The World’s Scariest Travel Stories: A Real Scream, #6 in a Series

New contributor Elaine Sipos chimes in with a host of ghostly travel stories:

1) While staying at a prestigious hotel in New Orleans, I was quite annoyed to find that someone was repeatedly knocking on my door and upon answering no one would be there. I mentioned this to the hotel staff and they replied, “Oh that’s normal – the Bourbon Orleans Hotel is haunted!�?

2) Staying at a very old B&B in the UK –– the Rectory Farm in Oxfordshire –– I was awoken by my partner rustling in bed. A few moments later I heard a quick flipping of pages and the sound of writing (as if someone were pretending to write with their hand – but on paper). I thought that maybe my partner had fallen asleep with a book in his hand and was dreaming. I woke him up asking him to put the book down. He said he didn’t have a book. I turned on the light and found that the book he had been reading before bed was on the floor well away from arm’s reach.

At this point we were both awake trying to figure out what I had just heard. All of a sudden we heard a very loud groaning sound from the hallway. We both heard it and are unable to explain what it was. Upon questioning the family who lived in the house, (though their rooms weren’t near us anyways), they revealed that none of them talk in their sleep or had had bad dreams that night.

3)) I was living on a Kibbutz in Israel, when we heard scud missiles overhead – it turns out we were being bombed by Lebanon.

4) Traveling through Turkey, I had been walking down a road to the main village in Pamukkale when two guys on a motorcycle tried to grab me. I fought and hit wildly and they gave up and left.

5) I was doing one of the 10 hour, 7 person taxi rides in Egypt that one does, when all of sudden we end up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t part of the plan and was quite unsettling as it was the middle of the night. Horses and buggies were flying by what seemed like hundreds of men sitting outside, chatting loudly, and smoking their hookahs. The taxi pulled into an empty lot and told us he didn’t feel like driving anymore. We started to argue saying that we had agreed on the whole journey and that we wouldn’t pay to be dropped off there. After an hour of this and many other men joining in on this conversation, someone else agreed to take us the rest of the way. We would split the cost between them and after lots of whispering they seemed okay with this plan. Another driver ended up taking us out of the town, but instead of going to the main road, he went along a very deserted dark road leading the other direction. When asking him what he was doing he refused to answer. We looked at each other (only 3 of us left at this point – 2 girls and a guy) and started to worry. After about 10 minutes of trying to figure out what we were going to do, to our relief we ended up on the main road again and eventually reached our destination. Only the driver attempting to grope our legs ended up being the worst of it.

6) In a hotel in Luxor, Egypt, a girl we had just recently met was very concerned about her boyfriend. She had been looking for him for a while already and as we had just arrived he shouldn’t have gotten that far. We assisted in the search and started calling out his name. All of a sudden coming from a door near the toilets we heard a banging and realized it was him. “Guys is that you? Get me out of here!! There’s a little man in here and he’s trying to do things to me!!!�? The boyfriend slid the key under the door and from the outside we managed to open it. The door swung open, the boyfriend came running out and at the far end of the room was ‘the little man’ in his jallabia wearing a very creepy smile. Now that’s scary.

7) Finally, scary is 50 hours on an extremely cockroach infested train in China.

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