Lanesborough Hotel

TK: Can you tell me the story of the Lanesborough Hotel ghost again?

RK: I went in the middle of the winter and it was snowing and really cold.

TK: How long ago was this?

RK: I don’t know. Ten years?

TK: Who were you with.

RK: Myself.

TK: So what happened?

RK: Um. I don’t like heat but I put it on because it was so cold and like at three in the morning I woke up shivering and I went to go look at the heater and it was switched to air condition so I tried to push it and change it and wouldn’t change so I called downstairs and they sent an engineer up so he comes in and starts working it and then he fixes it and puts the heat on. I go get back into bed and the air conditioner comes on again so I’m freaking out. I put on a robe on and I’m laying here and all of a sudden the bed started to shake.

TK: No way. Then what?

RK: So then I called again and they go ‘but I’m sorry we’re going to have to move your room, the engineer has gone home.’ So in the middle of the night they came and moved my stuff and I moved into the new room. The guy said that it used to be a hospital so a lot of people died there. Your mom says that it was this woman whose son was injured during the war and died in the hospital. His mom was the nurse. She never got to say goodbye to him so she continues to roam the halls looking for him. This is only on the third floor.

TK: Didn’t Richie have the same thing happen to him?

RK: No he actually saw her.

TK: Wait explain.

RK: He was staying on the third floor, alone, also, and he was asleep, only on one side of the bed. He turned over in the middle of the night and she was laying there, next to him. She then just got up and walked through the door.

THE INFORMANT

The informant is my father. He goes to London a lot for business and his favorite hotel is the Lanesborough. I’ve heard this story from him before but I wanted a clearer understanding of it, but although he is usually talkative and remembers small details, I had to pry it out of him because he wasn’t that into remembering it.

ANALYSIS

This story is the second one I have heard from a family member regarding a ghostly visitation that did not actually involve seeing anything, but rather a distinct sense that something was happening out of the realm of the ordinary–like my mother’s story of Woburn Abbey. Rather than seeing a ghost they each just felt like one had been there but did not see it.