by Chandini Antal

Over my spring break, I went to Savannah, Georgia. This trip had memorable moments and even stranger ones.

My mom and I were in Savannah for a medical conference. While she was in classes, I hung out at the resort and in our hotel room. My mom’s lessons ended around 2 or 3 each day, so we had the rest of the day free. On the first day, we decided to go on a historic trolley tour, because everyone said it was a must thing to do in the city. So, we decided to hop on one and discover the town. We sat down on the trolley and began our journey around the city. As we began to look around we saw the woman sitting next to us had a large red cone-like thing poking out of her backpack. I saw it and thought “okay then” but didn’t mind it too much until later. We then hopped off the trolley, and the lady pulled the cone thing out of her backpack. I soon learned that the giant cone was attached to a giant plush gnome. Again, I thought this was odd, but I didn’t mind until we walked two feet and she put her gnome down in the plants to take photos. Our tour guide just stared at her and waited for her to finish her photo shoot. We walked a few blocks and then we visited a historic house. As we were waiting to walk up the steps of the house, the gnome lady found a bench behind us and began to take more photos of her gnome. At this point, our group was getting a little annoyed, and the lady next to me started talking very loudly not even trying to be subtle as she was talking to her husband said, “what is this weirdo doing?” I started laughing, and my mom tried to ask me what was so funny but before I could tell her why I was laughing, the gnome lady decided to interject and give the whole group the history of her gnome, including his name and where he had previously traveled, our group rolled their eyes and continued on the tour.

This was not the only the odd experience I encountered. While I was in the city one-night my mom and I went to this restaurant, while we were there eating dinner I looked over, and I saw my friend (from HB) sitting at the table near me. I went over and said hi we talked and decided that the next day we were going to go to a museum.

When we walked in, the lobby was covered in fried eggs. We saw an elevator and pressed the button, as soon as we pressed it we heard the most atrocious noises.  It was screeching and thudding and terrifying. For some reason, we decided to get on, and it took like four minutes to get from one floor to the other, all the while we heard these banging noises, and this became Terrifying Experience 1. We decided to go the gallery across from the elevator on the ground floor. Eventually, we wandered into to a dark room where the walls were dark blue, it had a bloody ax in ice, and other old papers on the wall, there were also curtains in the corner. Over the speakers, there were these war cry like sounds and screaming. We wanted to leave the exhibit but there was a tour going on directly outside the door, so we decided to make another lap around the room. Being curious we decided to look through the curtains, and through them was this giant pitch-black room with these huge bean bags, and on the screen, was someone stabbing things with sticks aggressively and yelling, we were terrified and ran out, making that Terrifying Experience number 2. We started laughing when we realized what happened, so we continued on the path of the galleries. We soon began to realize that there are a lot of twists and turns, so we kept walking until we got into something I like to call the “Hall of Horror.” It was a soundproof winding hallway that lead to the next exhibit; it was pretty much all black and the soundproof padding reflected off the light, so it made the hall look like it was closing in. We thought that at any moment a crazy ax murder would pop out. After, we ended up in the next gallery or as we would soon find out “stimulation 1.” It was another dark room and when we walked in, the student docent flashed a light on us. We noticed a giant table in the middle of the room with antique speakers, all connected with chords. I would say there were about 50 of these speakers; we started walking around the table when this creepy music started playing. The docent kept staring at us and watching us. So, we kept circling the table, after another lap, we started to walk back to the Hall of Horror trying to get out of there, then the guy said: “there’s another stimulation.” We then felt obligated to go to the next one. We walked in and we saw this little shack in yet again another dark room. Only the shed had light on it, and obviously, this made for another Terrifying Experience. In the shack, it had a bunch of radios and record players. And shocker more creepy music played. I don’t know if these had a Spotify playlist for unpleasant music, but that’s what it seemed like. Then over the speakers, a deep voice played, it was some man, and he was screaming disturbing things and incoherent sentences. I honestly could not comprehend what was happening. At this point, my friend and I were in complete shock, and trying hard not to laugh when the record player in the shack started playing and rotating by itself. We wanted to get out of there, so we decided to go back the way we came. We practically ran across the exhibit trying to get out. The only exit we saw were black curtains, and we already learned our lesson before so we hesitantly pushed them aside there was a door, we open the door, and we saw daylight. We thought we were saved from whatever torture chamber we had just been in.

That was an incredibly odd trip to the museum but a hilarious one nonetheless. This is truly a trip I will never forget.