Thursday, October 31, 2013

alone in the hotel

I have an overactive imagination and I can scare myself easily. So if I'm in the right mood, I can definitely freak myself out when I'm by myself late at night in a hotel room. I don't fret about actual potential intruders, perhaps because a stranger once barricaded himself in my hotel room (long story) and I know I can handle myself well in that sort of situation.

When I get into a certain mood in the hotel room, there are particular features I'm especially aware of. So for Halloween, I figured I'd list them, as well as the reasons I keep an eye on them:

1. Drains: It (I made the mistake of sort-of watching this because it was in the background at a Halloween party)
2. Mirrors: there's a million iterations of "freaky thing in the mirror", but I grew up with Bloody Mary - say her name in the dark in front of a mirror three times, and she's come out and... do something terrible. This completely freaked me out when I was a kid at sleepovers. I wouldn't participate, but I also figured if Bloody Mary was going to come out, she wasn't just going to stop at the bathroom door.
3. Closets: I heard a third- or fourth- hand account of a family that moved to a new house and the young daughter didn't like her bedroom because she didn't like "the lady who lived in the closet".
4. Under the bed: there could be anything under there. It's just dust bunnies and errant tissues, but you don't check under the bed when you first get into the room because who does that? And looking under the bed would be ridiculous... when it's not 2AM and you've just woken up from a nightmare.
5. Windows: again, a million iterations of "freaky thing looking in/coming through the window" but mine is Spring-Heeled Jack. Or Buffy (the movie) where vampires come and scratch at your third-story window.

So what this means is that when I wake up freaked out and need to pee (of course), after I do my business, I do a final check behind the shower curtain and wait for the last second to turn off the bathroom light. Then I race across the room, leap into the bed to avoid ankle-grabbers, lie on my back, and my eyes go window-closet-bathroom until I eventually fall asleep.

1 comment:

Lockwood said...

This is *really* creepy, so use your discretion. It's a film adaptation of a "two-sentence horror story" which I had read some months ago. But even though I knew where it was going, it was still *really* creepy. It does, however, answer the question, "What's under the bed?" Terrifyingly, that's not the question of concern. http://youtu.be/EiKFEwI5YrI