Ferry Lodge¶

The Ferry Lodge is a rustic pine-log hotel in Radford, Virginia, across the street from the Pay n' Stay. It is full on the team's first night in town, becomes their base partway through The Radford Horror, and returns remodeled and under new management in The Radford Horrors, where the IRS raids it.


Type	Location (hotel)
Aliases	The lodge
Region	Radford, Virginia
First appearance	Radford Horror 01

Description¶

In the first arc the lodge is a big, nice, rustic pine-log hotel. Andre spells the name out as "F-E-R-Y" (Radford Horror 01). The rooms the team takes cost $80 a night, reimbursable, and are four adjacent second-floor rooms with thick timber walls, Indian blankets, stag heads, a pine smell and old TVs with cable and pay-per-view. The lobby has cucumber-and-hibiscus water and a tree-ring table, and a lobby phone (Radford Horror 05, Radford Horror 06). It is a separate place from the mountain ski lodge, the Alpine Lodge, where the team later uses the water tower (Radford Horror 06).

In the second arc the lodge has been remodeled "under new management": a bank of payphones, new windows, brighter lights, hot tubs, a pool and a mud-mask spa. It is half empty. The clerk pitches an "Alpine Relaxation Package" (Radford Horrors 02). Sheriff Molly Underhill says the new management arrived four or five months earlier and are "snooty" and secretive, hiring no locals (Radford Horrors 02); the diner waitress agrees (Radford Horrors 04).

History of events there¶

The Radford Horror¶

On their first night in Radford, Dick "The Biz" Baxter spots the lodge. It is full because of an oral surgeons' convention, and the clerk offers one single bed and points to the Pay n' Stay across the street (Radford Horror 01). The team later notes that the lodge has cameras (Radford Horror 04).

Around 1 p.m. in Radford Horror 05 the team moves from the Pay n' Stay to the lodge, after the bedbug trouble. Kurt and the Biz carry in a cooler holding the NSA agent's remains, the dog skull and a couple of beers. Kurt sets tell-tales in his room and keeps his pager on him. An orthodontist conference has nearly emptied the lobby by afternoon, and the team regroups there in the evening to discuss stakeout options (Radford Horror 05).

In Radford Horror 06 Andrew Howard takes a page from the sheriff on the lobby phone about Dean Lawson's truancy, which becomes a pretext to bring Dean in.

The Radford Horrors¶

On arrival Kurt notes the lodge lot is half empty. A Read a Bad Situation roll shows a nondescript white van and two street-corner "inexperienced field agents" watching the lodge. The van drives off when approached and circles back (Radford Horrors 02). Daniel Webster books two doubles, insisting on bunking with Kurt (Radford Horrors 02).

As the keys are handed over, IRS Criminal Investigations SWAT storms in. Kurt goes prone and draws, then pulls the pin on a grenade and holds it as a dead man's switch, and a Manipulate Someone roll of 11 keeps him from being shot. The clerk runs to the back room, shreds documents and sets the file cabinets on fire. Andrew catches her and passes her to Webster. The IRS leader, who had run an eight-month fraud investigation, is furious and shuts the lodge, and the team is escorted out (Radford Horrors 02). Kurt and Andrew later confirm with an IRS agent that the white van and the corner watchers were IRS (Radford Horrors 02). See IRS Criminal Investigations.

Later, on the diner's camera, the waitress says many gray vans gathered around the lodge during "the raid" (Radford Horrors 04). The woods past the lodge are where Billy Thornton goes to use heroin, and where Kurt hides the backup tape in a hollow tree twenty minutes' walk away (Radford Horrors 04).

The waitress is referring to the IRS raid, and says she never saw that kind of van around town before; whether the gray vans seen at the Douglas Pinball Emporium were among them is never established.

Inhabitants¶

The oral surgeons' convention and later the orthodontist conference (first arc).
The new management and a clerk who flickers when Webster says "FBI" (second arc).