The Becky Room

A tale of tragic loss in the desert heat

The Stillness of Becky: A Legend of The Mulberry Inn

The Mulberry Inn in St. George, Utah, built in 1873 as the grand Edwin G. Wooley / Charles F. Foster home, is the longest-running Bed & Breakfast in Southern Utah. It is a monument of pioneer ambition, but its history is laced with secrets and a chilling local lore.

The Attic's Secret and a Child's Despair

In the blistering summer of 1901, the Inn's already storied past took a tragic turn. Six-year-old Becky and her mother, Estelle, were hidden in the unfinished attic alcove, an impossibly tight, and opressivly airless space. This was already famous in local legends, having served as a known hiding place for polygamists fleeing the U.S. Marshals years before. Its invisible entrance was cleverly disguised, often cited in historical accounts as a concealed door and a hole in the ceiling discovered during later renovations.

Estelle had fled to St. George to escape a cloud of debt, and an abusive well connected husband, seeking refuge with a relative. She secured Becky and herself behind that secret access panel, believing they would be safe. But that was an unusually hot summer, the Southern Utah heat was a relentless enemy. Outside, the sun was a furnace, driving temperatures well past 110∘F. In the small, brick-walled space, the heat was suffocating.

As the days wore on, one bleeding into the next, their meager water supply ran out, for comfort Becky clung to her sole possession: a porcelain doll with wide blue eyes the color reflective of a summer sky. She had named her Porcelain companion Becky, in a child's flight of fancy and youthful irony, after herself. As the intense heat, reached its scorching fingers into her and stole the last of her breath, the little girl’s final, desperate thought, a plea for her mother’s help, had no place to go. Her spirit, starved for air and salvation, fled her body, anchoring itself permanently within the doll's unblinking stare within a porcelain shell.

The Sentinel of the Becky Room

Estelle was eventually found, week and nearing death, but her mind had fractured itself with grief and a guilt born of her loss. Before she was taken away, she told of a terrifying encounter with the doll. Staring into Becky’s glossy glass eyes, Estelle confessed a horrifying compulsion to the innkeepers. "Looking into them," she whispered, "I felt an uncontrollable urge to end my own life, to join the spirit that resides within that doll, to care for my Becky in eternity. It was as if she called to me, promising peace if I would only stay with her, forever." This confession cemented the doll's place in the Inn’s dark legend.

The doll was eventually recovered and had became the ironic focal point of the haunting in the second-floor chamber directly beneath the attic alcove. This room, with its Victorian charm, is now famously known as The Becky Room.

The porcelain doll, Becky, is the reason the room is now highlighted in local ghost tours. Always found seated in an old bet wood rocker, her vacant blue eyes directed precisely at the hidden door that holds the secret of the old attic hiding space. She has become the Inn's eternal sentinel, forever waiting for the mother who abandoned her to parish in the summer heat, to return and save her. No matter where she is moved, she will always, mysteriously, reappears in her chair in The Becky Room.

The Wailing and the Watch

The paranormal activity associated with the Inn’s deep historical roots converges most intensely in the Becky Room. Guests frequently comment on the unnatural waves of heat and the terrifying sounds: the soft, broken whimpering and the desolate cries of a small child calling "Mama..." The cries seem to emanate directly from the ceiling, from the hidden space above.

But the most compelling sighting is a young, matronly, woman. It has been told that on particularly unseasonably warm summer evenings, those nights when the temperature doesn't dip below 100 degrees, tourists walking the sidewalk in front of the Inn have looked up. They claim to see a woman dressed in a turn-of-the-century fashion standing at an upstairs window. Likely the restless spirit of Estelle. She is seen watching longingly, her gaze directed toward the nearby Brigham Young Winter Home Historical Site, carrying a palpable look of mourning and want, the eternal grief of the mother who fled.

But it is the doll’s interaction with female guests that is the most chilling element of the lore. Women who occupy the room, especially those who bear a dark-haired resemblance to the child’s mother, often feel the profound scrutiny of the doll. They swear that as they move around the Victorian-themed room, Becky’s painted eyes follow them.

On one occasion, a historian named Dr. Evelyn Reed, a woman with dark hair and a strong familial resemblance to the missing Estelle, was staying in the Becky Room. She initially scoffed at the local legends, a pragmatic scholar accustomed to debunking rather than believing. She meticulously covered the doll with a heavy, woolen, shawl before retiring, its solid rough shroud obscuring the innocent toy. She woke in the dead of night to a radiant, suffocating heat that had amplified the desert night outside. Her heart pounded as she saw that the shawl she had used to cover the doll was cast aside, a heap on the floor.

And there, nestled intimately against her on the pillow, tucked into the curve of her body as if a child seeking comfort, was the porcelain figure. Becky’s painted eyes, wide and unnervingly close, were inches from Dr. Reed’s face, holding an expression that was an agonizing mix of relief and pure, desperate longing. In that terrifying, silent moment, Dr. Reed felt a chilling echo of Estelle's confession ringing in her mind as if it had been screamed to her in an act of desperation and pleading. It was as if the trapped spirit had found a replacement for the mother who unwillingly was separated from her, and now she was home, not just with a visitor, but with a potential eternal companion. The doll seemed to whisper an ancient promise, a dark comfort, suggesting that if Dr. Reed would only let go of her mortality, they could be together, forever, far beyond the heat of the forgotten attic, away from the scent of heated sage and withering aspen. The pull was overwhelming, a siren song, serenading the soul.

Dr. Reed screamed, a raw, unnerving sound that tore through the quiet Inn, but by the time the staff arrived, the doll was back in her velvet chair, patiently waiting, forever the silent, haunted feature of The Becky Room. watched over by the perpetually grieving mother who haunts the very street outside.