In honor of this spooky season, I think it’s only right that I share one of my thankfully few creepy experiences. What better one than the time I felt a supernatural presence while staying in a foreign country?
The Beginning
The year was 2018, and it all started on the day my family and I were checking into one of the hotels during our family trip to Europe. This particular hotel was located in London, near several tourist attractions, making it a busy area. As a self-proclaimed expert in reading energies, I couldn’t ignore the unsettling vibes I felt as soon as I walked through the doors and into the lobby. I immediately felt uneasy, and although I couldn’t quite identify the source, I’ve come up with several possible factors:
- Eerie Emptiness: Despite its location on a busy street, the hotel seemed oddly empty, which felt very strange. It may have been due to its three-star rating, but it added to the eerie atmosphere regardless.
- Unusual Layout: The hotel’s layout was unlike any I’d seen before. The lobby was relatively small, and there was a bar positioned in the middle of the hallway leading to the bedrooms. Additionally, the restaurant of the hotel was located in what I can only describe as a basement, accessible only via a narrow staircase descending from the first floor. Again, this could all be because it was a three-star hotel, but I digress.
- Mysterious Staircase: Our room was situated on the first floor, at the far end of the hallway, with a large, white, vintage-looking staircase in front of it that led to an unknown destination (unknown because I was too frightened to go up). These stairs sent shivers down my spine.
We were to stay at this hotel for only two nights, so I decided to try to dismiss my paranoid thoughts and avoid making a fuss about them.
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The Nightmare
As if the hotel in itself wasn’t already scary enough, my parents had booked two separate rooms—one for them and one for me and my siblings. So, I was feeling uneasy, with only my older sister and little brother as potential protectors in case anything happened, which wasn’t exactly comforting. Nevertheless, I mustered up the courage to fall asleep. Around two or three hours into the night, I woke up feeling extremely strange. What made it even stranger was that both of my siblings also woke up at the exact same moment, my older sister looking terrified. She rushed to check on our brother, repeatedly asking him if he was okay. My sister had experienced a nightmare, or possibly a message from the supernatural world in the form of a dream, in which a very angry woman named Theresa had appeared. This Theresa woman furiously yelled incomprehensible words at my sister while choking our little brother. To say we were terrified would be an understatement, but we eventually managed to fall back asleep, with the lights on, of course.
The Next Day
Despite the night of terror and possible threat by an English ghost, the following day passed smoothly, although my siblings and I remained on edge. That is, until it was time for lunch. While touring the streets of London, we stumbled upon a restaurant that piqued our interest. Unbeknownst to us, reservations were required, but the waiter kindly seated us at two tables reserved for a later party. Can you guess who the reservation was under? To our surprise, both tables were inexplicably reserved under the name Theresa. What are the odds? This couldn’t be a coincidence, not after the events of the night before! The air was tense and eerie, and I knew that my fear wasn’t a product of my overthinking because now my siblings also felt the tension and unease I had experienced earlier.
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The Resolution
We still had one more dreadful night to withstand in that eerie hotel, and with my siblings and I now mentally and emotionally prepared to somehow face this British, supernatural ghost activity, we went to sleep. Despite our newfound courage, that night remained ominously still and nothing out of the ordinary happened. We left the hotel unharmed and unscathed, but this series of eerie events continued to haunt us regardless, leaving us with questions about what might have lurked in the shadows if we had stayed longer. While there were no actual ghost sightings and I may never have a definitive answer to the mysteries of that hotel, this remains a story I’ll undoubtedly carry with me as a reminder that, sometimes, the unexplainable and the supernatural can intertwine with our everyday lives, even during a family vacation in a foreign country.