The Ghost in the Hotel

Last Wednesday I almost heard a real ghost story. It was at a dinner at Lingon, one of the nicer restaurants in Uppsala, that the conversation turned to hotel stories.

One in our company started to tell us a story of how he woke up in his hotel room in Gothenburg by someone inserting a key in the door and opening it. He was surprisingly not so alarmed that he became clear awake but was still drowsy as he heard the woman enter his room. He could hear that it was a woman by the distinct sound of high healed shoes.
The woman entered the bathroom, closed the door and locked it.

Still not completely awake he started to consider his options, scream? Call the reception and complain that some strange woman forced herself into his room? Or maybe just wait and see and hope that the problem would literally go away?

The room was still dark, he heard the bathroom door open and the woman walk toward the desk in the room. For some reason he remembered that there was a yellow pencil on the desk. At this point having things gone too far he turned on the light and the woman by the desk disappeared.

Now this would have been the end of a conventional ghost story, or perhaps he would have found out in the morning that a young woman been murdered in that hotel x years ago. That would have worked for both a literary story or a personal story told at dinner at a nice restaurant.

But this is one of the stories that didn't become a ghost story. It turned out that the walls in the hotel were so thin that he had just heard the guest in the next room.