My best friend, who is an airline pilot, had an
overnight layover in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the United States of America.
His airline puts their crew
personnel in the Sheraton Read House Hotel in downtown Chattanooga, which is a
pre-civil war era hotel that was used as a hospital and mortuary during the
civil war. He was assigned a room
on the third floor, across the hall from an infamous haunted room that he was
told about by the shuttle driver who transported him and his crew from the
airport. After listening to the
shuttle driver’s story of a hotel ghost, when my friend pulled up to the hotel
in the shuttle, he saw something white appear from the sky and fly into the
hotel -- it was just a blur, but it was very noticeable.
In the lobby he noticed several pictures of the civil
war occupants, which added to the eeriness of the setting. The room across the hall from his
assigned room is supposedly haunted by a civil war era prostitute who is said to
have been brutally murdered by a civil war soldier. After my best friend got checked in, he
was talking to a friend on the telephone and made a snide remark about the
prostitute, when all of a sudden, the sprinkler system started flooding over his
head, and he said it looked like water mixed with blood and had a horrible
decomposing flesh smell.
He fled the room and went to the three story lobby,
which was directly below his room. When he got down to the lobby, he noticed
water seeping through the grand chandelier and then the ceiling started crashing
down! People were fleeing in mass
hysteria, and he was standing there looking like a drowned rat! The hotel manager went up to the third
floor and came back down and began reading my best friend the riot act, saying
he had smelled the room and demanding to know what he had been doing in there
and yelling that he had destroyed the hotel!
Eventually my best friend was assigned a different room
in the new section of the hotel, and he had the opportunity to call his wife who
is from Jamaica and very well versed on the dangers of angering spirits. She told him to leave the hotel
immediately, but he replied that it was late and he had an early flight. She then told him to find a Gideon Bible
and recite a passage from Psalms.
He found the bible and looked to no avail for the passage because he
knows nothing about the bible, and when he was telling me the story he was
calling it Palms, not Psalms! He
then took a shower, and he said that he scrubbed and scrubbed and could not get
that smell off of him! He set his
electronic alarm for a certain time and it kept changing to another time on him.
When he returned from the shower,
the bible lay open and had been turned to the correct passage!
The hotel called the airline and tried to get them to
take responsibility for two million dollars worth of damages! A few weeks later, I was driving to
Disney World and my best friend asked me to stop by the hotel and see what I
could find out. I told him I would
just to appease him and actually did not have any intention on stopping for two
reasons: if this entity was that
powerful, I wanted to error on the side of caution and not be there for round
two!; Also I was driving a one ton dooly and did not think I would have an easy
time finding parking near a downtown hotel.
However, as I was nearing the downtown Chattanooga exit,
curiosity began killing the cat, and I decided I would just drive by the hotel,
but when I did, there was an empty parking space waiting for me in front of the
hotel that fit my truck and trailer perfectly. Against my better judgment, I stopped,
and as I exited my truck, I saw workers shoveling out old broken bricks from the
hotel, and when I entered the once elegant lobby, I saw that it was covered in
thick plastic and yellow tape. I took the elevator up to the third floor and
walked past the haunted room three times, I did not see anything; however, I
detected ghostly energy. I returned
to the elevator and something told me to walk past the haunted room one final
time, and as I did, a maid stuck her head out from the end of a long hallway and
asked me if everything was okay. I
replied yes, that I was just checking out the haunted room, and she then asked
if I wanted to see inside of it, and I replied "yes I guess." She then came down the hallway and tried
her card key, which did not work.
She then saw someone who she referred to as the hotel engineer who all of
a sudden mysteriously appeared and was a few rooms down the hallway. She asked him if he would try his card
key and let me into the haunted room. He said he had to check on the hotel
guest who had made a complaint first and then would let me into the room. He knocked on the door of the guy who had
called in a complaint. An older
gentlemen answered and said he had not made the call and did not need anything.
The next thing I know, I had gone
from not going to stop at all, to being in the haunted room with a supposed
hotel engineer who was called to the location by a prank phone call! I confided
to him that my best friend was the guest who had been in the room when the flood
happened and asked him if he knew what had caused the flood and he said they did
not know!
Here a flood had almost collapsed a ten story building
and two weeks later, they still did not know the source of the problem! The hotel engineer then started talking
real strange to me saying things like there were many more spirits in the hotel
other than just the prostitute, and he said guests brought Ouija boards into the
haunted room and that he did not approve of that. How would he know if guests had Ouija
boards in the room with them? As I
exited the room, the maid who had mysteriously greeted me from the end of the
long hallway and invited me into the haunted room was once again at the other
end of the long hallway sticking her head out, looking at me as she had before
in total de ja vu fashion.
As if all of that was not strange enough, that night I
was in a shop at the local mall telling a local guy what had happened, and he
started describing the maid in exact detail, and I said that she must be a
friend of his, but he said no, that she is the prostitute and that the hotel
engineer was also a ghost. He
further stated that the third floor had been shut down for decades and when the
Sheraton Corporation purchased the property, it had been a corporate decision to
re-open the third floor. I also
consulted several mediums who confirmed the hotel workers were indeed
spirits.
When my best friend returned home, his wife began seeing
a woman who matched the maid’s description in their home. The same day, they also had a very large
tree hit by lightning and it totally blew up into splinters. Also, after getting her car washed and
detailed, she found a decomposed bird in the grill of her car -- the bird was
hanging upside down, with wings spread, an impossible position if the bird was
accidentally hit.
A couple of years later, my best friend once again had a
layover in Chattanooga and was surprised his airline still had an account with
the hotel. When you work for an
airline you sign in and do not check in; therefore, you are not personally
tagged for having done two million dollars worth of damage on your last visit.
This time, my best friend was
assigned a room on the tenth floor (top floor) of the old section. He was
entering the elevator with another pilot whose cell phone rang and he elected to
stay in the lobby to take the call. As the elevator started up, everything
was okay but then it started violently jerking to the point my best friend
thought that it might drop! It made
it to the tenth floor and the rest of the night passed without incident,
although he said he did not sleep a wink and constantly saw flashes of white
light.
The next morning, my best friend got into the elevator
and pressed the lobby button, and for no apparent reason, the elevator stopped
on the third floor and he got out, thinking it was the lobby! When he recognized it was the haunted
3rd floor, he pressed the elevator call button, but it never came -- he was
forced to carry his luggage down the stairs. At his next destination he could not find
an electric razor that he knew he had used the previous night at the Sheraton
Read House Hotel, so he called the hotel and described the razor in detail to
see if he had accidently left it in his room. The desk clerk said yes, the razor had
been found; however, it could not
be his because he stayed on the tenth floor and this razor had been found in
room 310 (the haunted room). After
reconfirming the make and color, he said trust me, it's mine and they sent it to
him, and it was his
razor!