‘Officially called ‘The Afterlife: A Spiritual Retirement Center,’ the facility off the I-70 and just outside Baltimore is more commonly referred to as ‘The Ghost Hotel-’ a misnomer for many reasons. Residents of ‘The Ghost Hotel’ are permanent, for instance, and it’s currently impossible to pay for a room. It is a strictly non-profit enterprise, held together by sparse government funds and sizable, if less reliable, private donations. Most of these donations come from families who are able to recognize a resident within ‘The Ghost Hotel’ and feel the facility is doing good work.
‘The Ghost Hotel’ is a place for the dead rather than the living. Occasionally the source of a haunting can be isolated to a single object or a room and, when this happens, those totems can be shifted to ‘The Ghost Hotel’ for the benefit of the haunted party and the haunter alike.
There are rooms for the relatively self-reliant ghosts, say, your translucent rocking-chair grandma or your window-waver. There are rooms for poltergeists, filled to the brim with small, tidy objects for thrashing about or intricate stacking. Employees take turns stepping into said rooms to act surprised and to ultimately put everything back where it’s supposed to go. For the outright murderous ghosts? Well, that’s how a traveler gets a cheap room for the night.’
There’s a long waitlist for volunteering at ‘The Ghost Hotel.’ Hector and I are halfway across the country when we get the call but we turn around anyway and make it just in time. I sign a whole sheaf of papers at the desk, most of which attest to my cardiac and metal health history. The woman hands me the keys without any real ceremony and points me to the sort of sliding-gate elevator a person expects at an establishment called ‘The Ghost Hotel.’
I hesitate. “Anything I should know about room, uh, 14?”
“You much of an actor?”
“Not really.”
“Then the less details you get, the better. They know when you’re faking it. Best advice is to pretend to die early.”
There is a small guide to being haunted on the bedside table that says much the same.
A resident is assigned a weapon tailored to their historical preference. These items are harmless. Theatrical deaths among volunteers are discouraged. Most residents resorting to would-be fatal attacks are signaling exhaustion. It is best to let them finish.
Room 14 is a taxidermy room. None of the decorations have horns or teeth of significant size but there are several stuffed rabbits on display. I think about calling downstairs to complain, to see if we can switch, maybe, but Hector doesn’t seem to mind so much. I put the rabbits up on a high shelf just in case.
When I come out of the bathroom a few minutes later, the rabbits have been placed on the bed. All of the taxidermied heads have turned to glare at the toilet. The lights flicker.
This won’t be a restful night.
Hector and I are plagued by animal noises well into the evening. Shadows crawl in and out of our peripheries. The rabbits won’t stay still- the resident ghost honed in on that discomfort right away. They’re never where I leave them. They move stop-motion when I blink. It’s admittedly pretty creepy. I wonder what makes this ghost so mean. Was it a murderer or something? Does it hate animals? I try to write messages in fog on the mirror but it just shows up as a dark shadow behind me before blinking away. The guide suggests this is pretty normal. Ghosts get set in their ways. They don’t want to talk.
I wake up in the middle of the night when one of the stuffed rabbits clatters to the floor. It’s pretty clearly baiting me. I take the blanket off and step across the creaking floor. I bend over and hear the taxidermied animals all creaking, each moving a leg or a jaw or a neck. The shadow flicks across the glass as my fingers graze the rabbit’s fur and I look over in time to watch it coalesce into the figure of a man. It drives a knife down into my back and I feel the blade click into the handle.
I hesitate, probably too long for any real sort of believability, and then slump over on the floor. The stage knife drops near my face and I see, reflected in the rabbit’s glass eye, the shadow receding into the darkness. After a moment I stand up and brush myself off. I set the knife and the rabbit back up on the shelf and sleep the rest of the night, undisturbed.
-traveler
