Not every ghost wants to scare you. Boone introduces Sully, the gentle presence said to keep faithful company in the post's oldest building — the restaurant named for a young Ulysses Grant.
Now don't you go hurrying past that old white house — Ranger Boone Merrick here, and I have saved you a warm one, because I'll tell you something most folks don't expect: not every ghost is out to raise the hair on your neck. Some of them just want the company. That there is the Grant House. Take a good look at it, because it is the oldest building on this whole post — clear back to about eighteen forty-nine, older than near everything else you have laid eyes on today. It carries the name of a young quartermaster named Ulysses Grant, who did a hitch right here at Vancouver Barracks back in the eighteen-fifties, a long, long while before the war made him a general, and the country made him a president. For the better part of two centuries since, this old house has stood through every season this post has seen — officers' quarters, gathering place, and for many a year now a fine restaurant where folks come of an evening to sit down to a good meal. And here is the thing about a house that old, friend. A house that has held that many suppers, that many goodbyes, that many warm nights against the cold — a house like that earns itself a resident. The regulars and the staff who have worked these rooms came to know him so well they gave him a name. They call him Sully. Now Sully, the story goes, is no rattling, moaning sort of haunt. He is a gentle one. They say a glass will slide itself down the bar with nobody near it. They say you'll feel a warmth at your shoulder in a room you know good and well is empty, like somebody just pulled up a chair beside you. A door eased shut. A footstep on the boards overhead when the upstairs is dark and locked. Little things. The kind of things a man does when he is at home and comfortable and in no particular hurry to be anywhere else. Folks who have felt him will tell you it never once felt unkind. It felt, they say, like somebody who loved this place so dearly he simply never got around to leaving it. Now, you know me — I trade in tales, not in testimony, so you take old Sully with a good grain of salt. I cannot swear to you there is a soul lingering in that house. But I will tell you this much. If even half of it is true, then Sully is about the rarest kind of ghost there is: the kind you would be downright glad to share a table with. So next time you pass that old porch, you go on and tip your hat to him. Costs you nothing. And a fellow who has kept the same house faithful company for the better part of a hundred and seventy years — well, I'd say he has earned himself a little courtesy.