Maria Gerbitz spotted two of her regulars heading into her Maria’s Hiredhand Cafe and hurried into the kitchen to get their usual tea and root beer. That’s when the gentleman behind her offered a hand. “I’ll get that root beer for you, Maria,” he said. After all, the restaurant is a busy but homey place where customers often help out by helping themselves. But when Gerbitz turned around to thank him she saw no one. The ghost — or prankster, as she calls him — first showed up around New Year’s. It was 3 a.m. and Gerbitz was preparing for an expected busy breakfast buffet. Suddenly, a large array of shadows — almost like a procession — streamed from the kitchen area and whisped away. The ghost appearance followed soon after. “Since then, three of us have heard a man’s voice,” Gerbitz said. Once, dishes came crashing down. A heavy metal door is heard slamming. An old jukebox’s lights flicker. “We’re always hunting for something,” she said. On a freakish snowy day this spring, a friend lending a hand went outside to get ice. Next thing Gerbitz saw was the friend, in short sleeves, shivering at the front door. She had been locked out and she wasn’t happy about it. The ghost even calls one employee by the nickname only Gerbitz calls him: Georgie. Gerbitz opened the Hiredhand about a year ago in an old wooden building along U.S. 54/70 between Alamogordo and Tularosa. The building came to Otero County from the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas.

Apparently the ghost came with the building, which had once been the front half of a medical barrack. The back half, she said, had caved in. Where the restaurant’s back door now is was actually the barracks’ front door, and the address numbers are still visible beside the entrance. The kitchen, according to a retired Army sergeant, is was where the nurses station most likely would have been. Patients who entered the barracks would have rung a bell to announce themselves. The same area today is where the ghostly voice is always heard, and where the unseen door slams.

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