Hotel Creeper
2:46 AM. We watched him walk over to our table and we knew
something wasn’t right. Yet, we didn’t move an inch.
It was the summer of 2007 and I was nine years old.
We had gone to Watertown for a small party with my friends Ashley and Bethany.
It was in the Holiday Inn Express. After a long day of swimming and taking pictures,
we took refuge in the lobby for some relaxation. It was about 2:30 in the
morning and my parents were asleep. We didn’t want to be by my parents. We were
girls and we talked about boys and make-up, and they would just yell at us if we were
too loud. My mom had bought us some diminutive fuchsia scrapbooks to put the
pictures in. Everybody else in the hotel was asleep except for a few older
people.
There was a tall and muscular guy staring at us. He looked particularly
disturbing with a shaggy black beard and an impressive mustache. We must have
been there for at least fifteen minutes trying to ignore him. The man started
ambling toward our rickety table. He tried his best to sound friendly as he
asked us where our parents were. We said they were in the hotel room eating
pizza. He eyed us mischievously as he continued to bother us about going back to
the hotel room and going to bed. We just started putting away the half-finished
scrapbooks. We didn’t know why he was nagging us. I just knew something was
terribly wrong and that we had to get out of there as fast as we could. We
didn’t want to tell him what floor our room was on but he insisted on following
us.
Ashley led us toward the elevator where we were in
view of the front desk. Bethany threw something behind her but he didn’t seem to
notice. All of us were about to go into the empty elevator when Ashley exclaimed
that she had forgotten her teal sweatshirt at the table. He told her to retrieve
it and come right back. I just stated that it would be best if Beth and I went
with her. As we were walking away from him I noticed that all of us were
shaking. He asked us why we were taking so long and that’s when we ran to the
stairs. He started following us. Luckily we had a lot of knowledge on where
everything was in the hotel. We observed the corridors as we looked for the pool
when we first arrived. There was an “employees only” door about ten feet away
from the top of the stairs on the second floor. We just wanted to escape his
sight. It smelled of laundry detergent, Windex, musty brooms and other cleaning
tools. We saw his feet as he walked past. He made a grunting noise and went back
down the stairs. He hadn’t found us. We were twenty feet from our hotel room. I
made sure that I had the key in my hand before we crawled to safety. I have
never been so petrified.