By Katie von Zedlitz

Ghosts. Although the concept may seem far fetched and made-up, many people have been stunned and changed forever after just one sighting. Some people are so certain of their encounters that they share it with anyone willing to hear it, but there are always doubts in those people until they have an encounter themselves. People always associate ghosts with Halloween and it’s fun to scare your friends and family and decorate your house with decorations, but we always think of it as just a fictional story when it can truly be an unexplainable sighting that we only choose not to believe. When people go to haunted places around the world, they bring back crazy stories and things that even experts can’t explain, and yes there is always the possibility that they made it up, but the real reason is why, and what would they get out of it. 

Some creepy ghost stories are about ghost encounters in hotels. At the Claremont hotel in California, there have been many many ghost sightings and it is considered to be one of the most haunted hotels in the United States. One story about an encounter at the hotel gave me the creeps. A couple stayed overnight in the hotel as a weekend getaway. Throughout the night they kept on hearing loud footsteps and what seemed like people running and dancing around on the floor above them. Surely this could have been a family staying upstairs who had kids running around and they didn’t want to cause a problem and complain about it that late at night and they assumed that it would stop when the family went to bed. However, the noise went on until the morning and at that point, they figured they might as well alert the front desk about it before it happened again the next night. When they got to the lobby and told them about their experience, the bellboy informed him that there were no rooms above them and that they were located on the top floor. 

There have also been several ghost encounters at hotels in not only the dining hall but even in the gift shop. At another hotel in California, there have been guests who while at breakfast experienced a strong smell of perfume. Around the first encounter, the guests and workers recognized the scent. It was supposedly used by a woman that died unexpectedly in the hotel in the early 1800s. The scent was reported to continue to get stronger and disappear several times throughout the day. The perfume had stopped being manufactured in the 1930s which makes many people wonder how the scent manages to get that strong if there were so little left in the world, and they were all left with the same explanation. Whoever was controlling this perfume had to be something outside of the hotel’s power and possibly the ghost of the woman of the 1800s. Guests have also reported cold spots and items falling off the shelves right side up and unharmed in the hotel gift shop. Guests have continued to be confused and scared by these encounters for nearly 200 years, and even experts can’t explain these unusual recurrences.

Ghost stories have been around for ages and have been especially popular around Halloween. Although there are always doubters and people who look to find a logical explanation, why would these hotels go through all of this work and special effects for some extra attention, and why would guests make up these stories. Surely you could always go through and pick out what could be fake and logical reasons for some of these stories, but why take the fun out of it. Ghost stories have been passed down through generations and have been fun to tell and hear by audiences of all ages. So as Halloween approaches and you’re looking for a good story to tell your friends and family, keep these in mind.