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I’ve been reading a whole bunch of creepy stories on a certain website recently, and they reminded me of something that happened to a colleague of mine while we were on a business trip nearly ten years ago. It’s fairly mild as ghost stories go, but this is a true story, and not an urban legend (I was there - so you won’t find it on Snopes.com. ). I thought I’d share it with you for your entertainment.

In 1998, I flew with some colleagues to a Microsoft TechEd conference being held at the Auckland Sheraton hotel. After the day’s activity and following late night “networking” we each went to our separate rooms, slightly inebriated but otherwise no worse for wear.
The hotel rooms were the type that always lock when the doors close, each having one of those electronic key cards for access. Our rooms were one or two floors above ground level.

My own night passed without incident.

The next morning, we all met up for breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. But one colleague looked a bit bemused and more than a little freaked out. I asked him what the matter was.
“I went to bed last night with the bedside lamp on,” he said, “and forgot to turn it off. But when I woke up this morning, I found that the bulb had been unscrewed and was lying on the bedside table next to the lamp…”
(Remember, we each had our own rooms, the doors were all locked, and there was no other external access. I also asked if he was the type to sleep-walk, and he said he wasn’t.)

Being a supportive chap, I then reminded him that there was an old cemetery almost directly across the road from the Sheraton, and that perhaps some neighbourly ghost had decided to help the hotel save power (if you click on the thumbnail picture above, you can see a Google Earth snapshot of the hotel with nearby cemetery). My colleague wasn’t too enthused with that idea. But then again, maybe he had simply rubbed the lamp before going to bed unawares - arousing a djinn in its modern containment vessel. It was a high-tech conference, after all.

Today we interviewed a new flatmate, one that will be replacing another who is leaving for India next weekend (no, not the one I had the argument with in the previous post). 

When asked what sort of work she did, she replied that she was a “woofer”.  Now due to her german accent I had earlier assumed she meant “roofer”, but by the second or third time it was unmistakable.  A woofer, apparently, is someone (often a tourist) who lives temporarily at a home-stay while working around the house as payment for their food and lodging. I had never heard the term before in my life, but apparently it’s quite well established, so there you go.