on tortilla chips and salsa. In preparation of taking a photograph of Mary’s footprints, Darden dusted the indentation with chalk. Because even though it is visible to the naked eye, through the lens, it looks a little muddled. “What are you doing?” one of the diners questioned. Darden gave a short explanation and all eyes in the room were drawn to the hearth. A man leaned over in his chair, “That’s the size of a child about 4 or 5,” he said matter-of-factly. His wife was intrigued. She tenuously moved from her chair and crouched on the ground. “That’s incredibly anatomically correct,” she exclaimed. Back in her chair, she crossed her arms and stared across the room. “You can really see it clear as day from here,” she said. Her husband continued to munch on chips until it sunk in that the hearth was not made of poured cement, that it was made of solid stone. “You say there’s a ghost?” he asked again, voice softer than before. “Do you have any stories?” he questioned. Oh, the stories. The general manager raised his eyebrows. “Once I left this room for 30 seconds. When I came back in, all of these lights were swinging in unison,” he said pointing at the canteen tin lamps hanging from the ceiling by chains. “There was only one other person in this building and there’s no way they would have had time to run in here. And there was no way they could make them move at the same time like that,” he said. One of the diners, silent thus far, piped up, “Maybe she was trying to tell you something,” she said. The manager retorted, “She can show me anything, but if she shows up, we’re going to have a problem.” Mary does show herself. Often, children dining in Mary’s room will have conversations with someone who isn’t there. Some adults have also seen her – a little girl with strawberry blond ringlets and petticoat dress. Others only feel her presence and heed her signs, which often come through the squeaking of doors moving to let someone invisible through, or in the movement of overhead lights. Darden has seen the lights spin in unison like a playground swing on chains that has been twisted and twisted until it was released into mad spinning. Sometimes, the games are accompanied by a faint, joyful laughter. Always, Mary’s signs are reminiscent of child’s play. “She gets bored like any little kid and wants someone to play with her,” Darden said. “I think the people she shows herself to are lucky. They’ve been chosen.” Though he hasn’t seen her, kitchen staff worker Thomas White has played with Mary. “There are times I’ll hear knocking from the inside the indoor freezer. That one gets me all the time,” White said shaking his head. “I’ve been in the kitchen and the water will come on by itself. I’ll turn it off and it’ll come right back on again full force. Then I’ll have to say, ‘Alright Mary, that’s enough.” And then, it stops. Tijuana Fats employees have become accustomed to talking to Mary. Sometimes, all of the margarita glasses are lined up on the bar in the morning in a perfect row after they’ve been hung with care. The bartender will say, “Okay Mary, that was funny, but now I have to put them all back again.” When half a dozen pans come flying off of their racks during closing the kitchen staff says, “We know Mary, you don’t want us to leave.” Waitress Molly Cooper didn’t know about Mary until she had worked at Tijuana Fats for a few weeks. A fellow waitress found her touching the footprints on the hearth and told her to stop. After touching the footprints, Cooper had a reoccurring dream that Mary was trying to possess her body. She told another waitress and was instructed to say “Goodnight, Mary,” each time she left the building. “I always say good-night to Mary now,” Cooper said, “I think she likes it when we do that. I haven’t had another nightmare since I started saying goodbye to her.” Mary comes and goes in Tijuana Fats. She doesn’t like to play when there are a lot of people around, but she seems to enjoy the company. Darden said, “This is a restaurant. There are people around and I think she likes that – having people to play with. You give a spirit more life when you give her recognition,” she explained. “It gives her validation.” Ben Cukierman has worked at Tijuana Fats for under a week. When someone recently walked in and asked, “How’s the ghost,” he thought it was a nickname for someone on the kitchen staff. Cukierman is an adamant disbeliever in ghosts. When his co-workers estimated Mary’s age at between 4 and 8, Cukierman said, from behind the bar, “Uh-oh, we could have a problem; she’s under 21. She’s underage.” Looking at the smirk on Cukierman’s face as he spoke of “the ghost,” White told the new kid, “Keep on playing. She’s gonna mess with you.” In Tijuana Fats, Halloween is Mary’s holiday. She gets a party complete with band and dozens of admirers that crowd into her room to view tiny footprints leading to a hearth. Darden said, “Old buildings have souls – they have things tied to them and we have Mary. Sometimes people feel her and others don’t notice a thing. We’ve had people that don’t know the story come in and ask what happened here.” As if on cue, a dark haired woman entered the bar, pulling her scarf off as she entered the room holding the stone fireplace. “Was this a house once?” the girl asked Cooper who nodded yes. The girl continued, “I was wondering when I walked up, I thought to myself that this place probably has a ghost.” In its Halloween attire, Tijuana Fats is decked out in cobwebs and spiders, glowing pumpkins and streamers. Looking around the building, Darden said, “You know, it always looks strange when we take the spider webs down – they just look like they belong here.” Chances are, even if the staff of Tijuana Fats didn’t pull the polysynthetic web from the walls and archways of Mary’s room, a little girl with tiny bare feet would.