The Haunting of Room 904
by Erika Wurth
Flatiron Books, $18.18
Review by Zack Kopp
In Erika Wurth’s The Haunting of Room 904 by, a Native American paranormal detective investigates the mystery of room 904 in Denver’s famous Brown (Palace) Hotel, where her own sister committed suicide, most recent in a line of women to do so in the same accursed chamber. Is it just another strange dark trend or is the room haunted? Since Naiche’s death in that room, Olivia Becente has made her living solving disconnects with passed relatives and banishing apartment apparitions as part of a small-time office team of ghost police.
Alejandro handed each object to me with a cloth, and I set them out, my hands folding them down in the proper way. I sat back. “I want to be clear. This is a ceremony, this is not some kind of play Indian thing. I am not a traditional medicine person, and I am certainly not a priest,” I said, chuckling darkly. “But this how I know how to respectfully communicate with the dead. My family was tradish, then Catholic, then Native American Church. This is what I know, who I am.” (6)
Meanwhile, scurrilous journalist Jenny Kunza stays committed to the destruction of Olivia’s reputation via libelous racist screeds in Denver-area newspapers (51). Her ex, Josh, has turned to stalking her since their breakup (64) and Olivia carries a gun in case things get worse. Her self-made ambitious intellect harbors a twist of imaginary guilt—she’s unsure how guilty she is for Naiche’s death. Adding to the confusion, a cult obsessed with the room has sprung up whose leader is driven to understand its inherent mystery.
“I think I can help. A woman on that list—Catherine Lambert—she was a friend of your sister’s.” and she was a member of that cult [the Brown Hotel doorman] said, his lips pursing … In the back of my mind, faintly, I remembered something about a woman named Cat. A woman my sister had been very close to before she died. … Naiche had been deeply entrenched in a cult that was turning out to be far more dangerous and influential than I’d ever imagined. (109)
The deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that Olivia’s sister Naiche is haunting the room now, cutting herself in the mirror (63) and the sisters’ stuttered reunion takes place as the investigation proceeds, between interspersed chapters depicting the (Sand Creek) Massacre of Natives by European trespassers. These chapters underline and emphasize the lineage of Wurth’s fiction, all the murdered Native spirits whispering secrets in the back of Olivia’s worried brain about that invasion’s inherent relation to the haunting of this room, reclamation of an ancient understanding about thematic connection that was once common knowledge. There’s no escaping your bloodline, as read the note found atop a Dybbuk box referenced in Chapter One (3).
My phone was flooded with hate messages from randos, though there were even more from the paranormal and Indigenous communities, telling me to hang on, offering help and words of wisdom, and mainly just making statements of support in my name on social media. Of course, there were a number of self-righteous “Who claims her?” posts from a handful of right-wing Natives retweeted by white nationalists and those clueless on the left, but my mother and I were used to that eye-rolling rhetoric by now. (191)
Author Erika Wurth is an urban Native of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent. She lives in Denver with her partner, step-kids and “two incredibly fluffy dogs”¹. Wurth is the author of several novels, including White Horse (2023), about an Indigenous woman’s relationship with an old family bracelet bracelet haunted by her own mother’s spirit.
Zack Kopp is co-creator of the monthly Coffeehouse for Social Medicine at Mutiny Information Café in Englewood. All his books are available at Amazon. Find more of his writing (fact and fiction) at www.campelasticity.com
