True, the kids had expressed mild concern over a closet door opening by itself in our room on the afternoon of our arrival at the Colony Hotel. “And I heard a sound in the middle of the night like somebody stepping really hard in the hallway,” my daughter remembers.
“Come on, that was just somebody walking back to their room,” her brother says, looking slightly less than convinced.
Built in 1926, the historic Colony Hotel in downtown Delray Beach, Florida, is a wonderful place to spend a long Labor Day weekend. Creaky hardwood floors and antique light fixtures and old photographs of the property and of long-gone guests lining the walls. Never once did it cross my mind that it might be haunted, nor have I ever believed in things being haunted in the first place. That’s ridiculous.
But now that we’ve read some online chatter about apparitions and unexplained sounds and sightings at the Colony, I’m not so sure. Maybe I just want to believe. Pondering the possibility quickens the pulse and seems to heighten the senses. It’s a strangely appealing buzz.
Not so for my daughter. “That’s the last time you make me stay in some scary old hotel,” she says.