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Popular Downtown Hotel
Hamilton, ON
by KLR

Not much frightens me, and since growing up with those experiences under my belt I thought I was pretty cool about ghosts and "paranormal" things. I'm over that now and I've learned to accept the weird things that happen on this planet.

However, when I gained fulltime employment with a well known
Hotel in the downtown area, I was in for some big suprises. I started off in the housekeeping department, for the first week, everything went pretty smooth. I cleaned rooms, on the various
floors and on many occasion you were with other girls in the dept. who had rooms to clean on that floor as well.

However, one day I was put on the first floor. Most of the girls hated the first floor and begged for higher floors, no-one ever told me why, but I soon found out! There was a convention in the city, and the hotel was on check out day, which means the convention was leaving, the rooms I had on the first floor were check outs, vacant and the floor itself was empty I had to clean those rooms that were vacant now. I was in room 101, at the end of the hall, across from one hundred which I had just cleaned and moved across, just starting room 101 I had stripped the bed of the linen and out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure standing at the cart in the hallway watching me so I turned looked directly at it to find it wasnt an actual person but the figure of a man, more like a shadow. I went white of course, a little freaked out. Ran to the door and it had dissappeared I pulled the cart in the room proceeded to lock the room and made my way down the hall to go down to housekeeping to catch my bearings back and maybe ask a question or two.

As I made my way down the hall, again the figure appeared this time making its way in teh same direction as me down the hall, at this point I turned and made for the stairwell to the lobby then from there down to housekeeping. I wasnt going to run into it again! When I got downstairs to see the housekeeper, she looked at me and said.."you've seen it, havent you?" At this point I broke out and started to tell her what I saw and she confirmed other sightings including that of a young boy dressed in green on the same floor, not only by employees but also guests including my nemesis the shadow I affectionately named Fred as he was always near me during my tenure at this hotel. I had found out that many of the banquet staff wouldn't do small meetings in the meeting rooms on the first floor for "Fred" was always around scaring them.

Eventually I made my way to the front desk to work there. I began working the night audit, from 11pm to 7 am in the morning. I worked with 3 security guards during that time
and two of them had experiences along side me with Fred. The first, was when I had finished my audit for the night, was sitting reading a book, when the printer started printing on its own,
all jargin. Then the door entering the desk someone was keying in the door code, proceeding to turn the door knob. I had called for security cause when I got to the door to look through the
peep hole, no one was there, but they kept tryin to enter the door. When security came down, he stood in horror looking at the door knob turning the keypad numbers gettin punched in. The second security guard had an experience of his own with the little green dressed boy. He didn't know about him, but one night he came to me at the desk and said, is there anyone on the first floor with a child? I said "no one is on the first floor" he then proceeded to tell me he came off the elevator to do a floor check, and the child was at the end of the hallway where room 101 is, and he called after the boy thinking it odd at that hour the child was out on his own, then he saw the child, or what looked like the child went down the stair well, he figured he could follow him quickly enough and catch him and bring him down to find his parents.

On his pursuit, he said the child had vanished. On another episode he had a very poignant experience with Fred.
On the elevator to do paper deliveries to rooms around 6am, he proceeded to put the elevator on service loaded up his papers, told me he was on his way and then within a minute came down,
walked through the lobby in front of me went outside and sat down on the curb.....he was very frightened. After about 10 minutes of me watching him, he came in and told me the elevator board lit up...3 times, the elevator got cold and then stopped between floor one and two....and then the board lit up again and just like that..."Fred made an appearance" in front of him, and in panic he tried desperately to get the elevator to move when it did, he came back down and outside at that point! This time I just told him, thats my friend "Fred" he's harmless.

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