Author Archives: vsaha

Hotel Ghost

Age: 51

Context:

This story was told to me by my father, whom I’ll refer to as SS. He had arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, ahead of my mother and me, relocating for a new job posting. During those first weeks alone in the city, he stayed at the Westin Hotel, a polished 5-star hotel, definitely not where things go wrong. He told me and my mom this story when we arrived in Dhaka, and I was quite young when I first heard it so I was super scared, but now I think about it as a strange incidence that happened to my dad.

The Story:

My father is a still sleeper. He doesn’t toss and turn, and has never once sleepwalked in his life. So on the first morning in his hotel room at the Westin, when he woke up on the floor, at the foot of the bed, not in it, he assumed some mundane explanation, that he must have been more exhausted than he thought. He climbed back into bed and didn’t mention it to anyone.

The second morning, it happened again. He was on the floor, same position, and same spot: at the foot of the bed, as if he had chosen to sleep there himself. By the third morning, when he opened his eyes and found himself looking up at the ceiling from the floor once more, the mundane explanations had run out. He went down to the front desk and asked to speak with the manager. He explained, carefully and plainly, what had been happening: that he woke each morning not in his bed but on the floor, in the same spot, with no memory of moving. 

SS told me the manager’s face changed the moment he finished speaking, the color drained from it. The man looked down at the desk between them, and there was a long pause, the kind that is not about finding the right words, but about deciding how many of them to share. He did not ask clarifying questions, or suggest a medical explanation or a mattress issue. He simply said that he was very sorry, and that he would arrange another room immediately.

The new room was not just different, it was significantly larger: a suite, upgraded well beyond what my father had booked, at no additional charge. The manager was apologetic, overly warm, eager to move past the conversation. He said something vague about wanting to ensure a comfortable stay, and then he closed the matter entirely.

My father said the man looked like he clearly knew something, and had decided, perhaps out of professionalism or policy or something harder to name, not to say what it was. Thankfully, SS never woke up on the floor again.

Informant’s Thoughts (SS):

My father says he isn’t certain there’s a definitive answer to how he ended up on the floor, or at least not one he could say out loud without feeling foolish. What he keeps returning to is the manager’s face. 

He says a person can dismiss their own experience, rationalize it, file it away. But you cannot rationalize someone else’s recognition. That man knew. Whatever was in that room, whatever had been happening there, the manager already knew, and chose to move him without a word.

His own theory is that someone had died in that room. And that whoever it was had never quite left. That the bed, in some sense, still belonged to them. That each night, my father was simply being removed from a space that was no longer his to occupy, displaced, without violence or malice, the way you might move something that has been left in your chair. Not haunted in the dramatic sense, just claimed perhaps by someone who didn’t know, or accept, that they were gone.

My Thoughts:

To me, what makes my father’s story haunting isn’t the strangeness of waking up on the floor, it’s the repetition. Three nights, the same spot, the same position. Whatever was happening, it had a pattern. 

I’m struck by how ordinary the setting is. Not a crumbling old house or a jungle road at night, a five-star hotel room, somewhere my father was supposed to feel safe and far from home at the same time.

What convinces me this may be more than a strange coincidence is the manager’s reaction. It suggests a history, a pattern beyond just my father’s three nights, perhaps other guests, other mornings, other quiet upgrades that were never explained. In South Asian cultures, there is a long tradition of spirits tied to specific places, not wandering, but rooted, attached to a room or a threshold or a particular patch of ground. The fact that whatever happened stopped the moment my father changed rooms feels consistent with that. It wasn’t following him, but belonged there.

This story stayed with me because when I first heard the story I was really scared especially cause this was a new country, and we were going to move there soon. Also, the slience around it makes it more spooky as my father never got an explanation.

The Sound of Anklet

Age: 64

Context:

This story was told to me by my grandmother, whom I’ll refer to as PS. My grandma is quite a religious woman, and so she believes in restless souls trapped as ghosts, but not in malevolent forces. She is a witness to this story, as she was brought in to confirm the presence of ghosts. The story takes place in 1978 in Kolkata, India, but she told me this story for the first time when I called her last weekend, inquiring about ghost stories for this class.

The Story:

Some years ago, PS’s brothers were looking to buy a house in Kolkata, and they found one quickly, a large, well-located, and strangely, almost suspiciously cheap one. When they pressed the previous owners for an explanation, the answer was given hesitantly: two maids had been murdered in that house. The owners were selling because they were frightened, and they had not been able to stay. PS’s brothers were not believers in ghosts. They were practical men, and a large house at a low price was still just that so they bought it.

They moved in, and for a while, said nothing to anyone. But at night, the house was not quiet. What they heard repeatedly, consistently, always after dark was the jingling of anklets. The sound of a woman’s feet moving through the house, the small bells at her ankles marking every step. The sound would drift through the hallways, unhurried, as though whoever was making it had nowhere in particular to be and all the time in the world to get there. They set up cameras in the hallways to catch the intruder but found nothing, in fact even the sound of anklets weren’t captured. So her brothers were unsettled enough that they decided to call PS, but they told her nothing about the sounds. They invited her to stay, and they waited to see whether she heard those strange noises too. 

The next morning, PS came to them with a question she couldn’t quite frame. She had heard something in the night, a strange sound she couldn’t explain. Moving through the house was the jingling of anklets.

Her brothers looked at each other as that was as all the confirmation they needed. They called in a tantric, a practitioner well versed in the rituals for restless spirits. PS says the tantric came in the way a tradesman comes to fix something that is broken. He performed the necessary rituals to release the spirits of the two murdered maids, to acknowledge what had happened to them, and to give them somewhere else to go.

After that, the house was silent. The sound of anklets was never heard again.

Informant’s Thoughts (PS):

My grandmother says that murdered people, in Bengali tradition, often become spirits not out of evil intent but out of incompletion, that because their deaths were violent, sudden and unacknowledged, they didn’t know how to leave. She said, the tantric didn’t destroy the spirit of the ghosts, merely released them so they could move onto the next life. 

My Thoughts:

What strikes me most about this story is the way my grandma’s brothers didn’t tell her what they heard. They brought her in blind, waited, and let her come to them. I think it was almost evil of her brothers to withhold the fact that there might have been ghosts. But I still can’t reconcile how 3 separate sets of ears heard the same thing while the camera captured nothing. My theory is that someone else was coming into the house at night, and maybe they were going through a part of the house uncovered by the camera. Their noise wasn’t captured as the cameras of that time were probably not that developed. This to me makes more sense, than believing it as a ghost story.