Checking in to a haunted hotel

The haunted hotel. It’s a definite thing, isn’t it? From Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining to the slightly less classic I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the hotel with an unwanted and probably long-dead guest is a leitmotif in scary cinema. It can also be found in poems, plays, novels; possibly the first novel on the theme is literally called The Haunted Hotel, it’s by Wilkie Collins and it is set in, yes, Venice.

But here’s the thing about haunted hotels. They are actually a thing. That is to say, there are places to stay which invoke a definite frisson of doom, dread or deep unease. And I know this because 1) I am a travel writer and I’ve therefore been to a few of these places, and 2) as I write this, I am sitting in a haunted hotel.

It’s a big fancy hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. An hour ago I was loafing by its magnificent swimming pool, sipping my delicious pineapple-syrup and Samai Rum cocktail. I was lying back in the tropical sun, laughing about the weather back home. And then — perhaps deservedly — I abruptly toppled into a dark and foreboding mood. A serious reverie of disquiet.

As soon as I pushed the first heavy door into the hushed lobby, I felt the hairs on my neck bristle

For a moment I wondered if it was the overly spicy Vietnamese pho I ate the night before, but no, I eat too much chilli all the time. An online friend suggested it might be the location, Cambodia, with its troubled modern history, pitching me into gloom. This put me on the scent, and I thought: wait, I bet this hotel — grand, old, impressive — has a dark back story. Because that can linger. I speak with authority because I’ve experienced the lingering mood in other places.

In a lovely eastern European city a few years ago, I unwittingly stayed in a hotel that was once a Nazi Stalag. A sequence of fortresses where thousands of prisoners were poisoned, tormented and so starved that they resorted to eating each other. It didn’t take me long, as I paced the eerie and silent corridors, to sense that this sad horror still permeated the Austro-Hungarian machicolations. When I found all this out, I gave thanks I was paying, and didn’t have to review the hotel.

Because what could I say? “The breakfast buffet is lavish, the lunches are good value, but you will be overcome with existential despair when you realize the hotel was the scene of suffering, torture and random killing. Room service is excellent.” Just last year, I had another, even stranger encounter. I was doing a personal US road trip around the Mason-Dixon line and was seeking a good-value but attractive hotel. Finally I found online a regal antebellum mansion, recently converted into a hotel, in a historic Virginia town. The place looked splendid: lofty white columns, exquisite green lawns and big proper porches for sipping mint juleps. And ridiculously cheap.

As soon as I pulled up the sweeping drive, and pushed the first heavy door into the hushed, whitewashed lobby, I felt the hairs on my neck bristle, in a bad way. The vibe was as grim as anything I have experienced. I realized immediately that the hotel was a converted prison. I’ve done time in prison, I know the atmosphere of cells; the mood is unmistakable, whatever the architectural era. But there was also something else here, worse than a prison.

My intimations were right. Taking my iPad on to that lovely porch, I did some googling. It turned out this place was, in the 1930s, a hospital/asylum for eugenic experiments, when supposedly retarded or promiscuous “hillbilly girls,” displaced by the creation of nearby Shenandoah National Park, were brutally sterilized. I had basically checked into an American Belsen. Hence the cheapness.

I have never felt sadder in a hotel. Next morning I quit and made sure my next bed was in the world’s most generic Holiday Inn.

Why do hotels with back stories invoke these moods? One possibility is obvious: ghosts — perhaps of the “stone tape” variety. This is the theory that tragic events leave a psychic imprint on structures, which can echo or replay itself. A less paranormal explanation is psychogeography: some places can gain a reputation and then people react to them, think about them, utilize them over time in a certain way, creating a jarring and prevailing mood.

A third explanation for all this is that I drank too much “Mekong Tonic” by the pool. But I asked my travel-writing friends if they’d had similar experiences, and several said “Yes definitely,” and one said: “Oh my God yes and I wrote about it.”

That friend is the award-winning Ian Belcher. Many years ago he was sent by a newspaper to stay in a notoriously haunted “hotel” (a converted farmhouse) in Cornwall so he could write about it in a jocular way, because, ghosts, lol.

Ian certainly arrived in a chortling and skeptical mood, but by the end he was eager to leave. He barely slept a wink. He was truly frightened — by what, he cannot really say — but it was enough to leave him quivering and frozen in bed at 4 am, with “tightened testicles.” As he tells me today: “There was something very wrong about that place.”

So what about my Phnom Penh hotel? Sure enough, half an hour’s research tells me it has quite the back story. It was once a famous French colonial resort, all glamour and celebrity guests: Jackie Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Somerset Maugham.

In the troubled 1970s, however, it became the go-to hotel for journalists covering the Vietnam War, then the Khmer Rouge. Dith Pran, Sydney Schanberg, Roland Neveu, everyone in the movie The Killing Fields, all stayed here, and all saw terrible things. There is an Al Jazeera documentary about the hotel, in which the writer Jon Swain weeps about the scenes he witnessed in this same hotel. When a hardened war journalist cries, you know he has seen bad things. Things which still hang in the air today.

It’s up to you how you choose to explain this. Whatever your answer, it occurs to me that hotels can be spooky because they embody a deeper, darker human truth. In the end everyone is a transient visitor, like a hotel guest. We are all ghosts that mysteriously check in and check out.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.