“Do you believe in ghosts?”
My sister asked me that question while we were staying in a cottage last week, either while we were carving a pumpkin with Hello Kitty’s face or eating vegan fajitas, I can’t remember which. I gave her my usual response (“ehh…”) and told her some small stories that had put some faith in the unknown in my sceptical heart in recent years. I refused, however, to tell her the story of The Night Porter, because we were about to watch Gremlins and she’d already had her light on every night. I didn’t have any space in my bed for frightened teenagers, so I said I’d tell her in the morning.
I forgot, so now you get to hear it instead, complete with links to “proof”. Happy Halloween!
It was a stormy Valentine’s Day in Brighton. Karl and I had booked a hotel room at the Hilton, because back then we could still do that kind of thing but couldn’t quite afford The Grand. When we arrived, we found we’d been given a very different room to the one we’d booked - the decor was a violent red rather than a gentle blue, and as I am sensitive to these things, we requested a switch.
It took the receptionist a long - long - time to find a replacement, but eventually they turned up a renovated room, barely stayed in, at the end of a corridor. The door handle was smeared with a mysterious red substance, which I didn’t love, but we laughed about it. Another corridor within the room, occupied by a mirror, wardrobe and ceiling hatch, led to a bedroom on the left and the bathroom on the right. It was ice cold, but the thermostat read 21 degrees. I unpacked, opened some presents and turned the heating up as high as it’d go. I didn’t think much of it.
Then it got a teeny bit weird. Despite there being zero windows open or any way for air to get in, a huge wind prevented me from closing the door to the bathroom. It was loud, like a wind tunnel, but there was no source, not even that spooky hatch. Here’s some evidence.
There were a few things that made us joke the room was haunted: the red smear, the spooky attic in the corridor, the way the temperature didn’t shift at all. But it was the holiday for romancing, not Ghostbusters, time, so we popped a bottle of prosecco, drank a glass and went out into the night. After a nice dinner, some shopping and some normal things, we came home to find a few things had been moved. Nothing major, but the cork was now out in the hall along with some wrapping paper from our gifts. Still, no sign of actual wind.
At this point, it was getting late, so I googled whether or not we had a little casper on our hands. A reputable website called “ghost walk Brighton” informed me that, among other ghoulies, the Hilton is haunted by the spectre of the Night Porter, who died in the sixth floor vestibule area. After googling what a “vestibule” was, we went upstairs, a little drunk and stupid. The sixth floor was a lot more dilapidated than ours – old, locked apartments with their own little letterboxes, dark corridors, raggedy furniture. It was fucking freezing.
We found a room blocked off by a gate, but the padlock was half off so we snuck up, finding a dining or ballroom. It was pitch black and immediately freezing on the stairs, and I was spooked, so I lagged behind, filming Karl and giggling. Here’s the Quite Horrible part: when I rewatched the footage, I heard a very loud, very audible man’s cough. It’s clearly in the same room, probably next to one of us, but neither of us heard it or reacted at the time. We were, however, spooked enough to run away. Here’s the cough.
When we returned to our room, the “wind” in the bathroom was worse than ever, and it was nearly impossible to shut the door. I filmed it for posterity, but when I rewatched I heard another weird little noise: the jangling of keys. Our room key was a card. I do not wear clanky jewellery. Yet the sound was completely unmistakable. Who would have a bunch of keys, wandering around a hotel at 1am? Not me, but a night porter from the past? Every chance.
We went out after that to the Twisted Lemon for a nightcap and a stroll, but it was even stormier outside than in. When we got back to the hotel we had a little peek around some more, but just found silence and cold. I asked the front desk for some blankets and a heater and they delivered, but I woke up at 3am freezing to find that the heater had been turned off at the wall, along with my phone charger. I did not, ultimately, get a lot of sleep.
Did we spend our Valentine’s night haunted by the spectre of a Night Porter who just loved his hotel so much that he couldn’t bear to part with it? Is the iconic local organisation Ghost Walk Brighton a reputable source of information? Are weird recorded sounds that we didn’t hear at the time, drops in temperature, moved objects and turned off plugs enough to confirm the existence of ghosts? I don’t know.
But, as Mulder so often said, “when convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?” I agree. I took so many photos and videos to convince myself as much as anyone else – it’s easy to get yourself wound up at night, less so to convince yourself in the morning. I remain semi-convinced.
Plus, when we went to the most haunted hotel in Rye a few days later (The Mermaid) there was a little bell by the door for the night porter. That’s a cute little callback from our see-through friend, isn’t it?
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