Unseasonably Scary
Do you remember? Gettin’ real terrified in September?
SEPTEMBER
Often, the beginning of Fall is signified by the changing of the leaves; farming as a means of social validation; and sweat leaping from your glands as you stand stubbornly in a leather jacket you’ve donned criminally early, Virgo. However, there is another, lesser traveled method of getting into the Fall spirit. Though often saved for October, this month you’ll inadvertently invite spooky season early by staying at a hotel absolutely drenched in evil.
I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself, Virgo. This month, you’ll join your husband on his music tour of the U.S. This means you’ll spend much of the month eating oatmeal out of hotel mugs (and thus growing to appreciate the girth of bowls, a wonderful aspect of bowls you’ve failed to acknowledge in your three decades of oatmeal consumption).
Despite a notable consistency in mug size from hotel to hotel, each location will boast its own wholly unique characteristics. The hotel in San Francisco has an old time-y elevator with a metal gate you feel uneasy about; the hotel in Cambridge has a TV inside of the bathroom mirror (a dream of yours, since you hate when bathing pulls you away from Housewives); and the hotel in LA bravely chooses to use the rooftop of their business (a business where you pay to rest and go to sleep) as a club, ensuring you’ll be wide awake listening to generic techno (pejorative) until 2am.
Though each of these hotels have their own precocious personalities, none will feel as distinct as your Chicago lodging. If I had to describe its unique character in one word? Haunted. If I had the opportunity to add two more words to my one word description? Pure evil.
Initially, the Chicago hotel just feels jarring due to its outdated lobby decor, which features a gallery wall of framed portraits of animals in suits. Plenty of hotels look like shrines to forgotten motifs of the early 2010’s, so you decide you’re unwilling to let this misstep keep you from enjoying your unprecedentedly long three night stay.
When you arrive at your room, you’ll see its door is open and slightly ajar. This certainly does nothing to cultivate peace of mind, but it’s late (3:30 am) and you’re so eager to fall into a deep sleep that you interpret the room’s emptiness as evidence that an open door must be their standard policy for empty rooms.
You’ll choose the side of the bed closest to the door. Though your exhaustion is strong, you can’t help but feel there is something off about the corner of the room you’ve taken as yours. Sleep overtakes you, and you decide to deal with your spatial unease in the morning.
When day arrives, your husband informs you that he woke in the middle of the night and saw you sitting upright, talking quietly to the corner of the room. The same corner that left you feeling slightly perturbed the night before. You’ll have no memory of the encounter, and feel more than a little disquieted by its reveal.
You are no stranger to haunted homes, Virgo. In your current apartment you woke up to a ghost staring at you from the foot of your bed. This ghost wasn’t an explicitly negative presence, but it has made it impossible for you to sleep on your back (the position you were in when you saw her). To try and cutesy her up, you call her your “ghostita,” but you’re still scared that she’s going to come back.
That said, your ghostita has nothing on the corner of your hotel room. If your ghostita is a pebble, the corner of your hotel room is an in-motion boulder falling from a great height (onto you). If your ghostita is a drip of coffee, the corner of your hotel room is a lahar, annihilating all living creatures in its wake. If your ghostita is a woman stubbing her toe, the corner of your hotel room is the embodiment of the media’s treatment of the bodies and fun nights on the town of female celebrities in the early 2000’s.
The corner becomes the inverse of an elephant in the room, in that you will relentlessly discuss the presence of something intangible.
That night, the corner feels so dark and overwhelming that your husband offers to take your side of the bed. Never one to push back on another person’s offer to absorb discomfort on your behalf, you accept. He grows to feel the same way as you about the corner, and neither of you fall asleep easily.
On your third and final night, the proximity of your departure buoys you into a comparatively confident night’s sleep. That is, until you are both woken by the screams of a woman in the room next door. The room that abuts your dreaded corner.
Something CREEPY is going on in this hotel!!!!!! she’ll shriek. In an uncharacteristically potent exercise of self-knowledge, you’ll whisper “I can’t take this on,” to your husband, drown out the screaming woman, and go back to sleep.1
By morning, all shared pretense about the hotel will have evaporated and you will be in a state of manic spiritual triage. Afraid to be alone in the cursed room for a single second, trips to the lobby for coffee are made in tandem.
You will clumsily navigate the complex emotional terrain of feeling guilty that a stranger was scared in the middle of the night and you did nothing to help yet feeling validated that there is something unnerving happening in your hotel and feeling scared that since there is something spooky happening here, is it a threat to you? Your mind is racing with questions. What did you and that demonic presence discuss during your late night chit chat??? Are you actually dead and is this a The Others ass situation????
In the service of escaping your room as soon as possible, you pack haphazardly, put less care into your appearance that you typically would (you resent that people don’t try at the airport) and drastically inflate the length of time needed to get to O’Hare as justification for your early departure (without some element of self-delusion you’d definitely be dead).
During checkout, you’ll try to needle the receptionists for information. You’ll lean against the counter like a thirsty cowboy and speak in a voice you think sounds calm and inviting (but really sounds bone-chillingly insane), to ask, Does this hotel have any history of being haunted?
Ha ha ha, the receptionists laugh. No, they’ll assure you. You all share a laugh at your silly question.
Except, one receptionist admits, we did recently have a woman who requested a change of room because she said that there was an evil spirit in her bed.
Everyone will digest this information in a shared silence until you basically are just like Okay thanks and walk to your Lyft.
Leaving the hotel grounds for good empowers you to comb the internet in search of information about the cursed land in which you lay your heads for three nights, but the apparent magnitude of haunted hotels in Chicago make the results too unwieldy to efficiently sift through. You recall a friend who lived in Chicago whose apartment building was once a hotel. One day, when he was sitting alone in a comfortable, silent apartment, his Alexa speaker started reading the definition of agony to him. You wonder if constant paranormal horror is the price you have to pay to live in the windy city!
With little luck on the research front, you resolve to put the scary experience out of your head. However, shortly after takeoff, you remember your husband’s ongoing project in which he takes photos of hotel hallways around the world. You suggest in a sincere way masquerading as a lighthearted way that you take a look at the photos of the Chicago hotel for anything…off.
At first glance, the photos look innocuous. However, as he goes to delete them (and the associated memories), something captures your attention. The cursed hotel room (the hotel room from which the evil emanated) has a shadow beneath its doors that’s almost pitch black—darker than any of the other doors—almost as if it’s been stained. You look a little closer, and see that in the second photo, which was taken a little bit closer, there appears to be a little black ribbon tied to the doorknob. Alas, this hotel only offered housekeeping on request, so none of the rooms were equipped with the traditional “do not disturb signs,” as comforting as it would have been to wave away the ribbon with an explanation.
Seeking answers, your husband will ask a witch in Argentina to evaluate the photos. She will claim that an unspeakably evil man haunts that hotel room. She tells you that he wants to be left alone! Let that evil man rest in peace!!!
Look, normally I would hate to say this Virgo, but since it’s the spooky season (albeit slightly ahead of schedule), I’m going to be frank: terrifying things love you! There is simply no stopping the mystical and mortifying from finding their way to you. My advice? Find a way to make these paranormal visitations F-U-N. Consider a OUIJA board! Or a book of spells! Or else just record yourself sleeping a la Paranormal Activity, a movie you remember less because of the content and more so because someone told you that you resembled the woman in it (who’s possessed). Good luck owning your bad bad vibes, Virgo!
You have comedian June Diane Raphael to thank for this winning catchphrase!
"Three decades of oatmeal consumption" is such a compelling sentence.