Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

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.

Protective Ghost

Age: 49

So we bought the house from my old boss, Kelly, actually, who I worked with at Leo Burnett, and she had told me this story about the house before we bought it. She just basically said the house was kind of haunted, but not in a bad way, and she explained a couple of different situations. One was that in the middle bedroom, in Alistair’s bedroom, when she had her twin boys when they were babies, and they were crying in the middle of the night, it was like 2 AM or something, and she went to put her son Seamus back in the crib, and when she set him in the crib, the crib moved away from the wall by like half a foot. And she picked him up out of the crib, and then she eventually put him back in the crib, and it did it again.

It sounds terrifying, but she wasn’t scared. She had this feeling that it was her grandmother, and that her grandmother was comforting her in this time of need, where she was so exhausted with the babies, because her grandmother also had twins, and she could just, like, feel her presence, and she said it was very comforting.

So that’s kind of the context before we moved into the house. And the other thing about the house is that it was built in, like, the early 1900s, like 1912 or something like that. And, during the Great Depression, it was actually a boarding house, meaning the second floor of the house, there were individual bedrooms that were rented out, and they actually walled off, um, the stairs so that you couldn’t go into the living room on the main floor. That is why they put in a second entrance to the house as well on the side, so you could go in to the side, and you would basically enter on the landing of the stairs and just go straight upstairs. So anyway, um, it was a boarding house during the Great Depression. All of the bedrooms had a little mirror on the inside of the closet. And so it was just a little weird. It had some quirks, and they all had locks on the doors as well.

Okay, so when we first moved into the house. Alistair was sleeping in that middle bedroom, and Dad was out of town. I can’t remember where Dad was, and I was in the basement because we didn’t have a TV on the main floor back then. I was watching something on TV, and I had the baby monitor on, and all of a sudden, there was this, like, this really weird noise coming out of the baby monitor. It was this sort of metallic, just this super weird noise and it didn’t stop. The noise was just this ongoing buzzing, kind of. So I immediately went upstairs to check on Alistair, and when I was opening the door, first of all, the door felt like it was, like, stuck or something, and then it did open. And, um… What I saw was that the light was on full blast. He had this little, like, I don’t know if you remember, but it was, like, a bright green little lamp from IKEA. It has, like, an on-off switch on the cord, and it shines this really weird and bright green color. So it was shining bright green out from underneath the door. Oh, I forgot to mention that. I could see the light was shining bright green out from underneath the door before I opened it, which was totally freaky. 

And the light, I did not leave it on, and there’s no way it was turned on. And he was a baby. It was not… he couldn’t have reached it. There was… it was very strange. And I was, like, totally freaked out. So I immediately unplugged the light, and the craziest thing was that the plug was, like, burning hot, right on the wall where the crib was. I instantly felt like it was a sign.

So my immediate thought was thinking about Kelly and what she had said about her grandma, and I think this person or whoever, um, whatever the spirit was, was, like, trying to warn me, uh, because the electricity… it was all cloth wiring, which can burn a house down. And that was, like, the first time I really became aware of the wiring in that house and how dangerous it could be, and it always freaked me out the entire time we lived there. But anyway, that was my takeaway, was that this ghost was, like, protecting me, and protecting my baby, just like it had sort of done for Kelly in that same room.

And there’s some other weird stuff, too, in that house. Like, for instance, when you were little. You were, like, 18 months old and you said something so weird. I know what it was, because I posted about it on Facebook at the time, and it comes up in my Facebook memories and I still laugh about it. Out of nowhere you said, “Mom, there’s ghosts in here.” And that was in your little bedroom way in the back. And I totally believed you, and you’re a very, very sensitive person. You always have been, and I believe you do have, like, that kind of a gift. But also, you did watch a lot of Scooby Doo with Alistair at the time, so who knows, but I believed you. (laughs) But…yeah, it totally freaked me out that you said that in your teeny tiny voice. Like, what? You were too young to understand the concept of ghosts, I thought, but I just kind of knew you were serious. You and your brother are both this way with your giftedness, in IQ and other things, so, yeah, I believed you, and I still do. You totally have that gift, and many autistics, like, feel things others do not. There’s all this research now about autism and telepathy, and, like, parallel universes they travel to and stuff. It’s so cool, so who knows, but I believe it all.

But anyway, there was nothing scary in that house except for in the basement. Don’t you think? It had a little bit of a weird vibe in the laundry room, especially. But upstairs, I just always felt that we had like a friendly ghost that was looking out for us, or that’s what I told myself. But it definitely felt like there was a presence in that house. Ok, that’s it.

When is this story told? To whom? Where does it take place?

Vanessa told this story to me, Audrey, on April 24, 2025. The story takes place in the house I grew up in from ages 0 to 12 in Oak Park, IL. The house was built in 1912, and it was used as a boarding house during the Great Depression, with the rooms on the 2nd floor rented out to various individuals. 

What does the teller think of the story?

She enjoys telling the story. She gets very animated and excited retelling the story. You can tell it really made an impact on her, and it was a significant event that occurred, which is why the memory has stuck with her all these years. She believes in ghosts and thinks she can sense various energies. Our current house is a large old house built in 1905. Whether the house is haunted comes up in conversation all the time. She can sense and feel things about houses, especially, but she is not a person who likes or gravitates toward anything scary at all. I think she suppresses a lot of the things she can sense to protect herself. But this story is clearly a good/funny memory about a house that she loved. 

My thoughts – what do I think of the story?

The story is entertaining and totally believable, especially for me, because I have my own stories from that house. So basically she thinks the ghost turned the light on so that she would unplug the light and notice the burning hot cord and learn about the sketchy cloth wiring. The way that she associates the ghost with protection is an interesting theme with her that I have noticed comes up in other situations. For instance, she also talks about a bird, a cardinal, that visits a tree outside the window in our family room every day. She thinks the bird is her grandmother, just looking out for her. It brings her comfort. I think it’s sweet. She is a positive person, and she is looking for the positive almost always, even in her own ghost story. I think she believes spirits hang around to look after and protect their people. She isn’t religious, but in this way she is spiritual. 

THE HAUNTED TAHOE CASINO

Age: 50

In this story, I interviewed my mother’s friend about an experience she had at this haunted hotel/casino in Tahoe. The following is her story told in first-person.

Interviewee: “Several years ago, 2018, I saw something on Facebook that they were going to have a paranormal investigation at the Biltmore Hotel in Lake Tahoe. [My husband] and I have gone on lots of haunted tours and stuff while we’re on vacation, (the Jack the Ripper tour, London, things like that.) So I’m like, that might be kind of fun for his birthday because it’s right around the fall time and it might be an interesting adventure. So we’ve never done anything like that before. I had no idea what to expect.

If you would have asked me, if I thought ghosts were real, I’d tell you no. I’d never experienced anything unusual; nothing major. So, we secured our spots and got a room there. It’s one of the older hotels, the interesting feature of this hotel is that it’s right across the street from another old casino, (Hotel Calnivas) which has since been demolished. There’s a tunnel underneath that connected the two casinos because they’re across the street from each other and the tunnel wasn’t for public use – It was for the mob, and for the people running the casinos and for the criminal elements to go back and forth between the two. 

We headed up [to the hotel] and they were like, okay, everything fires off at 8:00 PM. So we got there and checked in and they were kind of having like a vendor fair and some seminars. Our group/investigation started at 8 p.m, and there’s about 120 people because we had 12 people in our group and there were 10 different groups because they didn’t want everybody walking around in a big blob. There were different parts of the hotel that were said to be haunted, so because there had been a lot of bad activity there (murders and things of that,) they made sure you stick with the mob. 

We started off the evening, and to me it was very amusing. We had a psychic medium in our group, and we had a professional Paranormal investigator in the group, and he had all the equipment (like light boxes that react to the energy, the little metal rods that moved when you asked the ghost questions,) he had all that stuff. So this all was really entertaining to me, and I’m a very social person. So I was asking him a million questions and I became his little sidekick. So really fast, it became that I was running the equipment. I’m walking around with the light box, and they’re like, okay this ghost haunts these stairways, this is what happened to her, there’s a child ghost that walks around the hallways, etc. So we’re going from station to station and the little light boxes are responding. 

When we got to the hallway, I was given the metal rods and the child ghost kind of started being playful with me and the rod started moving. I’m like, how are these things moving, because my hands aren’t moving? We go to the downstairs part of the hotel and there is the casino, the lobby, a restaurant, and then a wedding chapel and the service area which is where the tunnel goes underneath the street. We go into the chapel and we’re told about the ghost that lives there, and she was a lady who had died on her wedding day, and so she haunted the chapel.

We were in there and my eyes just kept going to one corner of a room where there was a closet with supplies. The door was shut. There wasn’t anything like moving over there, but I just kept looking at it. It just was a little odd, but still nothing major. Our guide was like, okay we’re going to go into the service area. We went down into the service area and this is where the evening got crazy. We’re walking into the tunnel that goes underneath the street and the man leading the paranormal investigation is talking about how that was where they took people to murder them, so it was very haunted. If you cross the mob, that’s where you took your final walk.

We’re walking down the corridor and.. I am not an emotional person, but my throat closes up and I cannot breathe. Tears start pouring down my face, and I’m like, oh my God. It was such a weird physical reaction as he’s telling the story of our group, and it happened to myself and one other woman in the group out of 12. I pat [my husband] on the arm and say I got to go back up. The other woman and I backed up out of the corridor and back into the service area where the hotel staff would be making food and things like that. I instantly feel better. My throat opens up and I can breathe all the way and I’m not crying anymore. 

When they all come out, the investigator that’s leading our group walks by me and my throat closes up again. I can’t breathe and tears start running down my face again. I looked at him and yelled you need to get away from me right now. We’ve been buddies all night – laughing together, having a great time. There was nothing about him that upset me and I’m like, get away from me. You need to go, get away from me right now. He’s just looking at me and [my husband is] like, what are you doing? 

So we go out. Everybody’s a little rattled. We walk down the hall, and go back into the chapel. Everybody’s kind of calming down because the energy was a lot. The other woman that was with me also had a very adverse reaction to him. We’re in the chapel and I keep looking at that corner in the room, and Mike [my husband] is sitting next to me. 

We’re sitting on these chairs that outline the chapel and [my husband] says this isn’t right. I’m like, what do you mean? He says we need to get out of here. The person leading the investigation is like where are you going? We don’t want you walking around by yourself. [My husband’s] like, no there’s something bad in here. He’s like, what are you talking about? I said I feel it too. Something’s not right, there’s something over in that corner and whatever is in that corner, I feel scared. We didn’t feel that way here before. 

The guy leading our group leaves for a second and he goes and he gets the person who’s in charge of the whole event. She comes in and she’s like what’s going on in here? She goes, this feels bad in here and again I yell, he needs to get away from me right now. I don’t want him anywhere near me. She’s like, You all need to come with me. So, we had to go have a spiritual cleansing, because whatever evil entity that was down in the service area corridor, latched onto him and came out with him.

So after answering some questions and having a conversation, we had to go outside. We had to be grounded. There was sage going on. After all of that, I was fine with him. He didn’t bother me at all. As a matter of fact, I apologized, but when we were going into areas, they weren’t really telling us the story of the ghosts and they were waiting to see what we felt and what we experienced. 

The ghost in the chapel who was a woman and had died on her wedding day was a very well known and friendly spirit. What followed her, and what followed us out of the service area was one of the hitmen for the mob who took his last walk down there too. He was the guy who murdered most of the prostitutes and the gamblers who got in trouble and then they had him murdered. What followed us pitched onto the investigator in our group, who was the furthest down the corridor and talking about things. I guess they labeled me an empath that spirits seek me out for comfort, and so the reason why my throat closed up was because most of the prostitutes were strangled when they took them down there. 

It was all a very unnerving experience. I walked away from there fully believing. We spent the night in the cabin, which I then dubbed the murder cabins because we did not get any sleep. We were awake all night. Our investigation wrapped up around midnight and then [my husband] and I literally laid awake in bed until the sun came up at 6 and we left exactly at 6 to get out of there. I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. It was wild. 

[My husband], because the first part of the evening was a lot of fun and the light boxes and I was so involved in it, took a ton of videos, lots and lots of videos on his cell phone. None of them turned out. Every single one of them was scrambled, And no other videos on his phone were scrambled before or after. There was never any glitch in his cell phone being able to record before, and he had that cell phone for several years after and video worked fine, but none of the videos of that night worked.

I found out later that apparently there’s a spirit that kind of roams the grounds out there that’s like screaming in the middle of the night that people will hear screams. We didn’t hear screaming, but I read up on it afterwards and I was like, oh my God. We would have driven away at 2 AM if I had heard screaming. We would have left right then. Goodbye! I’m going right back [home], I don’t care that we paid for this room, we are not sleeping. That didn’t happen, thankfully. I don’t think I could have handled it. 

Then, a couple years later they were going to demolish it and they were kind of wondering what was going to happen to the energy there, you know, the spirits, because they got to go somewhere, right? They’re just there. So a few years ago we were at [my friend’s] cabin on a girls’ trip and I had told them all that story. They wanted to go to the Biltmore because it was still open.  

They weren’t having people stay there at the hotel, but the casino was still going and there were like a little bit of things in the gift shop, but not a lot of stuff and they had areas of the hotel roped off, like you couldn’t go upstairs. So [my friends] were like, hey, can we go to some of the spots that you saw on the ghost tour? And I’m like, well we’ll see what we can get into. There are places I will not go. We were able to sneak back behind the tape that they had DO NOT ENTER written on, and of course we went around it, and we entered anyway. 

We went to the chapel and I was talking about the ghost in that chapel, and my eye was not drawn to the service closet at that time. It wasn’t bothering me in there, but I was talking to [my friend T] and [P] about that. We were the only people there, and there’s no other entrances or exits out of the chapel because it’s really small – like the size of a master bedroom. It’s not a big area. 

We’re sitting in the same chair [my husband] and I sat in, and we’re talking a little bit about the experience, and [my friend] was like, I want to see if I can sneak down into that service area. I’m like, no, and she goes, well, it’s just right around the corner and [she wanted] to just poke [her] head in. I’m like, you do you, but I’m not walking in there. Whatever is down there knows me, I’ve had a bad experience there and you cannot give me enough money to walk into that service area again. We don’t have anybody to help us too, so I’m not going. 

We were kind of going back and forth about that. [My other friend] was like, well let’s just go back and find the other girls in the casino, and I’m like, great. We get up and [my friend] still kind of talking about going to peek her head in. [My other friend] and I are walking side by side, and [the first friend] elsewhere in the room not near us, and your mom gets shoved on the shoulder on the side I’m not on as we’re walking out. She jumps. 

She’s like, what? What was that? I’m like, what do you mean? She goes, something just shoved my shoulder. I’m like, no way. That’s a warning. We are not to go down that service corridor. I’m like, you’re not going down there. And so we didn’t.”

My thoughts: This story was extremely interesting for me as a listener, because of all of the factors that make up this story. This experience has motifs such as an unwanted spirit that has potential unfinished business with whom had killed them in the mafia tunnels. Additionally, there’s a spirit possession that happens to our narrator, and physical elements like her friend being pushed by a spirit allegedly. I think its funny that she willingly went back to the place that traumatized her after only a few years and even brought her friends, but it’s good that they all god warnings and left before they experienced anything worse possibly.

GRANDPA’S FIRST EXORCISM

Age: 19

For this story, I spoke to my friend. He told me this story that he got from his grandfather. The following is told from his first person perspective about his grandfather.

INTERVIEWEE: “When my grandpa was 25 years old he was a deacon at a church in Riverside, California. During his time, he had some house calls regularly. He was a deacon until he was around 40 so he saw a lot of different stuff at peoples’ houses. They would typically send him to houses to pray over new houses, old people, deceased, etc. However, one time he was asked to come to a home to perform a literal exorcism which was very out of the ordinary for him.

He thought this was unusual because he had never done anything like this before. One day, the church sent him to this house to perform the exorcism on this teenage girl who was spasming out, blaspheming, and acting really funky in general. The parents had no idea what to do so they called up my grandpa who and some other people with then church. My grandpa showed up with a few other priests. The other priests must have brought a bible, a cross, and some holy water.

They went into the house and the parents directed them into the room where the teenage girl was. She couldn’t sit still. They did something and they got the demon out of her; repeating a prayer or splashing holy water on her. She tried to jump away from it, but eventually she hit the ground and started shaking and screaming for a couple minutes. During this, the priests recited the prayer again and again. Then she passes out.

The girl didn’t wake up until the following morning super exhausted. She ended up being totally fine afterwards, with no signs of possession or evil spirits holding inside her anymore yet having no idea what had happened. This actually was the last and only exorcism my grandpa had to perform during his time being a deacon; this being a very different experience for him.”

My thoughts: I find it super interesting that his grandfather never did another exorcism after this, nor having done one prior. Around this time, which was maybe the 1970’s, the first Exorcist film came out, which made exorcisms more believed in during this time perchance, which may be why he got this house call in particular. With this, the details such as the girl forgetting everything that had happened, as well as the possession itself, it makes this story very unique; especially in the perspective of someone who has never experienced something like this.