On our honeymoon, my wife and I stayed at the Palace Hotel in Port Townsend, WA. Built in 1889, the building has seen a lot of history. My wife was excited to stay there. The furniture and decorations in the rooms all evoke the Victorian era. The rates were reasonable and our room had a jacuzzi, a king bed and 12-foot ceilings.
My wife sent me downstairs for ice the evening we checked in and I spoke with the lady at the front desk while she dug around in the closet for a bucket. I asked her about a painting at the top of the 1st floor stairs, if it was a former tenant. She said she didn’t know, but one day a woman came to the front desk and told her it was great they had people in period costume roaming around the hotel.
She’d seen a lady in a blue dress, just like the lady in the picture at the top of the stairs. She told the woman that they don’t have people roaming around in period costume. The woman looked confused, then turned white and left. I laughed about the story and took the ice upstairs. My wife is terribly afraid of any hint of the supernatural so I kept my mouth shut about what I’d heard.
When we woke up in the morning, my wife told me our Pit Bull, Ana made a lot of fuss in the night. I asked her what she meant. She said the dog woke her up shaking the bed twice. I asked her how Ana could possibly have shaken the bed and she said she didn’t know. She woke me up when the bed started shaking, like there was an earthquake, and I told her it was just the dog, to go back to sleep. I looked down at Ana, still curled up in her bed in the corner of the room, nowhere near the bed. When we left, my wife liked the hotel so much that she suggested we stay there on our anniversary. Over coffee, after we had checked out and were ready to head home, I told her what the lady said about the woman in the painting. Needless to say, we’re never staying there again.