The Hawthorne Hotel's "Haunted" Room #325 - The Reveal
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.
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.
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.
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!
just thought I would leave a note my sister and I were born in Salem Mass and traveled back there from Canada to see it again after 30 years as well as see our cousins that still live there we stayed in room 325 for two nights and while we were there the second night two of our cousins brought over a Ouija board, my sister and one of my cousins started asking questions and the board was moving like crazy they were communicating with a spirit of a man who said he was a handyman at the hotel many many many years ago and had committed suicide by throwing himself out the window of the room with only one bed in it, I was stating that I did not believe what was happening and my sister ask the Ouija board if he wanted me to leave and he said yes and I said I was not leaving and the Ouija board piece literally flew off the game board on the bed and hit the ceiling I am totally dead serious this really happened, I swear to God.
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