The shuttered Hotel Libby has a storied past in the Kootenai Valley. The hospitality hub deep in northwest Montana once provided lodging to railroad executives and bank presidents in the early 20th century, known then as the best hotel between Spokane and the Dakotas.

But in recent years, as the current owners look to renovate the Hotel Libby back to its proper form, some residents have come to know the 116-year old structure for its phantasmal ambiance in downtown Libby.

Until last month, most of the second-floor windows had been boarded up. Inside, the walls have been stripped down to the studs, rendering the once luxurious hotel into a building in limbo between its past and future lives.

Residents have noticed a headless bride hanging around by the windows, peering over the sidewalks. Others notice the lively and suspicious black cat darting from window to window. Some have even claimed seeing a silhouetted figure walking through the upstairs at night, perhaps a local kid who had sneaked into the hotel and was wandering the unfinished rooms and hallways; or perhaps something else.

Gail Burger, owner of Hotel Libby and the head of the effort to restore and reopen the building in its 1930s form, said there’s a lot of lore around the hotel’s saturnine spirit; some might be enough for those who believe in ghostly spirits and others she has created to simply add to the fun.

The headless bride, for example, is a mannequin she moves from window to window. She’s not sure where the head had disappeared to over the years, but she enjoys getting concerned phone calls about a decapitated ghost roaming the hotel’s third floor in a wedding gown.

Edgar Allen Poe, the black cat with enough curiosity to endanger all nine lives, is naturally outgoing and energetic for a feline. Burger said the cat wandered into the building from outside one day and has remained a resident ever since.

But there are a few instances of the unnatural that remain unexplained.

In 2014, a group of paranormal researchers spent a night in the dark inside the Hotel Libby, not to prove whether ghosts were checked in but to determine if activity was in fact happening at the hotel.

Members from Blackfoot Paranormal Investigation of Ovando and Valley Area Paranormal Research of Kalispell didn’t find a whole lot — a dark spot beneath some floorboards and a presence felt in the basement. One room reportedly had a window that opens on its own every three days, although nothing materialized in the room that night.

The paranormal hunters left Burger with a report, which she said is still sealed and hasn’t been shared with anyone, even Burger’s staff. Burger did allude to one point made by the investigators: the wall of a third-floor hallway had been identified as a porthole, where ghosts or spirits can actively pass through their world into ours.

But, with the renovation project in her mind which is undecided on the validity of ghosts, Burger isn’t worried about whatever it is a porthole could potentially bring.

“They said to get rid of the porthole, we would have to replace the wood so the grain is going the other direction,” Burger said. “Well, it’s the original wood and it’s not going anywhere, so I guess we have a porthole.”

Around the same time the ghost hunters visited, an independent film group made “Doom Service,” a shoestring-budget paranormal flick that was released in 2015.

Burger doesn’t discredit the idea of ghosts in her establishment, but embraces the idea and allows for imagination to motor the hotel’s atmosphere during this time between operations.

“Nothing has tried to push me out the window yet, so we’re cool,” Burger said.

Reporter Seaborn Larson may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at slarson@dailyinterlake.com.