The Hawthorne Hotel's "Haunted" Room #325 - The Reveal

When I ended my last post, Amanda, Jamie, and I had just retired for the night in the Hawthorne Hotel's very beautiful "haunted" Room #325.  I know you're all quite curious about how the night went but before I tell you that there are a few things that I neglected to mention in my previous post about the room that I should probably mention now.

The first was that shortly after entering the room on Wednesday afternoon and taking pictures, I started to notice a smell that I just couldn't put my finger on. The scent seemed to be floral-like in nature but not overpoweringly so and I could smell it better in some parts of the rooms than others.  I mentioned to Jamie that the room smelled like fresh-cut flowers but obviously there were none. She told me that she didn't smell anything at all but I was positive of it so thought that perhaps it might be some sort of air freshener that the hotel used during cleaning. As I've mentioned in the past, I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell so even when I left the room a couple of times to bring our parking permit down to the car and take pictures in the hallway and such, I kept smelling the floral scent just as strong when I would come back into the room. Each time I would ask Jamie, "Do you smell that?" and each time she would tell me, "Nope, I can't smell a thing." Odd.

The second thing was that even though the room was quite comfortably warm while I was taking pictures of the room and even popping my head out an open window to shoot 'the view', as soon as I sat down in the chair next to the closet in the sitting area, I became really cold.  I figured I just had a chill and after sitting with with my laptop for a little while I'd warm up nicely as anyone who's ever had a laptop computer on their actual lap for any amount of time can probably attest to the fact that it warms you up a bit - sometimes too much so!  In this case, though, even after almost half an hour, I was still shivering.  I finally got up, readjusted the temperature control to a slightly higher heat, and threw on another layer of clothing but when I sat back down, I immediately got chilled again.  Jamie, on the other hand, was sitting at the desk across from the bed near the window and she was more than warm - so much so that she took her ever-present hoodie off and was wearing only one layer! This from the former Florida kid who's cold all the time!  Odd.

After returning to the room after dinner in the Tavern, I didn't notice the floral smell anymore nor did I feel at all cold when I sat back down in the same chair near the closet.  As a matter of fact, it seemed a lot warmer to me than before so prior to going to bed for the night, I turned the heat down a bit as I have trouble sleeping in a room that's too warm.  At that time, Amanda departed for her smaller bedroom on one side of the bathroom while Jamie and I said good-night on our side of the bathroom in the larger bedroom.  I kept the bathroom door open a bit on our side so that we'd get a little of the light that was visible through the bathroom curtains and Amanda did the same on her side though she opted to stay up a bit longer and chat with her friends on-line while Jamie and I were both pretty tired and called it a night.

As I turned on the Baby Soothe app on my iPhone and set it to the sound of waves to lull me to sleep (I simply cannot sleep without some form of white noise), I wasn't scared at all but more curious and perhaps even hopeful that maybe "something" would happen.  Chances are good if something did happen I was going to be diving under the covers really fast but I was still hopeful that I'd at least have a good story to tell when the morning rolled around.  Being rather tired, Jamie and I both seemed to fall asleep quite quickly without hearing any children crying or any unseen hands reaching out to tuck us in for the night - just the gentle sound of waves crashing to the shore emanating from my iPhone which was docked in the hotel alarm clock.

I suppose that having a form of white noise going might mask any other sounds in the room so I don't remember hearing anything during the night though I do recall waking up at one point with the distinct feeling that someone was looking down on me but - chicken that I really am - I opted to keep my eyes tightly closed rather than be brave and take a peek. I finally fell back asleep and the next time I awoke was when the alarm on my iPod made me jump as I had forgotten to shut the darned thing off the night before and it was set for my usual time to get up for work on Thursdays. I sure the heck wasn't going to get up at 5:50 in the morning, though, so I finally managed to get the darned thing out of the iPod docking station of the alarm clock and shut off before falling back asleep until almost 8:30 when the scariest thing of all happened ... my iPhone started ringing and the caller ID indicated that it was my ex-husband! Eek!! In all seriousness, though, I really wasn't ready for any sort of conversation so I let it roll over to voice-mail and figured that if it was important he'd leave me a message - which he didn't.

After that I got up and noticed that the bathroom door to Amanda's side was closed and there was a light on under the doorway but there was no sound of movement from the other side.  I thought that was a bit odd and made a mental note to myself to ask Amanda about it before I went off to try out the "shower closet" that I had mentioned yesterday.  After a nice long, hot shower I decided it was time to wake the girls up for the day and see how they'd slept the night before.

Jamie reported sleeping like the proverbial rock and not waking up at all until I poked her in the ribs while Amanda, on the other hand, had a slightly different tale to tell about her night ...

Following an on-line conversation with her friends who all thought it was totally cool to be staying in a "haunted" hotel room, per their suggestion she decided she was going to leave the web-cam on her computer on during the night in the hopes of maybe capturing something.  She set the computer up on the nightstand, pointed it towards the bathroom door that was about halfway open, and turned off the light after climbing into bed.  The room had a pretty decent amount of ambient light glowing through the curtains in the bathroom but moments later the bathroom door closed on its own - not quite slamming but not just slowly closing either.  She said it made a pretty good noise (not that I heard it as I was sleeping soundly to the crash of waves washing up on some distant shore) and at that point she turned the light back on and left it on for the rest of the night!  Unfortunately, her web-cam didn't catch a thing either - darn the luck!  In addition to the door closing, Amanda said that she felt a "cold breeze" over the top of her bed all night.  When I woke her up, the room seemed to be relatively warm so I asked her if she'd maybe felt a breeze of some sort from the heating unit that's not too far from the bed but she said that no, it was definitely a cold breeze and that it seemed to float just above her.  Okay then ... Doubly odd.

So, do we have anything conclusive to report?  Well, no ... floral scents, cold areas, and a bathroom door that closes on its own definitely doesn't add up to anything conclusive but then again, how many "hauntings" really are conclusive?  The way I look at it is that ghosts or spirits no more want to do the "dog and pony show" for every Tom, Dick, and Harriet that comes down the pike than any of us would so perhaps there are times when they decide to "sleep in" themselves! Anytime I watch shows like Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adventurers or the like I always think that if I were a ghost, I'd not show up when they wanted me to just because I could! Or better yet, I'd show up when the camera wasn't rolling or the EMF meters were put away simply because that seems like it would be a lot more fun!   Yea, I'd be that kind of a ghost!

There you have it then, we'd spent night one at the Hawthorne in Room #325 with not much to report except for a really good sleep in a really comfortable bed and a possible bathroom door that closed on its own, a couple of cold spots, and the scent of fresh-cut flowers. I'm not sure if any of that points towards the room being haunted but just because we didn't hear any children crying or have anyone poking at us or the like, I don't believe that hasn't happened or can't happen to other visitors to the room. I can tell you, though, that at no time did any of the three of us feel uncomfortable in the room - except maybe for that brief bout of feeling like I had someone looking at me during the night but that's probably more from worrying that I was snoring or sleeping with my mouth hanging open!

Following our relatively uneventful night, it was time to scare up some breakfast which we did at Nathaniel's Restaurant and which I will tell you about next post complete with more pictures as well as showing you our accommodations for Thursday night - the other reportedly haunted room at the Hawthorne Hotel - #612!