Tucson is a Ghost Town

Tucson has plenty of residents, but it turned out to be a ghost town nonetheless.

As you may recall, I left off last Tuesday night complaining about the lack of entertainment options in Tucson.  As you may recall, I wrote about how the dreary downtown, a very loud, historic hotel room (that preserved its 1920s feel by not having tvs), combined with a rock concert being held in the hotel bar, led to a miserable time for me last Tuesday night.  Unable to deal with the noise, I finally asked to be switched to a quieter room, wrote a quick blog post, and shut my eyes to go to bed.

And then things got much more interesting. 

I kept hearing noises in my new room (and not just the ones from the rock concert).  I knew it was probably nothing, but as I lay there, I remembered that as I was walking toward my newly assigned room, the shape of the walls seemed to shift as I looked down the hallway.  As I kept hearing little banging noises in my historic hotel room, I finally got up and turned on the lights.

I notice The new room had a very creepy feeling I couldn't fully explain.  The Victorian armchair directly beside the bed looked like something out of the Amityville movie.  The sink was on the opposite side of the room from the bathroom and seemed likely to turn itself on at any moment.  And the noises, both inside the room and from the street directly outside, wouldn't stop, and I was losing the ability to distinguish between them.  After about half an hour of trying to talk myself out of it, once the rock concert stopped, I finally broke down and asked if I could go back to my original, non-creepy room. 

I blamed it on the street noise. 

I crawled into bed and almost immediately went to sleep.  I heard a lot of yelling that night (someone repeatedly yelling "F- you, Hotel Congress"), but I mostly slept through it, assuming it was rowdy concert-goers not wanting to go home.  I wondered why no one was calling security or the police about it considering how long it went on, but I was too tired to let it bother me too much. 

The next morning, I had a few extra minutes after I woke up, so I googled "Hotel Congress" and "haunted" just to see if anyone else had ever had a weird experience on the second floor there, were both of my rooms were located. 

Sure enough, the second floor is widely reputed to be haunted, owing to a shooting that took place many years ago in Room 242, just down the hall from where I stayed.  And as I type this, it just occurred to me that all that yelling I heard through the night might not have been about the concert.  In fact, I wonder if anyone else heard it at all.  

I had no idea of any of of these legends until the morning after I experienced whatever it was I did.  I still don't know, or want to know, what phenomenon is going on that floor. 

But it's safe to say I won't be rushing back.