I’m hoping the answer is yes, but I don’t think so.
This is a story about the hotel that my buddy and I stayed at. I won’t mention exactly where this hotel is (for legal and safety reasons), but I will drop three hints about it - (1) it’s in Southeast Asia, (2) it’s a famous 5 star hotel, and (3) there are at least two versions of this hotel.
Let me explain.
A couple of weeks ago, Joe and I touched down into [country redacted]. By the time we’d reached the hotel, it was past midnight and we were both ready to collapse.
Now, we’d done our research prior to booking our stay online. We knew that the hotel was expensive, but nothing could have prepared us for just how grand and lavish the hotel lobby was. Just past the gleaming golden rolling doors, the emerald green carpeting extended all throughout the lobby, just stopping short of the polished marble walls and pillars. Fresh flowers in vases lined the walls. A water fountain in the middle of the lobby, with velvet sofa seats laid out around it.
To the right of the entrance was a long golden counter, broken into 6 sections. Stood behind each section were check-in staff, all female, and all standing ramrod straight with the widest smiles you’ll ever see on anyone. As Joe and I approached the counter, the heads of these staff members slowly swivelled towards us, and nodded in greeting. All in unison.
Now, we’re all aware of what the sixth sense is. I would like to make clear to you, reader, that Joe and I both felt incredibly unsettled from the moment we stepped into the lobby. Yet we did not leave, at least not immediately. In our defense, it wasn’t until later into the night did we realise just how wrong things were. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Joe and I exchanged nervous glances as we approached the counter closest to the lobby entrance. The reception lady greeted us in the country’s native language and stretched out her arms towards us, over the counter. Her gaze never once deviated from my face as she froze into position.
I remember Joe breaking out into a nervous laugh behind me as I pulled out our passports and gingerly placed them onto the palms of the lady. She immediately pulled back into her original position of standing straight, and begun typing furiously into the computer infront of her, all the while smiling at the screen. This went on for a couple of nerve wrecking minutes as we waited.
Finally I decided to speak up. As soon as I opened my mouth, the lady’s gaze snapped up from her screen back to my face.
“English? You speak English, yes?” She asked brightly before plastering that god awful smile back on her face.
I shrugged.
“Yes, I will speak English to you, pal,” she continued before returning her gaze to the computer.
I realised two things during my transaction with her - that never once did she blink, and that her accent had switched abruptly from something local to something stereotypically American. We weren’t American.
I was growing tired of waiting, but was once again interrupted before I could question the lady - this time by Joe, who leaned over from behind me.
“Look to your left, at the door,” he whispered. “At the guy.”
He was referring to one of the two doors behind the reception counter - one at each end of the counter. As we watched, the door opened and out emerged a potbellied man in a suit, muttering furiously into his headset. His gaze stayed fixated to the ground as he walked swiftly down the length of the counter, behind the reception staff, before taking a sharp turn through the door at the other end of the counter.
“Turn back to the first door, keep watching,” Joe continued.
A few seconds later, the first door opened once again and once again, the same potbellied man emerged, muttering under his breath, before exiting through the door at the other end.
“Every fifteen seconds,” Joe muttered. I waited in silence, counting the seconds and sure enough, the potbellied man re-entered the lobby after fifteen seconds.
At that point, I wanted to leave. I really did. But as I turned to Joe, the reception lady slammed our passports back onto the counter, before once again holding her arms outstretched, presenting our room keys to us.
“Your room number is 5005. Please, pal, the escalators are to your left!”
“Uh,” I remember saying. “Actually -”
“Please, the elevators are to your left, pal, please!” She continued in her American accent.
Against my better judgement, I turned towards the elevator. The elevator doors were already opened, and next to it, waiting for us, stood yet another smiling hotel staff.
I turned to Joe, who shrugged. “We’ll leave if it gets weird.”
“Weirder, you mean,” I answered as we picked up our bags, keys, and passports and headed to the elevator.
“Yeah, but it’s just that, ain’t it. Weird. I can do weird,” he replied. I knew what he meant. Up until this point, things had just been… off. Quirky. But we never felt like we were in any danger. Not yet.
As we neared the elevator, we walked past other hotel guests sitting on the sofa seats around the fountain. There were a couple of men slouched over the seats, staring into space. Next to them was a mother, holding a cup of what I presumed to be tea, watching her son. He sat facing away from his mother, on the edge of the fountain, dangling his feet in the water.
“Room 5005, on the fiftieth floor!” The lady by the lift chirped. Joe and I exchanged glances as we stepped into the lift. Neither of us uttered a word as the door screeched closed, obscuring our view of the smiling lady by the lift.
“We can do weird.” Joe repeated as he thumbed the button labelled “50”. Neither of us wanted to say that the exterior of the hotel had only ten stories.
At this point, both of us were on edge. When the door screeched back open, both of us looked cautiously down both ends of the corridor before heading out.
The lush emerald green carpet swallowed our footsteps as we walked down towards our room, just six doors down from the elevator.
Our room was nothing out of the ordinary. Toilet, bed, closet. Joe flipped through the TV channels and we noted one English channel (CNA) and three local talk shows.
An hour later we were asleep.
And an hour after that, we were awake, and not by choice.
Someone was at the door, and was making their presence known by violently banging on the door.
Now Joe and I aren’t usually intimidated by this sort of thing. But much like our experience in the lobby, this too, felt… off.
“Call reception, I’m going to take a look at the door,” Joe whispered before getting off his bed.
I picked up the phone and dialled reception. Reception picked up instantly, almost as if they had been waiting for me.
“There is someone banging on my door,” I explained in a panic.
“You’re mistaken, pal.” It was the lady with her American accent.
I won’t bore you with the details of the minute long conversation, but it was basically me explaining the issue, and the lady insisting that I was “mistaken”.
Eventually I hung up and joined Joe at the doorway. The ruckus had escalated from beyond knocking on the door - it had begun shaking at its hinges as whoever (whatever) outside tried to get in.
“I tried calling the police. No signal,” Joe said helplessly with his phone in his hand.
I stepped up to the rattling door slowly, steeled myself, and looked through the peephole. I wanted to see what monstrosity we were facing before we decided on our next course of action.
Nothing.
There was nothing outside our door.
And yet it rattled, flexing under the strength of an unknown force.
“There’s nothing there.” I didn’t know what else to say.
Joe and I considered our options - to barricade and wait it out, or to make a run for it. Both of us wanted to leave, but did not see a way around the presence at the door. We tried calling for help again on our phones, but had no signal. All of the lines from the hotel phone led back to the reception lady. Waving at the windows in hope of catching attention from a passerby led to naught. Joe tried breaking the windows - they wouldn’t. Eventually we agreed to barricade the door and wait until daylight. If the presence was still there, we would retry our plan of signalling help from the windows.
We sat in silence for hours until the sun finally rose. And as daylight bled into the room, the rattling and banging on the door slowly waned.
Finally we felt safe enough to remove the makeshift barricade we’ve made. As we slowly moved furniture out of the way, Joe cocked his head towards the TV.
“Did you realise?” He asked.
“What?”
“CNA. It’s supposed to show today’s news, right? The one on TV’s been showing news from two months ago. Presenting it as if it’s today.”
We stared at the TV for a while, silently. We were both emotionally wrecked and needed a good night’s sleep.
“Let’s go.”
We picked up our bags, creaked the door open slowly.
A pungent odor crept into the room. It smelt like rotting meat.
In the carpet right outside our door, pressed deep into the emerald carpet, were two boot prints.
We made haste to the elevator and rode it down. Neither of us had discussed what we’ll do if the hotel staff had tried to stop us. We were too tired to think that far.
The elevator door screeched open and we readied for a fight. We needn’t have worried. Everything was as how it was the previous day.
Well, almost everything.
As we made our way to the exit, I couldn’t help but glance over at the sofa seats by the fountain. The two men were still on the sofa seats where we’d last seen them. Only difference was instead of sitting slouched, they were now laid slumped over the sofa seat handles. The mother was still there watching her son, who was now floating face down in the fountain.
========
We went back to the hotel the next day. We were curious.
The only problem was, the hotel wasn’t there.
At least, not the version of the hotel we stayed at.
Instead of crazy grinning hotel staff and motionless hotel guests lying around the lobby, we were greeted with…. Normalcy. Regular busy hotel staff, noisy families queuing in the lobby.
As we stood at the hotel entrance gaping into the lobby, Joe finally broke down laughing.
“The carpet’s red,” he spluttered.
He was right.
We left after that and never returned to the hotel again after that.
And frankly? I hope to never do.