There was something not quite right about the little hotel on the side of the road. I could tell that from the moment I saw it through my slightly fogged up windscreen, my windscreen wipers going a mile a minute in an attempt to keep up with the relentless rain falling from the sky. But this hotel was where the company I worked for had booked in a room for me, and at eleven at night, I wasn’t up to trying to find someplace else. Not that I could afford to rent a room myself anyway.
The hotel was part of a restaurant, with a bar and dining area downstairs, and the letting rooms upstairs. I went unnoticed as I walked in, but the second I announced to the woman behind the bar that I was supposed to be staying in one of the rooms, heads spun to face me, almost to examine me, before people turned to each other and started talking in hushed whispers.
“You’re blooming brave, love. I wouldn’t want to spend a night here,” someone called out. Someone responded sarcastically, saying ‘what are you on about, you spend nearly every night here!’ and the whole bar laughed, most seemingly moving on from the short conversation, but I couldn’t shake the man’s words.
I was escorted upstairs, and shown to my room. I thanked the man who had shown me up, and made to step towards the door of the room, but the man stopped me short.
“Take no notice of anything they say down there. They’re a bunch of superstitious bastards, and the drink just makes them worse.” He walked off after saying that, which did nothing to quell my unease. I looked around the hall, before quickly unlocking the door to my room, and stepping in. I had a strange feeling that I was the only person staying at this hotel.
After freshening up, and changing out of my work clothes into a pair of jeans and a comfy jumper, I made my way back downstairs, and ordered myself a drink. Word seemed to have spread, and people started coming up to me, talking to me. The things I was told as I sat there were unbelievable. That the building was haunted, that lights flicker and footsteps can be heard when there’s no one walking around. That someone once got hit by a bar stool that a ghost sent flying, and ended up in hospital. That the pervious owners of the building had left fearing for their lives and their sanity. It’s not like I was superstitious in the slightest, I’ve always been of the mindset that when you die, you’re dead and gone, and that the supernatural has always simply been stories to scare people. But the amount of people that came up to me with a different ghostly story had me a little on edge.
I lay in bed that night, exhausted but somehow unable to sleep. After hours of ghost stories, my brain had started to actually believe some of the stuff that was said, and every little noise I heard made me jump and clutch the duvet a little tighter. A creak here, a quiet clatter there. Whether it was just the building owners or a manager closing up for the night, and making sure the building was secure, I didn’t know, but in my head, a spirit was roaming the halls outside my locked room door.
I woke up the next morning with no idea when I fell asleep, but feeling disorientated and like something was wrong. I sat up, rubbing at my eyes, and realised as I looked around the room what it was that was off. There was a chest of drawers in my room, and when I went to bed, all three drawers were shut. I knew for certain, because I looked through them to see if anything had been left in them. Now, the top drawer had been pulled all the way open, and bent to the side on an angle to hold it open. I climbed uneasily out of bed, and checked the drawer, closing it when I found nothing else strange about it.
And then the next night, I definitely heard footsteps in the hall, that stopped just outside my room, and lingered beyond the door for at least half an hour of me panicking and being frozen in bed for fear that movement would alert whatever was by the door to my presence. The next morning, everything in the room had been unplugged, the plugs were lying on the floor next to the sockets. I requested a room change after that, but apparently it wasn’t possibly, because every room had been booked out. Strange, considering there was clearly no one in any of the other rooms.
In my spare time, the time I was supposed to be using for relaxing, watching television, and sleeping, I started researching the building. Simply searching the name of the building on the internet, along with the word ‘ghost’ brought up a string of web pages about the people who had died in the building, and stories of people who have stayed here, and what they experienced overnight. Flickering lights, footsteps in the hall when there was no one out there. Things moving around in the rooms. Terrible nightmares every night they spent here.
I started dreading coming back to the hotel, a cold shiver ran down my spine every time I stepped through the door, and settled in my bones until I left the building the following morning. The end of the week was slowly nearing, and I would be going home, and I couldn’t wait, but voicing my concerns to my boss, asking to be moved to a different hotel… I had only just managed to get this job, and I didn’t want to come off as paranoid before I had a chance to prove myself.
I stared up at the ceiling, the duvet pulled up to my chin. A coldness had settled over the room in the last couple of minutes, and I started to shiver, but quelled the shaking and froze at the sound of footsteps approaching my door. They paused for but a moment, outside of my door, before continuing. Not down the hall, like every time before, but continuing towards me, the footsteps coming through the closed door and stopping right next to me.
I could barely breathe, frozen in place as the bed dipped, as if someone was sitting down on the side of it. I tried to pretend to be asleep, but my eyes refused to close, and my breath kept catching in my throat as air come in and out in shaky pants. When I saw a figure appear before me, I stopped breathing all together. He was pale, colourless, almost see-through. He slowly reached a misty hand out towards me, and touched it to my cheek. Icey coldness ran through my body, starting from the contact of his hand on my cheek, and I felt my body go numb, even though my mind raced on.
In weeks to come, people would talk of the woman who was found dead in one of the rooms upstairs. In months to come, when gossip quietened down, and people started renting out that room again, they would complain that it felt like someone else was lying in the bed with them, and whenever they lay down, a wave of fear would wash over them. They would describe it in online articles as if the woman who had died was still around, and in her final moments, she felt nothing but terror.
And done!
I'll be honest, I was going to scrap the idea of doing Spooky Season Week this year entirely. It was supposed to start yesterday, and go from Monday to Sunday. But obviously, I didn't have any posts ready to go out yesterday. So I'm going to try and do Tuesday to Monday instead. At least this will actually include Halloween.
And hopefully, I'll actually get some posts scheduled. I currently have one ready for tomorrow, and that's it.
Anyway, that's all for now...
Bye!
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