Journals of a Hotel Manager

There is nothing scarier than living in an empty hotel. Just think of the hotel in the movie “The Shining”. At least Jack Nicholson had electricity. In the first couple of months after the flood, the live-in expats were housed in various hotels around the city. Soon we were running up a pretty huge bill with accommodation, food and laundry charges for the seven of us. When the electricity was back up by generators, the GM and I decided to move back to the hotel to show the staff that management had not abandoned them.

The generator was unreliable. It was also ridiculous to power up the entire hotel just for the GM and me. The GM lived on the second floor and I lived on the fifth. My suite was at the furthest corner from the fire escape. At times when the generator was down, the corridor looked eerily long and I had to start running half way down the hallway into the safety of my room. For this building had always been haunted.

The most famous resident ghost was known as Lady in Red. The hotel took nearly a decade to be completed, since the owners ran out of funds. Apparently during the seven or eight years when the building was nothing but an empty shell of concrete and metal beams, it became a favorite shelter for the homeless and the hopeless in the city. A young woman’s body was found one day in the building from her apparent suicide. She had been wearing a red dress when she hanged herself.

Lady in Red was first witnessed by a night cleaner soon after the opening. The cleaner was mopping the hallway in front of the fine dining restaurant one early morning, when he noticed that the restaurant had lights on. He paused and looked closely through the windows and saw a young woman in a red dress sitting on her own at a table, lit by a single spot light above her head, serenely eating. The night cleaner knew the restaurant had been closed for hours and this woman must have had gained unlawful entry. He angrily tapped on the window and the woman looked up at him. Then she vanished into the thin air.

The night cleaner went on permanent disability leave and eventually had to seek psychiatric treatment.

When I first arrived at the hotel, I had the task of renovating the fine dining restaurant. The kitchen installation team had to work overnight one day and they complained to the restaurant supervisor the next morning about one staff member who refused to leave the kitchen. They reported that the female staff member observed their work the entire night from a corner without saying a single word. She was wearing a red dress.

Once the newly renovated restaurant opened, the top complaint was about the toilet intrusion. Several male patrons complained about a female being seen in the gents’ restrooms. She, of course, was wearing a red dress.

All these reports from unsuspecting sources collaborated the presence of Lady in Red. All we knew was that she was not happy with the renovation of her restaurant. Now the hotel was flooded, would she seek revenge?