Finally a break.
After all the laptop drama, I managed to retype the rest of the story. I promise this is the last chapter, as I don’t want to disappoint my readers.
After all the excitement and amazement of the previous nights we were buzzing for some more action. As we settled in our room in the next hotel (number 3) my father immediately felt strange and got a headache, which made him more aware and focused, where I was still too excited to notice that we got lucky in our room choice, or the receptionist heard what we were doing in town.
We set up the camera in the room and went for a walk around the hotel. It was a lovely place which they had recently renovated and managed to keep the classic style intact. After the tour we sat with the manager to have a chat about the history in the place. Our room was really the only active area with concrete evidence of a paranormal presence. There were too many stories to tell to be able to find a possible cause or person to be trapped there. We were going to find something, it seemed, but we would not know who or what it was. As soon as we got back to the room we felt the difference in the air, there was something strange about that room. According to the tales told by the staff, there were 3 murders in that room over the course of about 150 years. Not exactly pleasant, but still intriguing. As we sat there with our equipment I reviewed the footage we just recorded and saw many unexplained shadows and sudden light changes happen in a short time period. Every once in a while we got a heavy head feel and our readings peaked. We attempted contact several times with several different approaches and got nothing. It seems they were not the most sociable entities in town. Following the info we got from the staff we got ready to sleep. My father didn’t like this strategy too much, as he’s too well trained in switching off to sleep in haunted places and he didn’t expect to wake up whenever something presented itself. I fell asleep quicker than I expected and I was half awaken by someone crying in the room, I opened my eyes and could see the shadow of a person standing against the wall of the room. As soon as I moved it went away, I first thought that was just a shadow, but the crying came back. I closed my eyes again and listened to it. I whispered to it, asked if I could help and it all went silent. I fell asleep after a short while only to wake up feeling restless. As I opened my eyes and turned around, there was the face of a man bowing down towards me. Again it went away as I moved. I sat up and waited but nothing else happened. I went back to sleep hoping for something else to wake me up, which never happened. I got up in the morning and my father was by the table writing on his diary. I told him of all that happened at night and he was silent throughout. Only later he told me he had many dreams that night, and that was all he ever told me about it. I’ve been looking through his diaries and still haven’t found anything about the dreams or the trip. I guess I’ll never find out.
Our fourth hotel was the biggest disappointment of them all. The staff was relatively young and the stories were too fantastical (I know what you’re thinking, we’ve seen our share of fantastical and they were real) but we gave them the benefit of the doubt and stayed for the night, as planned.
The manager gave us the most active room to keep our things in. We decided to stay there for the first night and then set up recording equipment on another supposedly haunted part of the building. During the night we got noises, things falling, faint voices coming from outside the window, even though it was the third floor and other phenomena. We tried contacting and got nothing back. We made notes on all the times and types of occurrences to see how it differs the next night. My father told me he had a feeling about this place, which initially I was surprised to hear, as I didn’t get excited about any of it.
The next night, he changed our post at the last minute, without telling anyone. We were at a kitchen, were the equipment was the previous night and all we could see in the image were shadows coming from the corridor, which could have been anything, as there were other guests in the building other than us. We stayed there and all we saw the whole night were people walking quietly out in the corridors. I started to understand my father’s strategy. I asked him one question and his answer confirmed it all. They were conning us. Or trying to.
Halfway through the night we moved to an empty room and fell asleep. We went back to our room once we were up and started to look at the footage. It appeared the staff did not realise we were not there or that we set up our recording equipment in a way we could see over the room door, one of those with a glass above the door. My father set it up so the corridor would be visible via a mirror on the wall inside the room. A slight variation of the previous night’s act, we got the whole deal, voices, things falling, footsteps, which we now could see it was the staff walking about trying to scare us.
We packed our stuff and before we left my dad out his head out of the room window, looking up and telling me to have a look a this one brick. The wall was old and dirty, except for one brick. As I touched it, it was a speaker. Ghost voices indeed. We’ve seen such tricks before in places where their business depends on the haunting that occurs in the premises, so if nothing actually happens the staff make something so the guests won’t be disappointed.
We were very disappointed and left without a word to the staff.
As we arrived at the next hotel I was baffled. It was a modern looking building, as modern as you can get in Bruges. Before I asked my father told me why we were there. “This is our well deserved rest for the last night before we go back home. I’m back to work, you know”
We spent the next two days sightseeing, eating out and enjoying the town while sleeping through the night. It was a week well spent, that’s for sure.
I do recommend a trip to Bruges any time of the year. There’s a lot of history and beauty to please everyone. As I keep to my word I will not reveal the names of the hotels we stayed, but the chances are you will stay somewhere with some paranormal history to it.
Thanks for reading.
Love,
Miles.
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