Last year, my mom, my aunt, my cousin Trina and I went on a girls trip to this hill station in India called Darjeeling.
We stayed at this old converted hotel called Alice Villa. The name was fitting as this hotel was right next to a larger one called The Elgin. It had belonged to Lord Elgin, an influential man in Calcutta during the British rule. His sister was Alice, and the hotel used to be her house.
My mum had told me it was haunted and I was a believer, but the hotel looked fine. We stayed in one of the old rooms, me and my cousin in one and my mom and aunt in another. Both the rooms were duplex and had creaky old wooden stairs and a proper fireplace.
On the first night we were having dinner when my mum turned to the waiter and asked him, "Are there ghosts here?"
The waiter laughed for a long time and then he said in Hindi, "We had a ghost but she's still here! Hiding!"
All of us were thoroughly freaked out. Our moms wanted to sit on the roof and chat a bit, so Trina and I went back to our rooms. The fireplace had flames crackling in it and the lights were off. Trina and I were talking about ghosts. Suddenly the flames in the fireplace died, but the only window was upstairs and it was closed, and it was not an electric fireplace. Both of us screamed and flew at each other. A cold feeling was in the room and it became hard to breathe.
Thankfully our mothers appeared then. We couldn't tell them; they wouldn't believe us. The next morning when I got up, Trina called out to me and said, "Did you go to the bathroom last night?"
The bathroom was on the bottom floor, I shook my head. Trina froze, "I woke up last night and heard footsteps walking up and down, I thought it was you so I went back to sleep".
We both stared at each other and then quietly got dressed. We spent the rest of the day roaming the city of Darjeeling. We returned early that evening. Our mothers asked us to go to the kitchen and ask the cook to send in some tea. The corridor was dark.
Now to get to the kitchen we had to cross the dark dining hall. We went in a bit and saw that the lights were off in the kitchen. We turned to leave when suddenly the kitchen lights switched on and the sound of dishes being washed came from the kitchen.
Suddenly Trina screamed. In the dark kitchen along with our shadows was the shadow of a woman in a gown. We both screamed. The lights switched off and we ran back to our room. We refused to enter the dining hall after that and ate all our meals in our room.
This trip to Darjeeling was done every year and once again we stayed in Alice Villa. This time there was a plaque about the history of the place. And it turns out the room we stayed in used to be Lady Alice Elgin's personal bedroom.
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