Haunted Hotel in Manchester, England

Nationality: China
Primary Language: Mandarin
Other language(s): English, French
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Beijing
Performance Date: Nov.28, 2023
Tags: #legend #england #Hotel #victorianhouses

“Once I stayed England and we decided to spend a night in Manchester. We chose a very famous hotel in the city center. The hotel itself is a historic building, built in the Victorian era and used to be the site of a refugee insurance company. This hotel has an old ballroom, corridors, and guest rooms, all furnished in the Victorian era. The guest room, when we stayed in it, felt too big and spacious for two travelers, giving people a sense of liminal space, which can’t help but feel a little creepy. When we had finished our dinner and were going up the old stairs to our room, we seemed to hear footsteps, and the feeling of being watched appeared, but no one was there. At night, I would lie in bed and listen to the trains passing through the window, and when the trains passed and quieted down, the same feeling that someone was staring at me from somewhere in the room occurred. The next morning, while having breakfast in the dining hall, a local staff told us about the history of the place. One of the staircases is said to be haunted by a grieving war widow who committed suicide by throwing herself down it from the top floor. The staircase in question was only accessible to men at the time. Also, the room 261, the one downstairs from us, is allegedly haunted, with reports of the sound of children playing at night.”

Context: This story, which I personally experienced, was told by a local tour guide in Manchester, where it took place in this haunted hotel. The tour guide tells us the story of the place, which he thinks may be true because Manchester experienced a severe post-Victorian recession and the great bombing of the Second World War. This has made the whole city full of many tragic experiences and legends.

Personal Thought: Given Manchester’s history and the way the tour guide tells it, the story is highly believable. The haunted experience is also my personal experience, so I think this building is indeed haunted. This hotel is a wonderful ghost story location, it includes plenty of history, outdated architecture and decoration, and many liminal spaces. It’s psychologically creepy. But the ghost story is also a reminder of Manchester’s painful, war-torn history

Refrigerator Ghost

Nationality: US American
Primary Language: English
Other language(s): n/a
Age: 22
Occupation: Business Manager
Residence: Orange, California
Performance Date: 11/26/2023

Tags: Ghosts, unexplained

D is 22 years old, and has lived in Southern California for the majority of her life. I had a conversation with her about some mysterious experiences she has had in her home in Orange County.

“Let me set the scene: I’m home alone. My sister moves out, my parents are across the country in an RV, away from everybody, including me. I’m by myself. I’m going about my day-to-day life, which consisted of nothing. I’m in the kitchen, and I’m walking over to the dining room, and I’m facing away from the kitchen. And I hear the little suction pop of the fridge, and I turn around, and it opens. And I watch it just swing all the way open. And I went “No, thank you!” And I walked over and I shut the fridge and I immediately called my mom and I was like “Mom, the fridge just opened by itself!” She’s like, “What do you mean?” I was like “The refrigerator door was shut. It was completely shut. And the way that I know it was completely shut was that I head the suction of the door when it opened… It just opened by itself, I have not touched the refrigerator in hours. What do I do about this?” And my mom was like “D, you are stronger than whatever is in that house.” And I had to live my days, by myself, in the house, with the refrigerator ghost.”

I’ve heard this story before (I heard it back when it happened to D) but this was told to me in this instance over a facetime call. It takes place in D’s house, in her kitchen. She was definitely very freaked out by it, especially when it first happened, but it has since become something that she tells freely. She doesn’t have any concrete ideas about who the ghost is, but she definitely believes her house is a little bit haunted.

I believe this story, because I remember D sending me video evidence of it when it first came out. I think its interesting–D definitely believes in the paranormal, but she’s also very no-nonsense when it comes to interacting with it. She refuses to even consider using Ouija boards or playing Bloody Mary, it’s not something she wants to mess around with. The fact that this was just something that happened to her out of the blue, in the middle of the afternoon, with nothing to follow up or precede it, is very interesting to me. It really makes me understand about how people have been “seeing ghosts” and having strange occurrences happen to them for centuries, and why we came up with ideas about ghosts in the first place.

Hall Light Ghost

Nationality: US American
Primary Language: English
Other language(s): n/a
Age: 22
Occupation: Business Manager
Residence: Orange, California
Performance Date: 11/26/2023

D is 22 years old, and has lived in Southern California for the majority of her life. I had a conversation with her about some mysterious experiences she has had in her home in Orange County.

“We were all watching a bunch of scary movies, it was you, me, [N], [M], and [S]. You remember this. We were watching–I think we watched Get Out, and then we were watching Us. And it was like, 10:30, 11 PM, and the hall light started flickering. Which… we all know that that happens on occasion. The hall light in my house likes to be weird. But it’s always creepy when it happens, and on top of that, we’re already watching a creepy f*ckin’ movie, so. N, brave soul that she is, was like “I’m gonna go turn the light off, like I’m gonna go flip the switch to be “off.”” And we were all like “That makes sense, if it’s off it won’t be going in and out because, y’know, technical stuff.” And so she gets up and does it and we keep watching the movie and then like… 15 minutes later we hear, again, clink clink clink. And we look over… And the hall light is back on. Then in another minute it’s back off, again. And I think we all tried to ignore it, because what else were we going to do about it? But it did freak us all out. And as much as people want to be like, “Oh, that’s an electrical thing–” N turned off all of the switches! So it’s not like they were on, and then turned off, and then turned on again, [meaning that it isn’t as if the light in the “on” position was simply faltering,] they were completely off, the light just turns on all the time.”

This story was told in the same instance as another story about D’s fridge opening all by itself. She says “I think it’s the same as the Light Ghost,” which is what she refers to this phenomenon of her hall light flickering. It’s been well-documented by her, as whenever it starts happening and she is particularly unsettled, she’ll record it and send it to her friends over Snapchat. She doesn’t think it’s any particular deceased person, just that her house is a little bit haunted, especially with this story of the light turning on & off when it has no electrical reason to.

I was present for this story. I remember being very unsettled, but, granted, we were also watching some scary movies at the same time, so I’m sure it was magnified by that. There’s always something creepy about that hall light flickering, though, because it’s not like a usual flicker, which is very spastic. When this light does it, it’s very even and measured, like somebody is bored and flicking the light on, off, on, off. I think it’s interesting that so many of us witnessed it, and that none of us have really assigned much meaning to it, beyond that it was vaguely spooky.

The Lady in Flats

Nationality: American

Primary Language: English

Age: 51

Occupation: Chief Marketing Officer

Residence: Driggs, Idaho

Performance Date: November 24, 2023

Text:

“I was staying at this friend of a friend’s house near Georgetown, one of those little townhouses or whatever that have the entrances kind of underground, ya know? I thought it was a little weird, didn’t really know the people that well, but I had been driving for so long and it was so late, just had to get to bed. Whatever. The people weren’t staying there at the time, so it was just me in this townhouse. The whole thing was about three stories, and the layout was kind of funky. You have to kind of walk down from the street into the basement, and then walk up another set of stairs from there to get to the main floor and then again to the second. I ended up crashing in one of the guest rooms on that first floor, kind of tucked away into the corner of the building, and it was all hardwood. Like the whole place was all hardwood. Super loud to walk on, love it. Anyways. Went to bed that night, and sometime in the early morning, like 2 or 3, woke up to that same super loud footsteps on the hardwood. Well I was kind of awake, but not really awake. Like I couldn’t move at all, and I was looking through my eyelids and still seeing everything somehow. So I heard these shoes on the floor, and I look up and there’s this woman, just walking all around the bed in a circuit. And she had on these flats, and this kind of green looking pants suit, just clacking along the floor, around the bed, through the wall back behind the headboard, then back again on the other side. Fully formed too, she looked, like, full. Not wispy or ghostly at all. And she was walking this super fat golden retriever on a leash, just lapping around the bed. And the flats just kept slapping against the hardwood floor, super loud, and I couldn’t really get up at all, and I’m kind of starting to freak out. Cause I’m thinking, how did this person get in, middle of DC, only one lock on the door, random stranger in the house, nothing I can do, and for some reason they can magically walk through walls. After a while of her just kind of walking around in this little green pantsuit and these flats with her dog, she just sort of disappeared. Then I kind of drifted back to sleep eventually, got up as early as I could the next day and hightailed it out of there.”

Context:

AM is a 51 year old mother from a small town in central Connecticut. She was visiting her brother in the Georgetown Hospital in Washington DC when she experienced the events that she described above. At first skeptical of whether or not she had been visited by a paranormal entity, she became convinced entirely that the Lady in Flats was a ghost, upon finding no trace that anyone had been in the house, not even a single strand of dog hair or a scrape on the hardwood floors.

Analysis:

While AM may have been slightly inclined to believe in the supernatural before her experience in the D.C. Townhouse, I find that her encounter solidified her belief entirely. What I found to be particularly interesting is the description of the apparition as entirely solid, dissimilar from the usual physical characteristics that are ascribed to ghosts in the 21st century, such as translucence or appearing as a pale shade. While perhaps not exactly reminiscent of the modern day ghost, AM’s ghost did exhibit at least some of the physical qualities that were seen in a number of Japanese stories on the supernatural from the previous millennia, that same solidness described in the story. Another curious aspect of the story that appealed to me was the apparent lack of purpose of the ghost, neither malicious or helpful, rather, it was simply present. Furthermore, the liminal state of sleep paralysis lends itself as a perfect opportunity to experience the supernatural, a classic motif found throughout the majority of ghost stories.

The Most Haunted House In Oregon

Nationality: American

Primary Language: English

Age: 25

Occupation: Self-Employed

Residence: Jupiter, FL

Performance Date: November 11, 2023

Text:

“After I left Florida, I started just driving all over the country, reconnecting with all my old friends that I hadn’t seen in so long. I was actually all the way up in Canada at one point, before heading back down into the States through to Seattle for a bit. Anyways, I ended up with one of my friends from high school in Oregon. I let her book the AirBnB that we were going to stay at that night, and for whatever reason, she only looked at the availability without checking any of the reviews before she booked it. Definitely a mistake, will not be doing that again. So she books it, we’re driving, it’s super late at night, we’re both exhausted, get to the house, and immediately vibes are just off. The whole time we were driving up there the area was just weird, something just did not feel right at all. The house itself was this really big old timey inn, straight out of the colonial era. We walk in and this place is just deserted, like nobody there at all, no one working the front desk for check in. After ringing the bell a couple of times the guy comes and checks us in or whatever, and starts leading us up towards our room down this super long hallway. Super weird thing, there were all of these tables in the hallways that were just lined with these big containers of candy, and all kinds too. Naturally we just start munching on some sour strings, and the guy turns back at us, telling us not to eat any of the candy, that it’s there to appease the spirits. Jokingly, my friend asks him if the house was haunted or something, cause she thought he was trying to mess with us or something. He gave her the biggest ‘are you stupid’ look I’ve ever seen, and said ‘Only the most haunted house in Oregon’, then kept walking down the hallway. We both kind of looked at each other, looked back at him, and immediately started looking this place up on our phones. Sure enough, it was literally the most haunted AirBnB in all of Oregon according to all these reviews we read. It’s too late to try and find somewhere else to stay for the night, so we just decide to stick it out and hope that whatever ghosts might be there just leave us alone. I think I slept maybe like two hours that whole night. The whole time there were all of these banging and groaning sounds coming from all over the place like people were fighting, but we were literally the only guests there that night. And I could feel the floorboards all around the bend like bending, there were all these footstep noises throughout the whole thing, I even felt a hand running up and down my leg at one point. Same thing happened to my friend except it was on her face. It never really felt dangerous or malicious, but definitely weird. Super creepy, we ended up checking out as early as possible that next morning, haven’t been back to Oregon since.”

Context:

CM is a 25 year old woman who has recently embarked upon a continental road trip to explore and reconnect with old friends. While believing in the supernatural and the powers that they may (or may not) hold, CM has held a decidedly wary stance against haunting ghosts, preferring to hear or read about them rather than experience them firsthand. This story was told only a handful of weeks after the initial events transpired, allowing for a fresh telling undisturbed by the passing of time.

Analysis:

Part of me is curious as to whether or not there was really a ghost there at all, if it was a trick the CM’s mind played on her. There were no ghosts or paranormal activities before she learned that the house was haunted, yet suddenly after learning about all of the spirits said to linger around the house, she began experiencing some of the classic tropes of a haunted house. There were certainly a significant amount of classic motifs of traditional ghost stories in CM’s retelling, namely the sharp noises in the middle of the night and the creaking of the floorboards around the bed, which may help alleviate some of my suspicions. What I found to be particularly interesting was the feeling of being in actual contact with a paranormal entity, that whatever it may have been broke the physical barrier. While in some cultures the spirits of the restless dead (or undead) are ethereal, in a significant amount of others the ghosts of those who have passed can most certainly maintain a sense of corporealness that is absence in most modern day ideologies of ghosts. While a significant amount of ghost stories may involve spirits interacting with the physical plain by moving objects or perhaps a piece of furniture, there are perhaps only a select few where the spirit will make physical contact with a person.