Haunted Hotels Collection: Check In, If You Dare!

[00:00:06] Welcome to Tell Me A Ghost Story, the late night call-in podcast where we delve into the world of the supernatural and explore the eerie and unexplained. I'm your host, Michelle Newman. This podcast features true stories from our callers that will send shivers down your spine and leave you questioning the existence of the afterlife.

[00:00:33] So grab a cozy blanket, turn down the lights. Why are hotels so haunted? Welcome to a very special themed episode of Tell Me A Ghost Story. Haunted Hotels. Before we check in, a question I couldn't stop asking myself while I put this episode together. Why hotels?

[00:01:00] Why does a hospital, a ship, a brothel, and a best western all end up in the same pile? I have a few theories. And the first one is about you. The first night you sleep somewhere new, one side of your brain stays on watch. Sleep researchers at Brown University found that on that first night, one hemisphere stays more awake, apparently as a night watch.

[00:01:27] And when they played irregular beeps to sleepers, the more alert side woke up faster. By the second night, the difference was gone. So in a hotel on night one, your brain is built to catch the odd noise and the shape in the corner. A skeptic will tell you that's the whole story. But I'd say it also makes you an excellent witness. Second theory, in 1992, a French anthropologist named Marc Oze wrote a book about what he called non-places.

[00:01:56] Airports, motorways, hotel chains, spaces designed to have no history and no real community where everyone is just passing through. Which is a funny thing to build, because ghost stories keep insisting something does belong there. The harder a building works at forgetting everyone who stays in it, the more it seems to hold on to them. A third theory, think about what people actually do in hotels.

[00:02:26] Honeymoons, affairs, last trips, running away from something. The biggest night of a stranger's life, one after another. And then housekeeping changes the sheets, and the room goes back on the market. The sheets reset, but not necessarily the energy in that room. And fourth, hotels know.

[00:02:45] In the fall of 1974, Stephen King and his wife stayed in room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, one of the last nights before it closed for winter. And they were the only guests. That night, he dreamed of a fire hose chasing his three-year-old son down a corridor. He wrote The Shining. Today, room 217 tends to book up months in advance.

[00:03:11] And Oregon's Timberline Lodge, the building used for the overlook's exterior shots, asked Kubrick not to show room 217 for fear of scaring off guests. And now it's reportedly the most requested room there. A haunted reputation is the only amenity that appreciates over time. Last piece. And I'll be fair about it.

[00:03:35] Long identical hallways, elevators, stairwells, thin walls, pipes, an ice machine at three in the morning. You hear everything and you see nothing. Which is also a recipe for a ghost story. A lot of voices outside a bathroom door are probably plumbing and strangers. A lot. Not all. So put it all together. One side of your brain on guard. In a building designed to have no past.

[00:04:01] In a room that's hosted a thousand strangers on their worst and best nights. Run by people who are happy to tell you about the ghost. You don't need a ghost to be spooked in a hotel. But I wouldn't rule one out. So let's check in. Hi, my name is Heather. I'm calling from Mesa, Arizona. I have experienced a good ghost story.

[00:04:29] A couple of years ago, I did stay at the Grand Hotel in Jerome, Arizona, which is very haunted. I was in my room. It was nighttime. We were asleep. And I hear someone tell me, can you turn the TV off? I look over. My friend is asleep. The TV is off. I just ignored it and went back to sleep. A few minutes later, I felt someone tap on my shoulder.

[00:04:58] Can you turn the TV down? In a whisper. Looked over. The TV still wasn't on. A few minutes later, I go back to sleep. Wake up. See the hotel door, bedroom door shut. That was it. It did last me several times. I turned on my TV.

[00:05:26] Mind you, this wasn't a remote control TV. This was a TV I had to get up and turn up and down. So, yeah. That's my scary ghost story. Thank you. Thank you, Heather from Mesa, Arizona. The Grand Hotel in Jerome used to be a hospital. The hospital closed in 1950 and the building sat empty for decades until a restoration in 1994 turned it into a hotel. That's the first rule of hotel hauntings.

[00:05:56] Buildings that start as hospitals, asylums, and sanatoriums are their own subgenre because they are designed to hold people at peak emotional moments of their lives. Then somebody adds a minibar. And if your building has spent decades telling people to be quiet so they don't disturb the patients, I'd imagine the habit sticks. Hi, Michelle. This is Christy. I'm from Los Angeles and I have a ghost story to tell you.

[00:06:26] I want to preface by saying that since I was 13, I've had hypnagogic hallucinations. So, if you don't know what that is, it's basically upon waking, I see crazy stuff like shadows in my room or bugs crawling on my face or men standing outside my window. It's pretty terrifying.

[00:06:49] So, they're way more common than people think, but you usually only have a couple in your lifetime, they say. If you're like extremely like stressed or you haven't slept or something, but I have them a lot. That being said, anytime I think I've seen a ghost in my life, because there's been many, many times, most of the time I just chalk them up to a hypnagogic hallucination.

[00:07:16] How long have I been awake? Is it suspect because of that? So, this story that I'm going to tell you is weird because it was in total daylight and the middle of the day and I was totally awake. So, I was on my second trip to the Mount Washington Resort.

[00:07:41] I had seen the Ghost Hunters episode where they went into the princess's room and got some like crazy EVPs where the princess was like talking to them. And it totally blew my mind, made me think, you know, totally different things about ghosts possibilities and like, you know, time being split, things like that.

[00:08:04] So, when they were saying that they were going to do a Ghost Hunters event at Mount Washington, I was super excited. Went out to the first one, ran around, didn't see anything, but it was very fun. Got to, you know, watch them do their EVP work and got to use the tools and it was super fun. So, the second time I was like, okay, I'm just kind of going to go because it's fun. They have like a great veranda.

[00:08:34] You can have some cocktails. Super fun. And the guys are all, we're all very nice. So, went up a second time. You know, nothing really happened, but I did go to see a psychic talk. And this was Chip Coffey who is on all the Ghost Hunting shows. I'm sure you've heard of him. Um, so he was just going to do some talking, do a little bit of, uh, you know, reading of the room. And I thought that was pretty cool.

[00:09:04] Um, so we're watching him do his thing. And there's a curtain that's behind him. He's standing up on a stage. It's fully lit in there. Nothing weird. No, like, you know, special effects on the stage. Nothing happening. Um, so as he's talking, behind him appears this smear. It's like a smear. If someone smeared paint.

[00:09:32] Or if somebody, like, just kind of rubbed the atmosphere with their finger. Um, and it was the strangest looking thing I've ever seen. And it ran right behind him. It cut across the vertical lines of the curtain in a way that was, like, super unnatural. I was sitting next to a friend and she calls out to me. Did you just see that?

[00:10:00] And then on stage, Chip goes, oh, excuse me. I didn't see you there. And it was very strange. And two witnesses to it. Something I'd never seen. It was just very odd.

[00:10:25] And, yeah, that was the craziest thing I've ever seen awake. Thank you, Christy from Los Angeles. And thank you, Psychic Chip Coffey, for being the second witness. The Mount Washington Hotel has a very specific resident. Joseph Stickney finished the hotel in 1902 and died in 1903.

[00:10:53] His young widow, Carolyn, married a French prince and ran the popular resort until her death. Her suite, room 314, is now the princess room, and you can book it. She's reportedly been seen in there sitting on the edge of the bed. And the story goes she refuses to sleep in any bed but her favorite. Hotel Folklore loves a former owner. Hey, Michelle. It's Maggie, your old friend from Ever, Washington.

[00:11:22] I have a story about my birthday trip that my husband and I took to Port Townsend, Washington, which is over on the peninsula, which is a very neat, old, like, seafaring slash mining town that's super spooky and has a lot of weird ghosty history. One of my favorite places in the world is the Palace Hotel in Port Townsend. And it's this old Victorian hotel that used to be a brothel, like they all did.

[00:11:52] And my birthday is the day before Halloween, so it's really fun to go around my birthday because, of course, all the spooky stuff is happening in Port Townsend. In fact, while we were there, there were a ton of, like, ghost haunting expeditions and things that were put on by the city, but they're all way too expensive to be a part of. They're, like, seriously, they're, like, 120 bucks each. It was ridiculous. So we get to the Palace Hotel, and as we're checking in, there are a group of women standing in the corner.

[00:12:19] A couple of them are dressed in Victorian garb and are talking about ghost stuff. So I immediately just jumped in and was like, oh, my God, what's going on? And listened to their stories, which was a lot of fun because everybody had a story about the Palace Hotel. So that night we go out, we have some drinks at the bar downstairs. We wander around the city. We have a great time. And when we come back into the hotel, it's dead quiet. Everybody's either out and about or in their rooms or whatever.

[00:12:48] And we're just a little tipsy, so we're enjoying ourselves. And as we walked up the many, many flights of stairs to get back to the third floor to get to our room, we were talking about the history of the ghost stories in the Palace Hotel. And supposedly there's a ghost there named Claire, who was one of the prostitutes that I think was murdered, but I'm not 100% sure.

[00:13:14] You know, and supposedly there's the ghost of Captain Tibbles, who built the building and lived in it for a really long time. And, you know, all different sort of spooky things happen in this hotel. And there are a ton of stories and ghost stories surrounding it. So we're talking about this as we're, you know, kind of walking down the long hallway to our room.

[00:13:35] And the really neat thing about the Palace Hotel is that the building, the Captain Tibbles building that it's in, was built in like the late 1800s. The building next to it was built in like the 1910s, 1920s, sometime in there.

[00:13:54] And sometime in the last decade or so, they, the hotel bought that building next door, you know, renovated it and made it a part of the Palace Hotel. The thing is that the palace, the original palace is like creepy and Victorian and really pretty and a little frayed around the edges in the way that like an old Victorian hotel should be. Whereas the new portion of the hotel is all modern and sleek.

[00:14:23] And the apartments are very like furnished in a modern way versus Victorian way in the old part of the building. And there is on the third floor, a path between the two buildings. And you can even see not only the original wallpaper that was hanging in the palace when it first opened, but you can see like the brick as you pass through as you're entering one building from another. And as we were walking around, because we were just checking it out.

[00:14:53] As we were walking around in the new part of the building, the new building, the air felt wildly different. Like the air was bright and light. It was happy. It was kind of hopeful. And as soon as you pass through that brick walkway into the old Palace Hotel, the air was stifling and thick and really heavy, kind of weighed you down. And we found that very odd because we kept kind of going back and forth between the two buildings in this little walkway.

[00:15:22] And you could feel it. You could feel the air change and the vibe change as if like all the history of the Palace Hotel stayed in this building and just sort of grew and got heavier and got, you know, spookier and creepier. So we settle into our room, which is the Miss Kitty room. And it happens to be one of the corner rooms on the side of the building.

[00:15:48] So you get this absolutely beautiful view of downtown Port Townsend, the ferry coming in and out from the islands across the way. Just really, really beautiful, perfect weather, sunny, crisp, cool because it's the, you know, middle of fall. So that night we go to sleep.

[00:16:08] And in the middle of the night, I got woken up by footsteps from the ceiling above me. And I was really annoyed because we live in the bottom level of an apartment and we always have somebody walking above us. So even on our vacation, here I am getting woken up in the middle of the night by somebody walking above me.

[00:16:39] And I found that very annoying. But like, what are you going to do? You're in a hotel. It's an old building. It creaks. I go back to sleep. The next morning we wake up. We, you know, bum around before going to get breakfast. And I mentioned to my husband how annoying it was that we heard footsteps above us. And he went, yeah, that is really annoying. Like, I heard them in the middle of night too. And I was like, what the hell are they doing up there? So we just shrugged it off because, you know, what are you going to do? And we go downstairs and exit the building to go out to breakfast.

[00:17:09] And then Steve remembers that he left something in the hotel room. So he's got to run back up. And I'm sitting there outside looking at the building, looking up at our windows to our room. And I realized that we're on the top floor. There is nobody above us. But I distinctly heard footsteps walking back and forth above me in the middle of the night. So I went into the lobby and I was talking to the receptionist.

[00:17:36] And I was like, just out of curiosity, is there any space above us? Like, is there a room where, you know, people go and get supplies or anything? Like, is there any way somebody would be walking above us? And she was like, no, not at all. And I was like, because I heard footsteps last night. And she pulls out this huge black buying order and, like, flops it on the table between us. And I was like, this is filled with ghost stories from this hotel. You should put yours in, too.

[00:18:05] Manky Manky from Washington. Footsteps over your head when no one is above you is the most classic hotel report there is. And you picked a great hotel for it. The Palace Hotel in Port Townsend, Washington, was built in 1889. And from 1925 to 1933, the upper floors ran as a brothel, nicknamed the Palace of Suites. The 16 rooms still carry the names of the women who work there.

[00:18:32] Miss Clare's name is on the door of Room 4, home of the Lady in Blue legend. And shaking beds, moans, and shadows get reported in Rooms 3 and 4. The hotel keeps a ghost book where the guests write down their paranormal experiences. That's the front desk's way of saying, We know. And paranormal research and folklore loves a brothel, a saloon, a boarding house. For the same reason. Lots of feelings.

[00:19:01] Very little control over your own life. And that intensity is supposed to soak into the walls. At least, that's the stone tape theory. That ghosts and hauntings can occur when emotional traumatic events are imprinted on certain stones or other materials in a location. Which would make the Palace Hotel. Less of a haunting and more of a very long, very loud rerun. Nobody has found the mechanism that lets a wall record anything.

[00:19:32] Though the theory has still aged better than most hotel carpets. Hi. My name is Jules. And I'm calling from Santa Barbara, California. And I'm calling to report something kind of eerie that happened at my work. I work at a hotel in Santa Barbara. It's called the Marmonte Hotel. And because we're super in tune with reviews and people posting about their stay.

[00:19:59] This one girl posted on TikTok about an experience she had in one of our rooms. And how she goes into crazy detail. And the extra crazy part is she got a photo of something, some kind of entity standing at the foot of her bed. And it was just like, just the way she described it.

[00:20:27] I just don't feel like she'd be making any of that up. So me and the director of rooms, we were like, oh, let's see if that room is vacant. Let's just go check it out. And it was. So we went and just popped in. And, you know, it really looked pretty basic. Like nothing. It was just a clean room.

[00:20:47] And then the next part I have to kind of explain is that our room attendants, our housekeepers, are really, really good at, like, almost, like, crazily good about making our beds. You know, you expect when you go into a hotel, the bed to be, like, crazy, like, perfect. But our housekeepers do, like, an amazing job with that.

[00:21:12] And so they're really, they're always incredibly, like, flat and, like, just perfection. And we're, like, looking around. And we're, like, looking around. And I said, you got to look at the bed. And we look at the bed. And there's, on one side, it's a king-size bed. On one side, there's, like, an indent. And not, like, just, like, one little dent. It's, like, the type of indent that would basically be there if someone was sitting there.

[00:21:43] And it was just, I'd never seen our bed like that. And just, I, just immediately both of us felt, like, holy shit. Like, something's there. Something's staring at us. Something's sitting there. And we just started running out of the room. I just had this feeling of my entire body. It was, like, we got to get out of here. And I was, like, no, no, no. You got to take a picture. You got to take a picture. So before she, like, holds up her cell and she's, like, taking it real quick. And she actually got a photo of the bed.

[00:22:12] I don't know if I can submit it or anything. But it was definitely something in there. And that's my ghost story. Thank you, Jules from Santa Barbara. The Marmonte Hotel was built in 1931 in a Spanish colonial revival style and has recently been renovated. And as we know in paranormal research, renovations stir things up.

[00:22:40] While the Palace Hotel has a ghost book at the front desk, the Marmonte has a TikTok. Hotel Ghost Lore used to be a scrapbook. Now it's guest reviews and a camera in every pocket. Hi, Michelle. This is Ashley calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. And I've got a ghost story from when I was about 11.

[00:23:03] My family went to California and we went and visited the Queen Mary. Now, my family's rather large, about 12 of us, aunts, uncles, and cousins that were there. One of my cousins, who's a year younger than me, he got too scared. So my Aunt Elle had to take him back up. When she was in the elevator by herself, she felt a little hand grab her knee. And when she looked, she was in the elevator completely alone.

[00:23:32] So we finished the tour and we're snapping pictures. Now when we get back home to Utah, my mother happens to notice that in one of the photos of the pool, there's a little girl in a blue gown in the corner of the pool. Now it's been said that she drowned there when it was still a functioning cruise ship before it turned to becoming a warship. So we found this interesting and my mother is a writer. So she wrote a book about our experiences on there.

[00:24:02] She changed some names. So the book is called The Ghost of Queen Anne. And it goes through and documents our experiences. And she made up a story behind the little girl in the pool. So we decided to call her Victoria. And as my mother was writing the story about Victoria, I started to notice that some strange things were happening in the house. The first thing that I noticed was anytime my mother sat down at the family computer to try to write this story,

[00:24:29] the computer would glitch and shut off and get a virus, even though we had protection. Then I told her, hey, so you don't lose your manuscript. Email it over to me. When she emailed it to me, everything was in code and it was errored and it was broken. And it did not send over as a regular manuscript should have. Then things started to get a little bit weirder. I lived in the basement and I was the only one that was down in the basement

[00:24:58] right next to the family room that had the family computer. I started hearing wet, squelching footsteps in the middle of the night. It woke me up once and I looked over and I always had a nightlight, but I looked over and I saw a small figure and I heard drips of water. So me being terrified and 11, I ran out of my bed,

[00:25:26] turned on the light and there was nothing there. But there was ever so slightly a small puddle on my floor where the carpet was wet. Now we didn't have any animals at the time, so we can go ahead and eliminate a pet accident. But I just thought that was so strange. My mother ended up finishing the manuscript, but not before we had flickering lights, other mysterious wet spots that appeared throughout the house, and then we started hearing children laughter.

[00:25:57] As soon as she wrote the last paragraph and finished the book, all of the weird occurrences stopped. We experienced no more children's laughter, no more wet spots, and I didn't have any more dripping nightmares. It was really weird the way that it ended, but for some reason when she finished the manuscript, the hauntings stopped. It's almost like we manifested the hauntings ourselves. Anyways, thank you so much for listening to my story. Big fan. Thank you.

[00:26:28] Thank you, Ashley from Salt Lake City. Hotel Folklore has a whole chapter on ships because sailors have spent centuries swapping stories about vessels that carry the dead and the Queen Mary, and the Queen Mary has the history to back it up. On October 2nd, 1942, she was zigzagging at high speed as a troop ship when she sliced through her own escort. 337 men died. In July 1966,

[00:26:57] an 18-year-old crewman named John Petter was crushed by a watertight Tor 13 during a drill, and after all of that, the city of Long Beach bought the ship in 1967. And the girl in the pool has her own legend, depending on who tells it. A little girl named Jackie drowned in either the first-class pool or the second-class pool, and in 1997, a psychic added a second drowning victim's name, Sarah.

[00:27:27] The ghost legends keep getting added to. Your mother created the name Victoria and wrote her a whole story. Maybe your mother just found a third drowning victim. I've driven up and down the area five now and so many times. It's a routine. I have my spots that I stop. I have, I know my route. I know the gas stations I stop at, and I know, like,

[00:27:56] the hotel that I try to stay at every time. And I, you know, I have a routine. It's, you know, I know I'm making good time when I make it to Sacramento in one day. You know, there's like a certain amount of things. And I usually try and stay in Ashland because I try to do California all in one day, but it's always kind of hard. And this time in particular,

[00:28:23] I tried to do California in one day, and I got very kai, and I started, I had had a late start on the drive. And I had decided I was going to stop for the night, and I pulled off at some hotel. It was just like a stop on the five. It was like, it had a, it was just one of those random stops

[00:28:52] that just has like a hotel and a gas station. And it was like outside of Sacramento, and I don't remember if it was before or after. It's right like around Gilroy, that garlic place. You know, her place that has the garlic festival and the garlic ice cream and stuff. But anyway, so it's like California farm country. So there's like, you know, there's like a faint smell of cows in the air. Yeah. So anyway,

[00:29:22] I check into this like Motel 6. And, you know, it's all right weird anyway, because I'm a female. I was a young female then, and like I was just driving up to Portland. So it's, you know, you know, it's, it can be, you gotta be aware when you're on the road by yourself. So anyway, I'm checking in. And, you know,

[00:29:51] everything's fine. It's kind of a lower grade Motel 6. It's kind of dodgy, kind of in a weird area where it's the only thing around. But, you know, whatever, I was only going to be there for the night. So anyway, I go into the room, and I, you know, I bring my suitcase in, or I'm just like getting ready for bed. And, you know, that night, I like, I don't know, it was just weary.

[00:30:21] It felt like I was the only one staying there too. So it was just very empty, very desolate. So, yeah, I'm getting ready for bed. The room's really run down. And I'm just, I don't know, I'm just feeling off. So I get into bed. Across from me, there's like a chair. And then there's the credenza that the TV's on and stuff like that all across on the wall, like typical hotel room.

[00:30:54] And I turn out the light. And I am trying to go to bed. And, you know what? I probably dozed off. But, I, I probably dozed off. I probably did. And then, I look across. But, you know, in the dream state, or in my awake state, I look across at that chair that was across, across the room. I am, there's

[00:31:23] a man thing. And, uh, I, I, I, I, he, um, you know, your mustache. Uh, he had on kind of baggy pants and a baggy t-shirt and sweatshirt. You know, he kind of looked like a Rectrican guy. And, he was sitting across, like, with both hands on the chair, arms,

[00:31:53] and his, you know, wide legs just like slouching in the chair. But, yeah, just, uh, just a guy watching me. Just a guy. I mean, it was pretty scary. Um, and I didn't know what to do. So, I yelled,

[00:32:23] mom, mom, mom, mom, mom. And when I woke up, looked away, um, I turned the light on and there was no man there. But, I woke myself up by yelling, mom, mom, mom, help me, mom, help me. My mom's alive. So, uh, you know, it's not like her spirit was there to protect me. But, uh, that's all I could think of

[00:32:53] to do. And, um, so, yeah, the rest of the night I slept with the light on because there was no way I was gonna chance that encounter again. And in the morning I cleared out of that hotel super early and got on the road and got up to Portland. So, that's my ghost story. Or, my weird dream story. Thank you to our caller driving up to Portland.

[00:33:24] You called it your ghost story or weird dream story and I respect that you left it open. People who study sleep paralysis have a name for a figure in a room who feels completely real and vanishes before you can move. They call it the intruder. It's a reasonable explanation. It doesn't make the Motel 6 off the interstate feel any safer, though. Hey, Michelle. It's Noah from Atlanta, Georgia. And my wife and I went to Vegas.

[00:33:53] It was like Halloween night. That Friday we went out to I don't remember the hotel but they had a Halloween party. We both went as Beetlejuice. She did like a gender bender Beetlejuice and I was I guess your other normal Beetlejuice. And we come back. We didn't even really party hard or anything. We come back to the hotel room, go to sleep and I wake up at like 3 in the morning. I remember looking at the alarm clock and seeing that and then looking up

[00:34:23] and there was a little boy staring at me. He was not in full color. It was kind of tones of gray and he didn't look modern. Like his dress appeared as if he was I don't know like late 1800s, early 1900s. Kind of that Musy Cap vibe to him. He didn't feel threatening. I kind of felt more like a fish in a fishbowl. Needless to say it did freak me out and I immediately rolled back over

[00:34:52] in the bed and was trying to talk myself out of the reality of the situation thinking maybe it was sleep paralysis or something but I remembered I had rolled over so I was like okay if I roll back over he'll be gone. So this time when I rolled back over it was him and what appeared to be I assume his father same tones of gray same air of dress and he had his hand on the kid's shoulder staring at me this time I closed my eyes immediately and rolled

[00:35:22] over and pulled the covers over my head even though it didn't feel threatening at all just seeing very vivid apparitions in that manner I don't know it felt crazy just knowing that that is a real possibility and if you liked those stories I actually also have a ghost podcast online I interview people about their ghost stories

[00:35:52] it's called real hauntings real ghost stories if you find the little icon with the cute ghost wearing headphones we have people on and interview them and trying to get to the bottom of what these ghost stories are when I started it I didn't really believe in ghosts that much and now I'm a full-on believer spoiler if you're going to listen to six years of content I guess but yeah check it out it's real hauntings real ghost stories thanks thank you Noah

[00:36:22] Halloween in Las Vegas you might as well be at a haunted house Vegas got its start as a tiny desert town in 1945 when it caught the eye of mobster Bugsy Siegel he borrowed nearly six million dollars from the mob to build the flamingo and it opened in December 1946 and less than a year later Siegel was shot dead in Beverly Hills the flamingo is still one of the oldest operating properties on the strip

[00:36:51] and his ghost is said to roam a quiet memorial garden dedicated to him he's also been reported by the pool in the late evening and in the wedding chapel which is supposedly built on the site of his old apartment in downtown Las Vegas the El Cortez opened up on Fremont Street in 1941 and Siegel had a stake in that one too a later owner left behind a spooky collection of urns in the basement and there have been reports of a man in a fedora believed to be a former gangster

[00:37:23] and then there's Elvis he played a historic run of concerts at what was then the international and later the Hilton and is now the Westgate and Wayne Newton swears he saw Elvis's ghost in the stands and guests at the Westgate have reported hearing music Elvis music in rooms with no radio playing I was on a road trip with my high school boyfriend we'd stopped at a Best Western in Fresno California

[00:37:53] it's still there by the way that night when I was drifting off to sleep I was laying on my back and I opened my eyes just a little bit and right in front of my face nose to nose I saw a man hovering over me and then in a split second he was gone I jumped in the bed you know when you fall in a dream and you you shake the whole bed my high school boyfriend was like are you okay and I was like

[00:38:23] oh yeah I thought I just saw a person hovering over me and just laughed it off I mean it must have been a dream it was just weirdly intense then he said I thought I just saw a person hovering over me and then we both just sat there in silence for a few minutes and then I got up and turned on the bathroom light and we slept with that light on the rest of the night next message

[00:38:53] hey this is Artemis from Los Angeles California and this is my ghost story so when I was in my mid-twenties I was living in New York City and me and my ex-girlfriend were working in the hectically fabulous world of fashion or adjacent to fashion and we were living together in Brooklyn and we'd had a really particularly busy

[00:39:23] month and a half both of us and we really wanted to do a vacation but we couldn't really leave the city so we said hey let's do a staycation and my ex kind of took it upon herself to figure out where we were going and where we would be staying and there's a hotel in New York called the Bowery Hotel which is a really lovely hotel that looks really old but is actually new they did a great job making it seem old but they have a sister property

[00:39:53] that is sort of like a townhouse that's affiliated with the Bowery Hotel that you can rent but it's kind of like you have to know to know to rent it one of these things and it's the same principle as the hotel except there's no staff on site you go and check in at the at the Bowery Hotel and then you go to this townhouse and it's like really beautiful and you know it's kind of like it's a thing so she picks that place

[00:40:23] I'd never really heard of it I didn't do any research on it you know it's just kind of like let's have an adventure so we decided to like meet after work in the city get some drinks go check in have a night in the hotel really really nice you know ordering food do the whole night so we go for drinks we go to the hotel afterwards to pick up our keys and the bellman who gives us our keys kind of goes oh

[00:40:52] that's a good room with this kind of like weird mischievous vibe and we were like all right weird man that's fine we thought it was like he was just being cheeky so we go to the hotel and it's really beautiful it's an old Victorian building and you check in by yourself and you go in and we were the only people in there that night so there's only like four rooms one on each floor of this thing and we were in the top room on the top floor and it is set up like you're in someone's

[00:41:22] house like you enter and it's just a staircase and a weird little foyer and really beautiful and art and yada yada but we go upstairs we went in we joked this looks like a haunted house like it looks like this would be your classic haunted house but you know we were in

[00:42:06] our like beautiful but you really gotta yank them up and then they lock in and you gotta yank them down and you know the lights are very old and the way they turn on is the only thing I can tell the light turns on so we were there and we and we were like this is really beautiful and this is really cool and we start drinking the

[00:42:41] there's this kind of unsettling feeling in the room I don't really know what it was but it just kind of had this lingering thing and we were kind

[00:43:11] so we're drinking wine and we're sitting on the edge of the bed talking and just like oh this is going to be so nice and my ex goes yeah I'm definitely going to draw a bath in a little bit because we don't have a bathtub in our place and I'm going to have a serious bath and

[00:43:41] nowhere the bath turns on this is about five minutes later so we've already changed into a different topic and I mentioned before like this isn't like a bath like a modern thing where like oh you bump it and these are like old things you gotta crank on and it

[00:44:12] but we were like you know like whatever like maybe there was a kink in the pipe like New York places are old whatever the radiators that creak so we go in and like sure enough the water is gushing out of the tub and we're like oh cool so we turn it off and then we go back into the room and we're kind of like that's weird so we're sitting

[00:44:42] lose track of time and we're hanging out and then I hear like a noise in the hallway like outside of the door and I was like oh that must be our food so I go out into the hallway there's no food and I'm like oh and I kind of like look over the railing down into like the next floors and I you know when you like you just miss seeing someone but like I didn't really see them but I know someone was right there

[00:45:12] I get that feeling like around the corner of the staircase and I was like okay so I kind of yell out I was like hey didn't mean to disturb you if you're staying here we thought we're the only ones no response but I'm like I think there's probably someone else checked in you know it's last minute check in so I go back inside and I'm kind of like okay that was weird but no food yet she like checks the app she's like oh yeah it hasn't arrived yet so

[00:45:41] we're kind of like okay go back great so we like open the window to get a little air in and again these are windows you gotta crank up so we pull the window up and we kind of like it locks in place and

[00:46:30] on the landing up above so like I registered someone but I had my head down and walked up the stairs so I started talking to her and like hey like okay I'm so excited to eat this like I thought she was leaning out looking and waiting for me and I get to the top of the stairs and she's not there and I'm like oh and I go to the room and I open it like so she's not even like at the front of the stair and I

[00:47:16] way and she's like someone probably just staying there you know what mean someone probably checked in like you're just catching the residuals of someone opening their door closing their door it's like there's other it's a hotel you know and I'm like yeah no this feels like way more intense than that so there's a little table that's like off to the side where you can like a dining

[00:47:46] and like hang out tonight maybe smoke some joints and so we're like sitting there and we lay out all the food and we're sitting and we're all just like getting really comfortable and she goes fuck you know it's like now it's getting a

[00:48:16] well that's very strange and now she's on my level of like okay this is really really weird we eat our dinner we're like okay let's go you know back outside like smoke a joint outside go for a little walk remind ourselves that we are in fact in Manhattan there's millions of people here it's not scary so we go outside we go to the front we smoke a joint we walk around the block walk off our dinner and we're like back

[00:48:46] to kind of being chill because you see hundreds of people in the streets and it's very chill and there's cars and you're like we're not haunted we're in New York City we met the person that has been you know I've been freaked out by

[00:49:16] so I'm shutting the door and then I go to come up and she's just like frozen there and I was like what happened and she was like I just swear someone had been there and I just missed them so I yelled after them but then I turned my head and there was no one in the hallway and I was like cool great so now we're right it's like going in the place and the sound dampens and now we're back in the haunted

[00:49:46] house again and it was cool we go back upstairs we're trying to enjoy ourselves she's like I'm gonna go have that bath I'm gonna you know I'm like great I'll like sit in the bathroom and read while you're in the bath it'll be very cute so she goes and draws the bath and we're in the bathroom both of us she's in the bath I'm sitting next to the bath reading we got candles it's very cute and I hear in

[00:50:22] the very distinct noise of feet and I was like and we both hear it and we just keep talking and then I hear it come back down the hallway from the opposite direction and I go outside again and I'm like there's no one in the hallways and I'm like now I'm holding on to like sanity I'm like no no like someone has checked in you're not you haven't seen this person

[00:50:52] they're just going about their night get a hold of yourself but now I'm a little wrecked we're both wrecked she gets out of the tub we go to get into bed and we're in bed and all the lights are on and it's one of those things where you have to go and click all the lights off it's not a master switch you gotta go around and click the different lights off and we're like okay let's go click the lights off and I stand up and go to the one side of the room to click the lights off

[00:51:22] and as I'm turning that side like the entryway lights off I we didn't even spend the night in the hotel and the next morning we kind of woke up laughing like I can't believe we just spent this money on this and then

[00:51:52] didn't stay like what was wrong with us like we were so so I called the hotel and I was like hey we left early totally our fault nothing was really wrong with the room we were just kind of feeling a little off so sorry about that but like here's me checking out from my apartment in Brooklyn you know like weird sorry and he was like oh no that's totally fine totally that's you know we'll love to have you

[00:52:21] guys back sometime and I was like yeah and like apologize to whoever else was staying there because I you know I think I like yelled out for them a few times and I don't want to disturb them like I was like was checking in to see if someone would come in and there's this like long pause and the guy goes there was no one staying in

[00:52:56] story it turns out that it had been an orphanage a million years ago okay so that's terrifying like it was like a nunnery orphanage thing and then in our room when it became a hotel the first it was like before it was like officially a hotel it was like you can rent floors of this short stay and these two really famous artists overdosed in our

[00:53:26] in what and it had been set up differently but they had a crazy night in like 1999 or 2003 or something and died one in the bathtub not even kidding and one in the living room area one last thing before your next trip the first night in a new room one side of your brain stays awake on purpose so if you hear something at three in the morning that's just your night watch doing

[00:53:56] its job probably that's all we have this week folks do you have a ghost story call 701 484 2666 that's 701 484 2666 or go to

[00:54:26] tellmeaghoststory.com and leave your story there thank you to all the callers who left messages this week i'm your host michelle newman signing off see you next week