Haunted hotel rooms

I see dead people.

Not really. I’m not Haley Joel Osment in “Sixth Sense.” I’m not sure if they’re dead people or spirits or ghosts or elementals—I don’t really know the difference and I have no plan of finding out. I also don’t really see them, it’s more like I feel them. Despite my own skepticism, my knack for sensing a paranormal presence has been on the mark, so much so that some friends refuse to invite me to their homes in fear that I would tell them something else is living there with them.

This ability, if you want to call it that, can be annoying when I’m traveling. As much as I love watching horror movies, I don’t enjoy feeling like I’m trapped in one.

On my very first trip to Tokyo 16 years ago, I found it almost impossible to sleep in my hotel room. Every time I’d start to drift off, strange noises would wake me up. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing white figures and black figures whizzing by. Days into the trip, I found out that the hotel was right beside a hospital.

In Thailand just a few months after the deadly 2004 tsunami, there were so many stories about ghosts that I made sure to bunk with a fellow journalist even though we had our own rooms. That made me feel safe—until I got back to Manila and discovered that there was a ghost in my hair in one of the selfies I took inside my room at the resort in Krabi.

Most haunted

Some years ago, we were inadvertently booked rooms in New Orleans’ most haunted hotel. On the first night there, TV static woke me up multiple times. The next morning, while I was alone in the elevator, I heard a woman sobbing. Other strange things happened there—I heard glass breaking outside my door but found nothing when I checked; I would hear thuds when nothing had fallen; I kept seeing shadows moving by the drapes. I started drinking each night so I’d be knocked out when I got back to my room—a strategy that proved to be ineffective. One night, I woke up to find a ghostly presence standing beside my bed.

At a cabin in Tagaytay, a bunch of journalists and I were haunted by multiple spirits. I’m glad they were there with me because if I was alone when I saw what we saw (duck figures moving on their own on top of the fireplace), I would have thought that I had gone crazy. I thought I had gone crazy earlier that day. We were given time to put our stuff down in our suites after checking in. Alone in my suite, I set down my bag on a chair beside the bed and ran to the bathroom to pee. When I got out not even two minutes later, I saw that a book that had been at the bottom of my enormous and overly stuffed bag was on the kitchen table.

While sharing a hotel room with a journalist in Jakarta, our plane tickets disappeared the night before we were scheduled to leave. This was long before e-tickets were a thing so we really had to find them. We turned the entire room upside down but they weren’t there. The hotel manager started reaching out to his airline contacts to help us. Then, as if by magic, the tickets reappeared in the middle of a table, in the middle of the room, a place we had checked again and again. I have no one else to blame but the supernatural. I was so creeped out I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

Tricks

Over the years, I’ve learned some tricks to fool myself into believing that I’m keeping the ghosts at bay. I don’t close the bathroom door when I shower, I keep the TV playing all the time (and I set the channel to CNN so there’s no danger of scary movies or horror trailers playing in the middle of the night). If there are two beds in the room, I put my luggage on the one I’m not sleeping in. (I started doing this after a travel agent told me about how he woke up in a hotel room in the wee hours to see his roommate doing impossibly fast sit-ups in the other bed. It took him seconds to remember that he didn’t have a roommate on that trip—he should have been alone in that room.)

My tricks aren’t foolproof though. I’ve still had many other sleepless nights in many other hotel rooms.

But in Toronto, I had a different reason for not sleeping. Before flying there, I had read on Tripadvisor that there had been a series of burglaries in the hotel where I would be staying. Guests had written about how, in the weeks before I was scheduled to check in, someone had broken into their rooms while they were sleeping and taken their things. The hotel manager confirmed this in a comment, saying the police were investigating the incidents.

Every night I was there, I booby-trapped my room, blocking the door with a chair and the luggage rack.

It wasn’t fun. Because the truth is, I’d take ghosts over robbers any day—yes, even one who does crazy fast sit-ups.