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Inspired by KoB's San Francisco hotel ghost stories (this is fun!), here's my experience from about eight years ago:
Mr. MG used to work for a friend (now does freelance work for him) who held training sessions for his software all over the country. One regular stop every spring was New Orleans. I tagged along every year, and the third year we chose an interesting-sounding hotel, just one block off Bourbon Street, that doesn't advertise or anything. It used to be a private home and has a rich history, having been taken over by Union forces during the Civil War, etc.
Nowadays the main part of the hotel looks quite like it used to when it was a private home, with a large parlor, curved staircase, broad hallways on the upper floors, a lush courtyard, and a bachelor apartment (a small building on the other side of the courtyard, not attached to the main house, that the young men used to live in). But the back part of the house has been sort of bastardized, with the fourth and fifth floors looking a lot like a motel would--a rickety elevator (VERY rickety) trundles up to these floors and opens onto a partially covered walkway with motel-like rooms off of it.
The first year we stayed there (we went back several times after that), we chose one of the least expensive rooms in this motel-like area. Our room was on the top floor--the second-last one in the row, and our door was in a small alcove along with the door to the end room. The room was also quite like a motel room, with a picture window looking out onto the walkway, heavy draperies that didn't quite close all the way, a small sofa and coffee table, and the double bed toward the back of the room by the bathroom door.
Our first night was uneventful--we just went to dinner at our favorite restaurant (piles of crawfish mmmm :9) and then walked around the French Quarter. I think we might have stopped at a great little cigar shop/coffee house (since closed). That was it. Point is, we weren't drunk! :)
We went to sleep around midnight, then at 2:30 I woke up to a rattling noise. It took me a few seconds to figure out what I was hearing, then I realized that someone was trying to break into our room! The doorknob was rattling, and the metal door was going ka-thunk ka-thunk as the person tried to open it. I went into a panic (meanwhile, Mr. MG was sleeping through the whole thing), but then thought that it was probably some drunken idiot fresh off of Bourbon Street who was trying to get into the wrong room. I waited a few moments, figuring if it was the person in the room next to ours, s/he would eventually realize that they should be trying the OTHER door in the alcove.
Sure enough, the rattling and thumping stopped. I listened for the opening and closing of the other door, but it didn't come. I started to wonder if the drunken idiot was on the entirely wrong floor. If so, then s/he would have to walk past our window to get to the stairs or elevator, as there was no staircase or other way out at the end of the hallway. So I looked over at the window, peering between the heavy drapes, waiting for the figure of a person to stumble past. Nobody did.
And then the bed started to shake.
My first thought was "earthquake!"--till I remembered I was in New Orleans. D'oh. I've been in a lot of earthquakes while visiting my brother in Southern California, and this KIND of felt like it, but then I looked around the room and realized nothing else was shaking--just the bed. I distinctly remember looking at a half-full water bottle on the nightstand--the water wasn't moving. It really was JUST the bed.
Now I was downright terrified. I knew I should have woken up Mr. MG, but for some reason I didn't. I was frozen. Then the shaking stopped.
It took me quite a while to fall back asleep, but eventually I did. Nothing else happened. The next day Mr. MG was bummed that I didn't wake him up so he could experience it. I thought about it all day; then, in the evening, when I was talking to the desk clerk about a restaurant recommendation, I also asked him if the hotel had any ghosts.
He said, "Are you asking from things you've heard, or from personal experience?" I said personal experience. He asked what happened, but I said no, first tell me what you've got. I didn't want the guy to just say "Yeah, sure, that's a ghost" to humor me. So he told me about the ghost of the Civil War soldier who died in the first-floor front bedroom of his battle wounds (I had caught a glimpse of the room and it always bothered me) but, he said, the soldier never left that bedroom.
Then he said they also had Madame Locoul. She was the second owner of the house, and a cantankerous old bat who felt forgotten, as the house was named after the original owner and nobody ever talked about HER. I asked what she did, and he said she usually flew over people's heads in the second- and third-floor hallways. "Oh--and she likes to shake things." Like beds, perhaps, I asked. I told him what happened the night before, and he said that sounded like her, definitely. He was surprised that she had made her way to the fifth floor, but when he found out that I was a "sensitive", he decided that explained it.
So I went out and bought a purple votive candle and a small stick of incense, and that night I put the lit candle in a heavy-bottomed water glass, lit the incense and stuck it in there as well, and meditated. I told Madame Locoul that we were honored to be guests in her lovely home and we'd only be staying there a few more nights, if she didn't mind. She didn't bother us after that.
The next year, we stayed in a room on the fourth floor, and the first night, the shower curtain rod fell around 12:30. What a racket! We decided that Madame Locoul remembered us and was letting us know she knew we were there.
:rofl:
And then there was what happened at the 1850 House (a restored townhouse/museum on Jackson Square) the very next day...but that's for another thread, if anyone's interested....
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