Room 4410

By Probert

     Is there a such thing as ghosts? Spirits? Who really knows, that's a question for people to answer themselves. I know that there is, and after reading this, if you're not a believer, you may think different.

     I can't recall the exact date, but I know it was last summer, the summer of 1997. My girlfriend and I were going to the Jersey shore, and the night before we left we thought it would be nice to spend the night in a hotel, the Camelback Hotel in Tannersville Pa. Everyone needs a little time to themselves, and this just seemed like the perfect time for us.

     We were staying in room 4410. When we first went into our room, we didn't notice anything strange. It was a nice little room with carpeted walls and a spiral staircase leading up to a loft where the bed was. The only strange thing was, there were a bunch of cabinets by the sink, and all of them required a key to open; but we were the only people on the whole floor that didn't have a key. Our door had a number lock where we had to punch in the combination to get in.

     Everything seemed fine, but as the night went on, weird things began to happen in our room. The first event of the evening took place in the shower. My girlfriend was taking a shower and suddenly she couldn't breath. She called me into the bathroom, and when I got there, she was sitting in the shower holding her chest. Once she got her breath back she explained what took place and I just told her not to worry about it, it was probably nothing; but as I turned around to leave the bathroom I noticed a pair of little girls underpants stuffed behind the toilet.

     That night we opened a bottle of wine, shut off the lights, lit a few candles, and sat at a table in front of the window overlooking the area. Everything was lit up outside, it looked really pretty. After talking for a while, we turned on the lights, blew out the candles, and watched TV. Suddenly, my girlfriend noticed something very disturbing, written on the wall was the word, "kill". I was a bit startled by this but I figured that someone got into our room at some point while we were out eating dinner, and decided to play a little joke. Then as we glanced at the wall again, there were very defined pictures of angels and what looked like devils. There were also handprints, very large handprints. I myself have big hands, but when I put my own hands against the ones on the wall, I couldn't believe the size of them. They were unusually big hands. We tried as hard as we could to ignore this, but as we sat there on the couch watching TV, the couch violently jerked as if someone had kicked it.

     I had to go to the bathroom, but as I got off the couch and began to walk down the small narrow hallway toward the bathroom, I had a very bad feeling that something wasn't right. In fact, it was so bad that I froze, and from what my girlfriend said, I turned white. It felt as if something were holding me back. I've never felt the presence of evil before, but somehow, I knew that this was it.

     About an hour later we decided to try and go to sleep, but as we lay in the bed, the words, "have fun," were written on the wall over the bed. Trying to ignore that, I shut off the light. Everyone to this day tells me we were crazy for staying that long, I don't know why we did. What finally made us leave was what happened after the lights were out. I could have sworn I felt something grab my leg, and as I sat straight up and flipped the light switch, nothing happened. I had to hop out of the bed and turn on the other light. I ran to the top of the staircase and felt a cold draft at my feet, but the windows were all closed. At that moment, we grabbed our things and left.

     When we got to the lobby we told them we had to leave. Now, it was 3:00am and they don't give you any of your money back after midnight, no matter what; but when we told them what room we were in, they fully refunded us with no questions asked. It felt like we were in an episode of "The twilight zone," everyone in the hotel seemed to know something that we didn't.

     As we stood at the counter waiting for the woman to hand us our refund, I saw something black walk across the lobby floor out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, there was nothing there.

     We left the hotel and never went back since, but the strange thing is; when I was at work one night a man came in and was telling everyone horror stories. He was talking about local ghosts and haunted houses. I didn't hear many of the stories because I was cleaning up, but what caught my ear was when he asked, "Did you guys ever hear about Camelback? Room 4410?"