In Paso Robles, California, there is a hotel which people – both employees and guests – claim is haunted.
Surprise, surprise, right?
In this day and age, one is hard-pressed to find a hotel that hasn’t been declared haunted at least by a few people.
Photo credit left: flickr/jasonholmberg right: twistedvisions
Updated 2/10/2020 – Stories of hotels having ghosts in them are as common as the encounters which spawn them.
And it can even be said that many of the stories you hear have a tragic element to them.
Not too many of them also include bravery and self-sacrifice.
Possibly eternal self-sacrifice, at that.
In 1940, the Paso Robles Inn caught fire.
Witness accounts of what happened vary – some say that a masquerade ball was underway, and a few lavishly costumed and heavily intoxicated guests were responsible for inadvertently starting the blaze.
Others say the fire was deliberately set – and of course these accounts split off into various factions as well, with some people saying that it was someone’s jealous lover, other saying that it was the hotel’s owner trying to collect insurance money, and so on and so forth.
Whatever the case, if the rumors are to be believed, one man committed the ultimate act of bravery and worked to get the guests out of the hotel.
An older man, he unfortunately succumbed to a heart attack in the process, and either died as a result of it, or as the result of smoke inhalation afterward.
In either case, he was dead by the time the authorities arrived.
Image credit: twistedvisions
Today – according to many who stay there and some who work there – the hotel still bears signs of his presence from time to time.
Phantom calls from Room 1007, the room in which the employee found himself when he first called down to the front desk to alert the lobby of the fire, are a somewhat regular occurrence.
“We used to get them at the front desk all the time,” says one former employee.
“It was eerie, because you’d answer it, and you’d hear this tinny voice on the other end of the line, as if it was coming from a million miles away.
And invariably, there would be no one in the room.
In fact, usually if there was a guest in Room 1007, we knew that we weren’t going to be hearing anything from that room that night, and could breathe a little easier through the night shifts.”
He spends his afterlife trying to save people from the fire.
That’s his unfinished business.
Although they are never completed, calls also sometimes go out from this room to the local 911 authorities.
This is common enough in hotels – in a building full of people where you have to dial 9 and then 1 on your room phone to get out, accidental 911 calls are pretty routine – but in almost every case, it is coming from that room.
And in almost every case, that room is empty.
“We never bothered him when I was around,” says the former employee.
“We just let him be.
But I’ll tell you, he sounded damn eerie.
And sad.
That was the worst part, just how sad and alone and scared he always sounds.”
This ghost doesn’t know that he gave his life to save other people.
He’s stuck in-between, forced to relive that terrible day over and over.