That night I stayed in a haunted hotel room: Share your ghost stories!

By Kelly

AI image generated with Adobe Express

Lately, I’ve been thinking about ghost stories. The ones I find most interesting are the ones I read online from total strangers that they claim are true. So I thought it would be cooler to collect them from people I know (and possibly some I don’t) online here. So put your real ghost stories in the comments. I’ll share one of mine in return. (I only have a handful, but this is the scariest.)

I spent a weekend alone in New York City in the summer of 2006. I rode a train along the Hudson River from a writers’ conference in Saratoga Springs. I had never visited “The Big Apple” before, so I did all the touristy stuff, but I was 25, so I got a cheap, $80-a-night hotel from a discount booking website off off Times Square.

As soon as I entered the building (a dark stairway right off the trash-piled street) and entered my “room,” I knew it was a mistake. This “closet” had a full bed at its center with barely any walking room around it. The radiator under the window was melted. The bathroom was the size of a standing coffin. The carpet was stained with something brown in several spots. I hoped it was mud.

The sheets ended up giving me body lice, but in the moment, I just noticed they weren’t clean.

But as a broke graduate student, it was what I could afford, so I went to sleep. But soon after, someone ran down the hall and pushed on every single door to see if one would open. I thought that was odd, but went back asleep, until the same thing woke me an hour later. I realized someone was doing it, strategically every hour, to see who they could rob.

That scared me so much I had an adrenaline rush and moved the only other thing in the room besides the melted radiator (a 200-pound wardrobe) to block the door for extra safety, then went back to sleep. For context, I am 5 feet tall with no upper body strength, so adrenaline is the only explanation.

Then I woke to light behind my eyes coming from the hallway. The door to my hotel room was open, the wardrobe had been returned, soundlessly, and there was a lanky man sitting in a chair by the door. His skinny legs were twice the length of his sitting body.

I sat up and said, shakily, “What are you doing in my room?”

I could only see half his face, because of the light from the hall, but he looked my age, and he was wearing a dirty white shirt, and a tweed newsboy cap and pants, held up by suspenders.

He turned to me and said, “Oh. I haven’t even gotten started yet.” Then he smiled. Slowly.

I woke up to someone pushing on the door again, testing their ability to break in. The door was still closed with the wardrobe still blocking it. The chair and the “1800s ghost” were gone.

It was 5 a.m. I had dreamed about the room I was in. A room I had only spent an hour in before I fell asleep. I decided it was either haunted or extremely dangerous (or both) and called every hotel I could until I found one that would check me in at 8 a.m. It wasn’t cheap, but safer, so once the sun rose, I hoofed it to The Blakey across town, which I put on my credit card. I spent months paying it off, but it was worth it to sleep without fear the next two nights.

So that’s my scariest ghost story. What about you, Readers? What’re yours?