JULY 4th, 2011 – THE PHANTOM ROOM AT THE PENGUIN HOTEL
Well folks, it’s officially the Fourth of July, and what better way to celebrate our nation’s birthday than with a Very Special Blog Post! Tom and I just got back from vacationing in the lovely coastal town of Stonepier, Massachusetts, and our trip was chock full of all the great New England cliches. Friendly locals, beautiful beaches, enough seafood to make you burst, and… a long history of tourists vanishing into thin air?
Yeah, maybe that’s just a Stonepier thing.
I’m referring, of course, to the Penguin Hotel, a little establishment on the Stonepier coast that’s attracted a lot of buzz in the paranormal community. In the past ten years, EIGHT visitors to the Penguin have mysteriously disappeared from the same hotel room. Each visitor left their luggage behind like they only planned to step out for a moment. There were no signs of foul play, no hints of their whereabouts. None of them were ever found.
Each guest had spent the night in room 325. This came as little shock to the few paranoids paying attention, because that room has been known to commit a few disappearing acts of its own. Many visitors to the Penguin have reported blank stretches of wall where 325 is supposed to be, even – in some cases – after seeing the door there just hours before.
You’re probably wondering to yourself: how can an entire room just disappear? Well, inquisitive reader, wonder no more, because the Weird Brothers are on the case. We investigate creepy vanishing hotel rooms so you don’t have to.
Tom and I arrived in Stonepier on the hottest day of the summer, but the winds blowing in from the ocean made the weather bearable, almost pleasant. The bulk of the town sits at the edge of the water. If you like kitschy nautical-themed shops and a lobster shack at every corner, then good news! Stonepier has you covered.
Okay, that makes it sound like I hated the place, but honestly I didn’t. Stonepier is a beautiful town. Lush parks to walk your dog, cute colonial homes, beaches so clean you can go barefoot without stepping on shells or used cigarette butts. You can tell the town is proud of their history, too. There are these neat statues planted everywhere to commemorate the town’s fishing industry and the long tradition of sailors who hail from these humble shores.
So what happened to all those missing tourists? How could such a peaceful vacation spot harbor such a dark secret?
Tom and I checked into the Penguin Hotel after doing a bit of exploring around town. The hotel is easily the biggest building in the area, but it still maintains an aura of coziness, like a bed & breakfast that’s been stretched to accommodate Stonepier’s sizable crowd of tourists. The lobby had all the maritime decor you’d expect: paintings of boats, wall molding with little fish designs, even a steering wheel from some old seafaring vessel. The ocean smell wafting in from outdoors really completed the picture.
We got our keycard from the receptionist (five stars, Rita!) and headed upstairs to get settled. Sadly, I’d been unable to wrangle a stay in the infamous room 325, no matter how much I wheedled over the phone. I guess “being an internet famous paranormal blogger duo” isn’t a valid reason to kick paying guests out of their rooms. The sales manager was nice enough to book us a room on the third floor, at least, so we were close to where we needed to be.
Our room was pretty standard hotel fare; nothing to write home about. I got to work unpacking while Tom ventured out into the hallway to snap a few photos of room 325. Or at least that was the plan. He came back to the room with a look of deep concern on his face, his eyes glued to his camera screen.
“It wasn’t there,” he said.
He showed me the picture he’d taken, and sure enough, there was a blank stretch of wall between rooms 324 and 326.
“No fucking way,” I breathed.
We agreed to take shifts watching that particular hallway, which sounds a bit insane in retrospect. (“Text me if you see a door appearing out of nowhere.”) But be real with me: you wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to witness a traveling hotel room for yourself, would you? Tom volunteered to hover by the ice machine and pretend to scoop ice if anyone came around the corner, while I chose a spot near the third floor windows to slouch against the wall and pretend to read a novel. We swapped out every twenty minutes to avoid drawing too much suspicion. Not that anyone was paying a smidgen of attention to us; they were too busy chasing children down the hall or sweating over their heavy suitcases or yammering away with their sunburnt friends.
The hours passed with no strange activity, no doors materializing out of nowhere, and I began to grow impatient. What if the door knew when it was being watched? Was the simple act of us standing there and waiting for it the very thing that kept it from manifesting? Either way, my vision was starting to swim from staring at the same spot for so long. I glanced away and looked out the window, where night had long since fallen. The sky was clear, a deep velvety purple, and there were more stars visible than I was used to.
When I glanced back, I was looking at room 325.
I stifled a victory whoop, nearly biting my tongue in the process, and darted back to our room to grab Tom. He was reclining in bed, flipping through Reddit on his phone.
“Grab your camera,” I said excitedly. “It’s here.”
“Oh shit!” Tom exclaimed. He grabbed his camcorder from its perch on the nightstand, I grabbed my trusty notebook, and we hurried into the hall together. We had to slow our pace when a shirtless man ran past us, no doubt on his way to the beach for a night swim. But he was the only person out and about, so when he was gone, we booked it around the corner as fast as our feet could carry us.
There it was. Room 325. It looked no different from any of the other doors around it; in fact, it didn’t even give me bad vibes, like some of the places we visited. It was just a door. But eight people had gone missing behind it, and we had to find out why.
“Don’t go in there!” I can hear you shouting at your computer screen. “Haven’t you seen a single horror movie?” Relax, friend, relax. Tom and I aren’t idiots. We’d come prepared. I had my pocket knife (as usual) and a flashlight heavy enough to crack a skull, and Tom had reached out to a friend who lived nearby, instructing them to call the police if they didn’t hear from us by noon tomorrow. We may not have known what we were walking into, but we weren’t going to become another statistic.
“Do we knock?” Tom asked. “Someone booked the room. Maybe they’re still inside.”
It was worth a shot, since the alternative (breaking down the door) was much less ideal, and much more likely to get us arrested. So I walked up to the door and gave it a few quick raps. “Room service!” I called.
No footsteps approached the door. No rustling or voices came from inside. But the light above the scanner suddenly turned green, and the door creaked inward, even though I hadn’t pushed it. The room inside was unlit, but I could make out the shadowy shape of a bed and a nightstand. I looked back at Tom and shrugged. He already had the camera rolling.
“Hello?” I said, pushing the door open further. “Is anybody in there?”
No response. I ventured inside. My hand crept along the wall until I found the lightswitch, and the overhead light turned on. Along with the bed and nightstand, room 325 sported the “cheap hotel room” greatest hits: carpeted floor, a lamp, a landline telephone, a TV set, a wardrobe, and a series of generic framed paintings. There was an unopened suitcase lying on the bed, but its owner was absent. The room was empty aside from us.
“Looks pretty normal to me,” I said. I approached the abandoned suitcase, hoping to get a clue about the room’s current resident, but the case was combination locked. I used my pocket knife to flip over the luggage tag. Apparently the suitcase belonged to one “Janet McCarthy” (address withheld to protect the innocent).
Tom walked slowly around the room, taking footage of every last detail, no matter how mundane. He lingered for a bit near one of the paintings, which looked like an impressionistic blob to me. I wandered over to the window and drew back the curtains. Instead of the crisp, clear night I’d seen before, there was only a churning sea of gray mist, so thick I couldn’t see anything through it.
“Huh,” I said, thinking out loud. “Is there even supposed to be a window in this room?”
“Shaun,” Tom said suddenly. “Shaun, get over here.”
He sounded panicked, which was never a good sign. I let the curtains fall and hurried over. Tom had the camera fixed on the blob in the painting, and his hand was trembling. He pointed at the center of the shape.
“Do you see it?” he asked. “Tell me you see it.”
I didn’t, at first. But the more I stared at the painting, the more it all started to come together, like one of those pictures where you have to squint really hard to see the hidden image inside. The blob wasn’t a blob, it was a person’s head. A woman, I thought, judging from the long brown hair, but I couldn’t be certain. Her face was turned away from the viewer, so all we could see was the back of her head. I could understand why Tom was freaked out. Who paints a picture of the back of a woman’s head?
“I think it’s Sara,” he said, in a voice so low I could barely hear it.
I looked sharply at Tom. He didn’t sound like himself, and I hadn’t heard him mention Sara in almost a decade. Tom rarely talked about his sister. He’d been in middle school when she drowned, and he’d already been dealing with the death of his childhood dog at the time, so it was really terrible timing. Not that there’s ever a good time for your sister to die suddenly. I remember him telling me –
Why the fuck are you talking about Tom’s personal life, stick to the story, no one want to read about this tragic shit
[Note: cut/revise the above paragraphs before posting]
“Tom, that’s not your sister,” I said. But I was cut off by the sound of a door slamming. While our backs had been turned, the door to room 325 had shut by itself.
Shit shit shit, I thought. I ran to the door, twisting the handle, fully expecting us to be locked inside – but it opened. That was the first big surprise. The second came when I realized what I was seeing through the door. In the handful of seconds that the door had been closed, the hallway of the Penguin Hotel had been replaced by another hallway entirely. It was still a hotel, but I didn’t recognize it at all.
The hall, impossibly long, was lined with unmarked doors, and a row of identical chandeliers stretched along the entire distance. The pattern on the carpet looked like shadows, the kind cast by leafy trees. Everything was lit up a deep, dark red.
“Tom!” I shouted. He’d just brushed past me, muttering under his breath, camera rolling. I followed him without thinking. The second I left room 325, the door swung closed behind me, shutting with the smallest of clicks. I glanced back at it nervously. Something told me it wouldn’t open so easily next time.
Tom was still muttering when I caught up with him. “I don’t want to be in there with her I don’t want to be in there with her I don’t want to be in there with her –”
“Hey!” I said, getting in front of him, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Listen, man, you’ve got to snap out of this, whatever this is. We’re officially in weird territory here and I need my cameraman. I need my partner-in-crime. Are you in there?”
It took Tom a minute to calm down. He was breathing super hard, so hard I thought might hyperventilate. But he didn’t let go of the camera, and it was that, I think, more than my voice, that brought him back to reality. He took a deep, shuddering breath and looked around.
“Where the hell are we?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Why don’t we look around, get our bearings?”
Tom stared up at the chandeliers above our heads, the red light reflecting weirdly in his eyes. “This is where all those missing people went,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
I didn’t have to answer him. We’d both come to the same conclusion.
With nowhere to go but forward, we started walking. The hallway, while long, didn’t go on forever, and we reached the far end within a couple of minutes. From there, the corridor branched left and right. Both paths looked exactly the same, so I picked left on a whim. Before going on, I used my pocket knife to cut a mark in the wall (“W” for the Weird Bros), just in case we needed to retrace our footsteps.
We walked, and we walked, and we walked some more. This hallway was even longer than the last, but at least it didn’t force us to make a decision at the end. We could only turn right, so right we turned, until the hallway ran out and we found ourselves in an entirely new space.
It looked like a hotel lobby, full of couches and chairs and decorative plants, except this room genuinely seemed to go on forever. Everything was tinged that same unsettling red – especially the potted flowers, whose petals were so bright they looked like droplets of blood.
“I don’t think we should go in there,” Tom said. He’d spoken quietly, but his voice still echoed, fading into the depths of the lobby. “I think… I think if we go in there, we’re going to get lost, and we’re going to die.”
“You’re quite the pessimist today,” I said. I had been going for a joke, but nothing about this situation felt funny. “Back the way we came, then?”
We promptly noped out of the lobby from hell and headed back into a more familiar nightmare, one with doors and chandeliers and burgundy wallpaper. Neither of us spoke as we went. I know it sounds horribly cliche, but it really did feel like we were being watched, like somebody was peering out at us through the peephole of every room we passed. I reached into my backpack and took out my hefty flashlight. Just in case.
We reached the “W” on the wall before long, and then we continued on, taking the path we hadn’t before. I started noticing a strange hum in the air, like a cat purring, but it was so faint, and I couldn’t be sure if my brain was making it up to fill in the silence. I didn’t ask Tom if he could hear it. I didn’t want to know the answer.
This hall took a left turn at the end, and when we rounded the corner, both of us froze in place.
We were standing on a balcony in a room so huge it made me physically nauseous to look at it. Doorways leading to maroon hallways surrounded us on all sides. The balcony formed a ring around an enormous pillar made of black glass, and when I looked up, I could see an endless series of identical doorways and balconies, climbing higher and higher, so high I couldn’t see the ceiling. When I looked over the edge of the balcony, I saw the exact same thing, but reversed. If this room had a bottom, it was too far away to see.
The humming sound, which I definitely hadn’t imagined, was coming from the black pillar.
“This is insane,” Tom said faintly, but he didn’t stop filming. “This is fucking insane.”
If the lobby had made me uneasy, this new room – what to call it? The stomach of the hotel? – filled me with so much dread I felt paralyzed. We were so far removed from any world I could understand that I had no idea what to do. Wandering further into the tangle of rooms and hallways seemed like a surefire way to go missing forever. But would going back to room 325 be any better? What if it didn’t let us back in?
“Oh fuck,” Tom uttered. “Sara?”
He was looking behind us, pointing his camcorder into the hallway we’d just come from. There was a woman standing at the threshold. She was wearing a blue dress and had a head of dark, damp, flowing hair, and she was standing with her back to us. Tom and I took an involuntary step back. The woman took a step too, walking backwards in our direction.
“Run!” I shouted, grabbing Tom’s arm.
We took off along the balcony. In my haste, I tried to count the doorways we passed to make sure we could find our way back to our original hallway, but a part of me knew that was pointless; we were already lost. I chose a doorway at random and careened down the new hallway, Tom keeping pace behind me. When I glanced back, the backwards woman was following us, shuffling at a strangely brisk pace. Her slouched posture didn’t change as she moved.
This hallway looked a bit different from the one we’d started in, as if it were part of a different hotel. The carpet was still red, but patterned differently, and the doors were a pale white. We ran and ran and ran, but when I saw what was waiting for us around the next corner, I grabbed Tom and pulled us both to a hasty halt.
The corridor ended in a single door, which sported a bloody handprint on the front. Lying on the carpet in front of it was an object that, for one horrible second, I thought was a severed hand. Then I realized it was a plastic prosthetic. The fingers were caked over with dried flecks of blood.
“Ow,” Tom muttered, clutching at his own hand. I stared at him, then dared to look behind us. The backwards woman stood between us and the room with all the balconies. She wasn’t moving, she was just standing there. I got the impression she was toying with us. The tips of her fingers dripped slowly onto the carpet, and in the reddish light, I couldn’t tell if the drops were blood or water.
“Try a door,” I whispered to Tom. “Any door. There’s gotta be a way out of here.”
Tom grabbed the nearest doorknob and rattled it, but it didn’t open. He moved on to the next one, but I stood and faced the backwards woman, gripping the flashlight in my sweaty fingers. Neither of us moved. I braved a step in her direction, and to my surprise, she moved away from me, stepping forward this time. Was she scared of me? I took another step, then another. She continued to move away, keeping the distance between us equal.
“None of them are opening!” Tom shouted from behind me. It sounded like he was panicking.
I couldn’t stop staring at the backwards woman. Something about her looked so familiar, and it wasn’t because she looked like Tom’s sister. I couldn’t see the resemblance to Sara at all. If anything, she looked like Paula it was Paula how the fuck was it Paula
I took another step, driving the figure back, until she collided with a door at the end of the hallway – and melted right through it. The door was covered in a sticky blue residue, like thick globs of paint.
I approached the door hesitantly, wondering if this was a trap. Behind me, Tom was still rattling locked doorknobs and swearing when none of them opened. I reached out and grabbed my own doorknob, and this one turned for me, smooth like butter. I opened the door before I could stop myself.
Outside, I saw the ocean. Bright blue waves, sparkling in the sunlight, with a crowded beach far below. It looked so inviting. So safe. I almost stepped through the door, and who knows what would have happened then? But Tom let out a shout from behind me, and I turned to see that he’d gotten a door open too. Behind it was the familiar hallway of the Penguin Hotel.
I left the door with the beautiful shores and ran back to him, stepping over the prosthetic hand. “Come on!” he said, ushering me through. The two of us clambered back into a world that made sense, a world we could actually understand, only stopping when we reached our own room. I fumbled for the key card in my pocket.
“How did you get the door open?” I asked.
“It was so weird,” Tom said. “The door was locked when I tried the knob, but when I put my palm on the handprint, it just clicked open.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know if Tom had activated something dangerous by touching that bloody handprint. But there was no point in worrying about it now. We’d made it back in one piece, thank fucking God, and I wasn’t gonna look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
When I opened our door, there was a postcard with a quarter taped to it lying on the bed.
—
Fuck. I thought I was going to be okay writing this, but I guess not. This investigation fucked me up worse than I thought it was going to. Everything that happened in room 325, and everything that happened afterward, keeps coming back to me in my nightmares. I don’t think we fully escaped that other hotel. I don’t think we fully escaped her.
I tried so hard to put it all behind me. The opening paragraphs of this post, they’re so fucking cheesy and fake, and there’s so much they’re leaving out. I didn’t even mention Paula Pretzels. You know, the YouTube food blogger who stayed in room 325 and was the last person to disappear inside it? The girl who posted a seriously fucked up video on her channel, a video that prompted me and Tom to go investigating in the first place?
Back then I thought it was some dumb viral clip, like a creepypasta. I don’t think that anymore. Because the backwards woman is in that video.
I think it figured it out, actually. Why she looked so familiar. Why Tom saw her as his sister, and why I saw her as Paula, the missing girl we were chasing. Why she always stayed a certain distance from us, no matter where we went. I think she’s a bad dream. She’s always there, she’s the person who haunts you, and she never goes away.
I don’t think I’m going to post this. The fans would lose their shit at what we found, but this isn’t about internet clout. I can’t risk giving her an opening. I can’t let her worm her way into anyone else’s dreams. So… I guess this post is gonna sit in my draft folder forever.
We’ll keep looking into weird stuff. We’ll keep posting our cases for the fans, just like everything is normal. But this – no one’s going to read this. That’s what’s going to keep them safe.
It’s too late for us, I think.
– Shaun
/gallowshill14
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