A Perfectly Normal Hotel
You might not believe me, but I swear every word of my story is true.
You might not believe me, but I swear every word of my story is true.
The summer after I graduated from college, I worked at a hotel that was supposedly haunted. As in, that was how it advertised itself.
It had once been a farmhouse commune. In 1971, one of the hippies living there killed two of his roommates with a shotgun, then hung himself. Tragic, absolutely. And therein lay the potential for profit.
The lore was that he’d been in communion with unholy spirits. The legend was that you could hear the screams of his victims in the rooms where he’d killed them. The rumors were that the mirrors occasionally showed splatters of blood.
The tourists lapped up it up, as if invisible blood were milk and honey. They took photos in the rooms plural where the deaths had occurred. The museum shop sold plush shotguns with googly eyes. A sweet souvenir for the kidlets!
I’d been working there for three weeks—food service, cleaning, the usual—when my manager asked me to do her a favor. She’d left her phone somewhere and needed my help. Could I check upstairs?
Yeah, I played along. As I walked by the largest death room, I heard a disembodied voice. “This is my house, asshole, get out.” The recording had been deliberately made to sound as if it were from the 70s. Nice touch.
I didn’t bother looking for the phone. I figured I’d gotten the thing I’d been sent to find.
When I returned to the lobby, my manager held up her phone. “False alarm, I found it! Say, you look a little…Are you OK?”
“Yup. I’m good.”
“Are you sure? Did you see anything? Or…hear anything?”
“Gosh. Now that you mention it. I DID hear a voice telling me to get out.”
“Good! Now you’re ready to give tours!”
“Uh-huh. So that when they ask me if I’ve ever seen a ghost, I can truthfully tell them that I HEARD something I can’t explain. Because I was alone on the second floor when it happened. No one else was working. Of course, I won’t tell them I know for certain it was a ghost’s voice. All I can say for sure is the words I heard. And I won’t be lying.”
“You catch on fast.”
I started giving the stupid tours after that, for an extra two dollars an hour. They always asked me the same question. I answered flatly, with literal facts.
But I started to notice something strange.
Several employees would leave the breakroom shaking, after the owner surprised them there. He wouldn’t touch them, just verbally berate them enough to instill the fear of God and joblessness into their very souls.
Hours would go missing from paychecks.
And the employee bathroom developed a terrible smell.
I’ll spare you the details of how I got out. Basically, what happened is this: The busy season ended and the off-season began, so they let most of us go. All that remained was the skeleton crew.
So that’s my story. The Tale of the Crappy Employers. You might not believe me, but I swear each word is true.
Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.
