Now here’s the thing – one of the other things – that I wanted to tell you. There was more to it than those girls, see. Those girls (or whatever they were) who came walking toward us from our end of the hallway? The ones dressed as a pair of antique porcelain dolls? There were a few other unexplainable occurrences.

Such as that of the phone in our room.

A curly cord phone sitting on a side table near a window in a haunted hotel room has no problem casting itself in a narrative of visual intrigue. You go in expecting paranormal evidence all around, and this phone looked the part. It was an unglamorous rotary phone of yore, plain and black, as if it’d once taken part in a life of office drudgery.

If I had a photo featuring the phone, I would insert it here. I should have one, yet I don’t… despite the fact that I included it in the hundreds of shots I took as I moved around the room pointing my camera at every quaint oddity I saw, which was practically everything in the picturesque interior of our quarters. It was our first day in the hotel. Our families wanted pics of the room, and so I was taking them, methodically, as I do.

Maybe a good way to sum it up was that the phone was interesting to me, but I wasn’t interesting to it. Because all of the photos I took of it vanished. Every last one.

I checked my trash folder, thinking that maybe I’d accidentally deleted them. I remember the faintest cold prickle on my skin as I realized that the photos weren’t there, either. They were simply nowhere. Feeling ridiculous, I quickly brushed away the notion of re-taking the pics. Clearly, as I’d said, the phone didn’t want to be photographed.

On our third and last day, we were packing and preparing to check out when I found myself drawn back to the phone. It was nearly noon – we’d asked for a one-hour checkout extension – and the late-morning sun shone through the window next to the side table on which the phone sat, looking spread out with its wide base, like a squatting frog. Somehow, I felt compelled to touch it.

Now, an object warm to the touch would be an uneventful circumstance if the object is black and sitting in the path of a sunbeam. Black absorbs heat from the sun. But the object in question – the phone – wasn’t warm to the touch. It was actually hot. I placed my hand on the window and drew it away, further mystified. We desert valley denizens were enjoying a brisk, early fall morning in the mountains. The room felt comfortable. The window felt cool. Why, then, did the phone feel hot?

I picked up the heavy receiver and put it to my ear. The inside of the earpiece felt even hotter. It felt unnaturally, unreasonably hot.

I set the receiver down in its cradle and regarded the phone. It was a rotary phone, but it was missing its rotary dial. There was a blank white circle, either a sticker or a piece of cardboard, in the center of the phone where the rotary dial would be. With no rotary dial and no dial tone, the phone seemed to serve as décor.

“This phone,” I said to my Favorite Person (henceforth known as “F.P.”), “is hot. Isn’t it?” He came over and touched the phone, agreeing that it was. “It’s in the sun,” he reasoned. But the window, I pointed out, is cool. The table that the phone is on is cool. And the phone is… hotter than warm.

There was no explanation.

At home a few mornings later, I sat at my kitchen counter and observed a sunbeam on the counter below the window. The sunbeam fell on the black ceramic mug that I keep out as a container for tinctures. I went over and placed my hand on the mug, the counter, the window. The sun was bright, but the mug, counter, and window felt cool. Over the next hour, I sat in my spot at that peninsula counter and made sure to haul my ass up to move the mug when the sunbeam shifted. I wanted to make sure that it stayed in the transient sunbeam. Throughout my experiment, the black mug never got so much as warm. The same should have been the case with the phone in the hotel room.

Interestingly, the phone does appear in this shot of our room from the doorway.

Now, there’s something else I wanted to show you, something that might be of interest if you’re the sort to believe.