The Memory of Place

I am confident that places keep memories just like people do. They at least think.

The poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst taught at a lecture in 2001 that people often (but not exclusively) think in the language we use to talk. But thinking isn’t something that is limited to people.

He goes on, “Life as we know it, it seems, thinks in nucleic acids. The forest thinks in trees and their associated life forms: asters, grasses, mosses, fungi, and the creatures who move through them, from annelids to arthropods to thrushes, jays, and deer.” What a lovely idea.

If places can think, then it stands to reason that they can remember.

What, then, does a hotel room think in? And what means are available for a hotel room to remember?

A Not-haunting

It’s tough to talk about hauntings and hotels without talking Stanley Kubrick’s very spooky haunted-hotel film, The Shining (1980). In it, Dick Halloran tells young Danny that people with the ability to shine can see events that had happened at the Overlook Hotel. And he adds, “I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel – over the years, and not all of them was good.”

As far as I can tell, I don’t shine. This fact often gives me some degree of comfort when I have occasion to stay at a hotel or visit a site of historical violence. But unfortunately, sometimes the memory of a place is all too evident, even to the opaque-voyant among us.

Los Angeles Tragic

I’ve never seen, or felt, the memories of a place laid out so clearly as on a recent stay in a Los Angeles hotel. I walked into the room to a deep stench of tobacco. The annoyance of the odor melted into something sharper, though, as I walked into the bathroom. My eyes were tugged to the ceiling, directly above the mirror.

Above me was a dark colored stain, in a tight splatter pattern. The stain continued down the adjacent walls, becoming more spread out toward the floor. It was also more faded, as if someone had tried to clean it.

I don’t know what this stain was, but I know it looked like blood splatter. It seemed to me (spooked as I was) fairly obvious that some poor soul had taken their life here.

Station of the Cross

I’ve had occasion to spend the night in places that were reportedly haunted. But never had I been a part of the entire process from reputation of haunting, to evidence of haunting, to a certainty that I, too, was to be haunted there.

The impression was deepened as I turned around to beat a hasty retreat, and saw an even more foreboding sight. Above the door frame, perched, was a hastily (desperately?) cut-out Christian cross. This hotel room’s memory got even deeper, and another scene was laid out before me.

Another person stayed in this room between myself and the (alleged) suicide. As they became embroiled in the haunting, they made an attempt at salvation, via the cross.

I told this story to a friend and they suggested an alternative history of the cross. Perhaps the suicide had cut out the cross himself. Perhaps it was a final attempt at salvation, or at the very least, not damnation.

After these discoveries, according to the great law of anticlimax, I slept like a baby and was in no cognizant way, haunted.

A Prayer

Let me end this rampant and quivering speculation with a prayer to my not-haunter:

Thank you for leaving me in peace and old tobacco in your place of final action. I’m sorry that what I think may have happened to you may have happened to you. All the Best.