A Permanent Guest

There’s a hotel in downtown Freeport that has been around since 1928.  It had a diverse past, from housing workers who were building the railroad to being used as a halfway house during the Great Depression, it’s halls and rooms have sheltered both the upscale and the downtrodden. It was even rumored to have been a favorite overnight stay for the infamous gangster Al Capone.
In 2006 the hotel changed hands and the hotel was sold to a major hotel chain who, although they kept the character of the original building, did a lot of renovations to make it their own.  But they probably didn’t realize just how much of the old character they kept.

Just after the hotel re-opened, I had a chance to speak with one of the staff.  “So, are there any ghosts left over after the renovations?” I asked.

She tried to hide a smile and then motioned me a little closer. “All of the workers talk about him,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“The little boy on the fourth floor,” she said. “Some of them have seen him out of the corner of their eyes, but all of them have witnessed the radios turning off by themselves and the lights switching on by themselves.  Some have had tools walk away from where they just put them down, only to be found in an empty room. And some have heard the laughter and the footsteps.”

“Cool,” I replied and then I studied her. “And how about you?”

She sighed. I’d uncovered her secret.

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” she said. “But you need to keep me anonymous.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

“Just before we open, we have a soft opening,” she explained. “Employees from this same hotel chain come and stay here and we test all of the services. That way we can work out any bugs in the system.”

She paused and looked around to be sure no one was listening.

“We had all the employees stay on one floor, the second floor, so we didn’t have to open up the rest of the rooms,” she explained. “I worked late, to be sure everything was running well.  I left the hotel at about three o’clock in the morning. Everything was quiet and I felt that we’d done a good job.  I walked to my car, parked across the street and then I looked back at the hotel.”

She paused once again and lowered her voice even more.

“All of the lights in the rooms were off,” she explained. “All except one. On the fourth floor. The one the little boy was said to haunt.”

Happy Friday!

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