Of Swords and Parasols (original) (raw)

(Most of my Wiscon, including Frank the Toilet Ghost) can be found on my twitter.)

On Sunday night there was A Toilet Issue that resulted in our room getting a new toilet. This toilet flushed itself somewhere around every half hour. Like, not on a timer, but in our rough estimation.

Anyway, anyone who has stayed on at the Concourse Monday night after Wiscon officially ends knows that that place gets...well, a teensy bit creepy. Wiscon completely fills up the hotel except for a few others who are there and just kinda “What did I walk into? They sure seem nice though...”

Anyway, somewhere between 2 and 4 pm the place becomes a ghost town, but in hotel form. After almost a full day with a ghost who kept flushing our toilet, I went down to the microwave on the 3rd floor to reheat some leftover pizza. The microwave is right by the pool, and I could see that the pool and hottub were completely empty, except for all the inflatable floatation devices, which were just...floating around the pool. I feel I should mention that this was, like, all of them. Not just one or two that a family with a couple of kids might have left behind. Nope, half the pool was filled. In a non-haunted hotel, this would be fine. But in this hotel, it was probably the ghosts chilling in the pool now that everyone left.

( cut for length and picturesCollapse )

There has been much speculation about that door and what it might be a portal too. A few years ago a friend saw it and asked hotel staff about it and the person they asked didn’t know but opened it for her and apparently it’s a storage closet of some sort, most likely once meant for mothers to store baby carriages and such in. Innocuous enough, but worth noting that NO OTHER FLOOR has this door in the wall. There was discussion on twitter this weekend about exactly what world this is a portal too, and apparently the hotel itself now calls it The Room of Requirement.

It should be noted, though, that on monday night post-convention when the hotel is empty and no other living being appears to be on the floor, and there may or may not be ghosts in the pool, you turn from the microwave and see this:

Yup, that’s right. Endless empty corridor with lights highlighting and leading you to the door in the middle of the wall. Not remotely creepy at all, with or without ghosts playing in the pool.

ALSO WORTH NOTING is that when I went downstairs, all the lights were out onthe vending machine on our floor, but they were on when I came back up not 10 minutes later. Now, logic informs me that no doubt the machines power down as an energy-saving thing when no one is around and are motion activated, and there was enough foot traffic until Monday afternoon that they simply never powered down during the actual convention. When the hotel is empty, though, it’s more like that thing is possessed.

Back up in my room, I had spent the afternoon, and continued into the evening, introducing my remaining roommate, @c-l-ford​ to kdramas. We started with Different Dreams and moved on to The Secret Life of My Secretary, which had been recced to me, but I hadn’t had time to start before Wiscon. She seemed a bit weirded out by the OTT-ness but was very into it by the time we stopped after the 7th half hour episode. At some point during the day @c-l-ford​ named the ghost Frank.

Anyway, I went down the hall to have a visit with another friend while she went to sleep. I came back later, about ready to drop myself, to seethis in front of my laptop, which was written in case she was too asleep when I came back to tell me herself:

The gist of this is “YOU LEFT AND THEN SUDDENLY YOUR LAPTOP STARTED PLAYING THE DRAMA AGAIN AND I TURNED THE SOUND OFF BUT IT KEPT GOING THEN IT STOPPED AND THEN IT STARTED AGAIN LATER.”

It should be noted that, while I did leave the viki tab open after turning off the drama, I had changed tabs (I think to twitter?) before leaving. All we could think was that Frank the Toilet Ghost really liked The Secret Life of My Secretary too, and wanted to watch more. Maybe he even got his friends down in the pool to come up too.

The comment was made that we might consider getting a non-haunted room next year.

(It was suggested on twitter that perhaps it is me, and not the hotel, that is haunted, but it’s worth noting that I AM ONLY HAUNTED MONDAY NIGHT AFTER WISCON. So there.)