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The spooky thrill of a haunted hotel


In the novel by Eimear McBride strange hotelthe unnamed protagonist arrives at a hotel and finds the meaning, rather than the sight, of other people. You can hear cigarette butts in the yard and the sound of someone next door zipping a suitcase and boiling the kettle. When she meets men in her room, fleeting, nameless exchanges occur: tonight he is hers, tomorrow he will be someone else’s. The hotel seems to belong only to the protagonist, but we are aware that it hosts many other people and events. You can feel your shadows.

It’s this ghostly space of busy isolation that we enter when we stay in a hotel. They have this sensation of insect activity; as if too many people’s memories were appearing on top of each other.

When I started writing my new short story collection, I knew almost immediately that I wanted to set it in a hotel. I was interested in exploring what it means to be a woman moving through the world, trying to find some kind of security in unsafe spaces. Taking the reader to a hotel was like asking them to enter a place they would instinctively feel wary or uncomfortable about. I wanted them to expect, unconsciously, some darkness. in the stories The Hotelwho are united by their shared location, the land itself is haunted, and the hotel construction process is cursed from the start. People are drawn there; some leave without it happening, but many find themselves, for a long time afterwards, unable to forget it entirely. In one story, a lonely girl staying with her parents discovers a new friend whom she then locks inside a wall; in another, a resident monster falls in love.

A scene from The Shining
A scene from The Shining © Alamy

While I was researching and writing, I read a lot of books, rewatched movies, and thought about space. Why is it often portrayed as a haunted space, full of ghosts and dangers?

I haven’t always seen hotels as places of concern. I don’t remember ever being in one as a kid, so they took on a sort of mythical status in my mind. Compared with the familiar stone cottages of the Isle of Wight, with their gardens full of long orange slugs, the ruined houses in France or the dormitories of school trips, with their stench of teenage shoes, the hotels seemed enormously luxurious, the height of sophistication. To me, they were Lucy Honeychurch’s long hair lit with Florence’s soft light in A room with a view; mysterious and very adult.

The author's last book.
The author’s last book.

But the first time I was in one I began to see its potential for discomfort. He was about 23 years old and had won a writing competition whose prize was to spend a few nights in a hotel in the Lake District. It had a long, winding path and smooth, shiny stone. The room was huge and my partner and I frolicked around, jumping on the bed and filling the huge bathtub to the top. The next morning, when we returned after breakfast, everything had changed. Someone (we never saw who) had entered and filled it with their presence. The heavy curtains were tied, the bed was made, even our clothes were organized. We felt ashamed of our messy suitcase, our unmade bed, and also nervous. It occurred to me that the door could open at any moment and someone could come in and move us the same way they had moved our things. They could come in when we were sleeping and fill the bathtub with milky water, open all the windows, wrap us in the bedding so tightly that we couldn’t move. Some illusion and pretense of solitude and privacy was shattered. Maybe we thought we had the only key.


This feeling that a hotel being empty and full at the same time is no clearer than in the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s film. the glow. Danny and his parents travel to the Overlook during the winter off-season. The huge hotel, located high in the mountains, will be empty of guests and other staff and the family will be covered in snow.

There is already a feeling that something is wrong: a cavernous, empty hotel is not a suitable home for a small family. Except, since this is a horror novel, the void is an illusion. The Overlook is filled with the dead, with fragments and flashes of trapped memories filling not only the hallways, bathrooms, and gardens but also the fragile, violent mind of Danny’s father.

Norman Bates' house in Psycho
Norman Bates’ house in Psycho © GettyImages

These themes resonate in Joanna Hogg’s film. The eternal daughter. Tilda Swinton plays middle-aged filmmaker Julie and her elderly mother Rosalind. It’s Rosalind’s birthday and they have traveled together to a rural hotel to celebrate. The hotel has all the hallmarks of a classic horror location: an overly long driveway, grounds filled with floating fog, and an unfriendly receptionist. There appear to be no other guests, but Julie is kept awake by noises from upstairs.

As the days pass, it becomes clear that Rosalind has disturbing memories of the hotel; It used to be a farmhouse owned by his family. Memories are layered on top of each other. Rosalind herself says it: “They contain these stories. And we are here now. And that was then. And there is a confusion in me about when exactly it will be.”

If rooms contain stories, then the hotel, with its ever-changing cast of room owners, is the ultimate archive of memories. Almost all of us have experienced the moment of entering a hotel room and finding something that a previous occupant had left there; Some of us have had the unpleasant moment of walking into the room and finding someone else sleeping in the bed. My father sometimes tells the story of the ghost on his honeymoon. At a cottage in the Lake District he saw something on the stairs: a blur of movement. There was no feeling of malevolence but only of repetition, like that of someone who had been there before.


The German word for I miss him, unheimlichwhich directly translates as unhomely, tells us something more important. He unheimlich It is the place between the familiar and the unknown. It goes some way to explaining why horror is so often located in the domestic.

Miranda July takes us to this interior in her new novel the four when the protagonist moves to a motel and hires a designer to decorate the room. Although the room is beautiful, the protagonist feels undone. “I was trapped in a terrible purgatory, neither here nor there, nor at home, but really nowhere else.” This in-between feeling reflects the days you sit in the hospital after your child is born, waiting to see if he or she will live or die. Sometimes we can’t go home. In the end, the motel has a creepy appeal. “It was hard to leave the finished room, and not because it was so beautiful.”

I wanted, in The Hotelto show a building as if it were a person, from conception to death. Whenever I write I am aware of places, houses, forests or rivers, as corporal: as characters in a story. Sitting at my desk, writing these stories, I felt tormented, as if when I turned around there would be someone there, waiting. Throughout the collection, a refrain scribbled on walls or in journals is repeated: “be there soon.” The Hotel attracts us and, sometimes, does not let us return.

Daisy Johnson’s Hotel is published by Jonathan Cape at £14.99