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.

Hello, friends. Once again, I come to you from the latest of hours. There’s more I wanted to share about our anniversary getaway in the ghost town of Jerome here in Arizona, but I realized, as I started writing, that this one incident is lengthy enough for a sitting. I’ll come back next week with Part II.

We stayed at the Jerome Grand Hotel, whose famous haunting goes back to the building’s early days as copper miners’ quarters, even before it became a hospital. (If you know me, you know that I was there for the haunting.)

It was the second night of our stay. We were driving back up the hill to the hotel at the top – the sun nearly at its setting point – when we noticed two girls on foot, making their way up along the same graveled road.

We passed them carefully. I studied them. At first, I couldn’t say what was unusual about them. Then I realized that it was their manner of dress. I guess I’ll start with that.

Both girls wore babydoll dresses that hung down to just above their knees. (The word that came to mind was “old-fashioned,” but I could be kinder and say “vintage.”) As for the color of the fabric, you could describe the dresses as “ivory” as easily as “antique white,” in any case an off-white with a yellowish undertone. Their styles were different, yet similar, both of them with an ivory lace top layer floating over the filmy dress beneath.

Mind you, the girls were not small children. They could either have been teenagers or young adults. They did not look like twins, though they might have been sisters. Maybe just friends. The shorter of the two had dark, bobbed hair. The taller one’s hair was a medium-brown color, and it was just as straight, but slightly longer.

I remember that the shorter girl, the one with the bobbed hair, wore over her left shoulder a small pink purse with a long, thin strap.

The sight of the unusually outfitted pair had me perplexed. Why were they dressed as if attending their own ninth birthday party in the 1800’s when they weren’t nine, and it wasn’t the 1800’s?

We rounded the curve of the steepest part of the road, which delivered us to the bosom of the hotel waiting at the top. The hotel’s restaurant, Asylum, occupied the ground floor of the building on the side facing the road, so it was the first thing that we encountered. Ah! I thought. Maybe the girls are going there to dine. Still an offbeat choice of attire for dinner (unless you’re indeed a child in the 1800’s), but the restaurant is called “Asylum,” after all. I guess I can see it.

We parked and entered the hotel, heading for the carpeted staircase. Mid-way up, we heard loud male voices echoing down from the 3^rd-floor hallway, which was sealed inside the building’s inner cavity with a door that only guests could unlock. The voices grew louder as we approached that door. Surely, I thought, we would find two, maybe three guys hanging around in the hallway, yell-conversing.

But we didn’t. The voices stopped abruptly when we turned our key in the lock. We entered the corridor into silence. There was no sight nor sound of a door closing. There were no guys with loud voices. No guys at all.

Instead, there were the two girls, walking side-by-side toward us from the end of the hall – from our end of the hall, in fact. We were staying in the corner room at the far end. Room 39A.

Surprise and a chill filled my marrow at the sight of the girls. How did they get up here? Why are they coming from the direction of our room?

They moved toward us in silence, gliding along in their ivory frocks that looked even more yellowed with age in the dim hallway. I could see that the girl closest to me – the one with dark, bobbed hair – wore makeup such that you’d find on a porcelain doll, right down to the points of black eyeliner dotted beneath her eyes to the pink circles of blush on her cheeks. Around her neck, she wore a wide, black velvet choker, and a necklace with a pendent that looked like a cameo.

The girls slipped past without looking at us, or at each other, nearly inanimately. They moved in unison, as if one person rather than two. There was no hint in their eyes that they saw us, even as we nearly brushed shoulders with them in the narrow hallway.

Normally there would be a salutation. A friendly or cursory in-passing exchange of pleasantries. A nod. A smile. Maybe even a grimace, depending. Any kind of acknowledgement of the presence of another human being. Right?

My husband later said that he would have greeted them in the casual way that greetings are exchanged with strangers in passing, but there was “something in the air around them that made him want to pass them quickly, without looking at them or talking to them.”

It wasn’t that we weren’t feeling social, or anything like that, you see. It was just that the space the girls occupied felt empty and cold. It felt like a void, a barrier, and a warning, all at once.

Funny thing was, when we saw them walking up the graveled road, the girls seemed incongruous in their antique babydoll dresses under the darkening light of dusk. They appeared to be out of place. They didn’t fit into the setting. In the hallway of the hotel, however, they looked perfectly appropriate and at home. They were right where they should have been, and should always be: in the dim hallway of a haunted hotel.

I wish I’d had a chance at attempting to photograph the girls. In lieu of that, I have a pic of the hallway from the viewpoint of our room, as well as a couple of the hotel from the outside:

Stay tuned next week, when I’ll regale you with the phone incident and the toothbrush cap incident.

After all, it is October, when I usually post horror short films. I’m here to share true stories with you, instead. We took this trip at the end of September. Spooky season got underway for us in proper form, that is for certain!