This incident happened not too long ago in April 2019, when my hubby and I booked a hotel staycation around Orchard area. Since it was an award winning hotel, we paid a bit of a premium as we wanted to give ourselves a treat from a tiring week of endless work.
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I remembered when we first drove into the hotel basement carpark, it was dimly lit and a little rundown. The paint on the walls were peeling and there were some boxes of junk in the surrounding area.

“Is this the correct hotel?” I asked my hubby as I turned the car into a parking lot next to the lift lobby. We paid a bit of a premium for the room and we were having an expectation vs reality moment.

The hotel building exterior looks modern but perhaps, they did not refurbish the basement carpark I guess? I thought to myself.

After I alighted from the car, something in me didn’t feel quite right but I brushed it off quickly as I thought it could be just my imagination.

We entered the hotel lobby and were greeted by the hotel staff who handed us some welcome juice and biscuits. The hospitality of the hotel staff made me feel so much at ease that I quickly forgot about the gut feeling I had at the basement carpark.

Minutes later, our room keys were handed to us and we took the elevator up to our room.

We did what every Asian parent teach their kids to do, which was to knock on the door before entering the hotel room. Upon entering, my hubby slotted in the room card and I excitedly went in to take a photo of the bedroom (refer to photo below) before checking out the rest of the room. ​

The room looks relatively new and clean with a day bed bedside the large glass window. We hung around in the room for a bit and left shortly after to explore the rest of the hotel surroundings. We didn’t return to the room until much later, after dinner at around 10pm. As usual, my hubby slotted in the room card to activate the room lights but it didn’t work. We tried a few times and even tried another card, but it just didn’t work. A few moments later, the lights finally came on. We left the card in the slot and shrug it off thinking it could be an electrical fault without giving much thoughts about it. Funnily, this didn’t trigger any form of uneasiness like what I experienced in the carpark earlier in the day. I guess I was too absorbed by other matters occupying my mind. Hence, I didn’t think much about it.

It was just a normal night, I wasn’t on medication or had any alcohol. Hubby and I were spending some quality time chatting about random things till quite late and we went to bed at around 3am. As my hubby can be quite a heavy sleeper, he was already fast asleep within a couple of minutes. I too, can be a heavy sleeper but for some reason, I felt really drowsy but couldn’t fall sleep that night.

I kept having constant chills running down the back of my spine. At that point in time, the thoughts of encountering something supernatural didn’t hit me yet as I tend to rationalise my thoughts a lot before passing it off as anything supernatural. The hotel bed must be really good at absorbing body heat, I thought to myself and I turned to sleep on my side as I snuggled a little further under the sheets to keep myself warm.

​Now, the chills were getting more and more intense as I tossed around to lie back flat onto the bed. Suddenly, my body froze and I couldn’t move! Not only I couldn’t move, I started feeling a grip tightening around my neck and then, I couldn’t breathe!

Everything happened so quickly that this time round, I was fully aware and convinced that other than my hubby and I, there is/ are something supernatural in this room.

Sheryl had earlier placed her protective Buddhist pendant on the side table beside her as she had always done when she goes to bed but when she tried to reach for it she realised that it was no longer there. She quickly woke her husband up, and asked for his protective pendant, and he told her that he had placed it on his side of table just as she did, but when Sheryl searched for it, it too wasn't there. Her husband mumbled that maybe it might be in their luggage and turned back to sleep.

Sheryl foraged through their luggage for her husband's pendant and found it, she wore it around her neck and clutched it to sleep.

On a trip to Hong Kong in 2004 with a girlfriend of mine, we stayed in a pretty international hotel in the Tsim Tsa Tsui district.(starts with the letter "M").  It was our first time in HK so we did a 5D4N trip to explore the country.

Everything seemed fairly normal when we arrived and checked in, with the exception that the room was cold. Like REALLY cold. We figured it was because the weather in Hong Kong was 18 deg and dropping, so we probably weren't used to the climate and the room felt colder than usual. (AC was at 21 deg).

The layout of the room was such that when you entered, the bathroom is on your right and just a few steps ahead was the "pantry" area (with all the coffee, tea, fridge etc) and it was completely mirrored. It also reflected the bathroom that was opposite it.

We had 2 separate twin beds but because one of it was facing the mirrored pantry area (superstitious beliefs lead us to think that sleeping opposite a mirror is not a good idea) we decided to shift the beds a little closer to each other since the room was very big anyway.

The problem was the bathroom. During the first few nights of showering, I always felt uneasy. As though there was a pair of eyes just boring into me but i put it down to being in a foreign country so I brushed it off but my showers did become super quick.

At nights, the room became cold, unbearably so.

It got to the point that after the 1st night, my friend and I decided to join the beds together to keep warm.

We tried to request for a room change but the receptionist informed us that they were full. To their credit, they did try to send up people to help with the thermostat but after 2-3 futile attempts, we gave up complaining. My friend also request that we keep the lights on at all times.

On our last night in the hotel, my friend said that she could not take the cold anymore and asked if we could have some tea. Since my bed was closest to the pantry area, i got up to fill the flask to boil the water. I was right about to take the teabags when a movement from the mirror distracted me and I looked up.

As I mentioned, the pantry is completely mirrored and reflected the bathroom and when i looked up to see what was moving, I was horrified to see a grotesque female head with long hair and what looked like intestines, hovering near the ceiling light of the bathroom and the damn thing was looking straight at me.

Confession by Kai-Tak

The following incidents took place in the North of Thailand. Bird is an art teacher who shared these stories, knows the guide from his trips. He illustrated the scenes from the two stories above.

GERMAN TOURISTS
A group of German tourists reached one hotel after a long flight from Germany. The guide told bus driver to drop her at the lobby and then park the bus in the parking lot behind the hotel. She ran to reception, checked in and ran to the bus. It took a long time at the reception for checking 50 tourists in, she was worried that her clients would be mad because they just had a long flight from home. She found no one when she reached the bus, all 50 tourists disappeared.

She looked around and had no clue where those tourists went, she found a staff near the parking lot so she asked if he saw a group of tourists around the area. He said they walked towards the back of the hotel. She wondered to herself why the tourists would go there. It seems like an odd place to be walking to.

While she was walking to the back of the hotel, the tourists walked back with a smile on their faces. They patted her shoulders and said thank you, some of them even gave her tips. She was confused but she didn't ask. She gave out the room key cards to those tourists and left it as that. 

In the morning during breakfast, she checked on the tourists if their rooms were ok. One of the tourists greeted her happily and said, "thank you so much about yesterday, we didn't expect such a good welcoming show."

"What show?" she asked.