"Is This Place Haunted?" pt. 2

I've worked in a historic hotel for the last eight years or so. Close to a century old, it has housed old western film stars, mountaineers, adventurers, and tourists from all corners of the globe for generations. Usually people stick around for a single night, but others stay around for longer. Some are convinced a few never left.

Spooky, right? #2spooky4me

I've written about how the hotel has its fair share of ghost stories, from mysterious footsteps to sink taps turning on by themselves to guests being shaken awake by forces unseen. I've personally even experienced things that left me with goosebumps even after thinking up logical explanations and that it was my imagination getting the better of me. Having had an overactive imagination as a kid while simultaneously being a fan of the paranormal and spooky, I've learned how to calm down when I freak myself out. Usually I can see a scary movie or hear a ghost story and shrug off the heebie-jeebies.

Then again, sometimes stories bounce around my head longer than usual and spark my curiosity. Within the last month I've listened to three separate guest accounts of something they have had a hard time explaining. Granted, I hear stories from guests all the time, but the fact that their stories are set in the same wing of the hotel and are so eerily similar-- and that none of these guests even know one other-- stands out in my mind. The accounts don't vary much, and they go basically like this:

The room was upstairs in the south wing of the hotel. The guest was laying in bed, nodding off. It was pretty late. It was dark. Aside from the usual creaks that come from old buildings, it was quiet. After some time, despite the stillness and the hour, the guest felt something watching from beyond the shadows. The guest peeked through sleepless eyelids to see a dark silhouette at the foot of the bed that looked like a man. It started to move closer to the guest, either moving along side the bed or hovering overhead. Startled, the guest frantically turned on the bedside lamp, but when the light came on... the shadowy figure was gone.

It sounds like it could have been a nightmare. As a matter of fact, some people have reportedly seen "shadow people" during episodes of sleep paralysis, but the people I talked to claimed to have never experienced anything like that prior to staying at the hotel or since. Meth addicts who haven't slept in days report seeing similar things too, but the guests who reported the mystery man at the foot of their beds didn't look like they were coming off a drug bender either. Although not completely beyond the realm of possibility, I also doubt there was some dude hanging out in their rooms. I swear it wasn't me either.

The guests aren't sure what it was they saw or experienced, but they all lean toward the opinion of something supernatural. Considering the age of the building and the tales surrounding the place it's not hard to understand why they'd think it's a ghost. 94 years of passers-by might leave a straggler spirit behind, after all. Maybe it's the lost spirit of someone looking for a place to sleep, or possibly a dark entity out to harm unwitting souls that happen upon its hallway. Any number of ghost hunting TV shows can give you an explanation, but whether any of it is true or not is a matter of what you believe in I guess.

Regardless if it was a malevolent shadow person or an exhaustion-induced hallucination experienced by multiple people, it's still fascinating to me. One day I might rent out a room in that wing of the hotel to see if anything paranormal happens to me, but in the meantime I'm content with hearing the stories and keeping an eye out for those things that go bump in the night.