In 2007 I went out to New Delhi in India on a work trip, it was my second visit as I had gone in 2006 as well, just before Christmas. I was lucky enough to be put up in the same hotel again which I later found out was the oldest 5 star hotel created shortly after India became independent. I was on the second floor it was something like room 241 or 142 as I remember thinking it was a room for two and the play on words or numbers didn’t quite work. (There were two of us and one room.) The room next door was unoccupied and the two rooms were the only two rooms on this spur off from the main stairs.
My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) had been out to visit and we had had an amazing time visiting the Taj Mahal, Red Fort and many other parts of this amazing country. She had gone home and I found myself alone and maybe a little bit bored as you can only watch so much National Geographic and YouTube wasn’t as interesting as it is nowadays.
The building had seemed quite old and I begun to wonder if there were any spirits around. This is what happens when you spend weekend after weekend ghost hunting and suddenly you cant anymore as you are in a foreign country. I had an itch I wanted to scratch.
So I sat in the arm chair next to the bed and as I have done so many times before I asked if there were any spirits in the room. If there were I asked them to make a sound or make their presence known, After about 5 minutes of this the atmosphere in the room changed. The temperature dropped dramatically and I remember looking down at my arms and seeing every single hair standing on end. For some unknown reason I felt I had to go out of the room into the corridor and take some pictures. Maybe I would catch an interesting orb or something. Looking back I cant thing for the life of me where this idea came from but when I opened the door I was confronted by a very tall Indian Soldier who was literally standing so close to the door he was almost in the room. I stepped back a little shocked and he said “there had reports of a disturbance in this room.” There was no “Hello” or anything else.
I think I said it wasn’t me or words to that effect and I remember he didn’t step away just looked around the room from his position in the door way. I closed the door with him still standing there and sat down on the bed. It was only as I sat there I realised this guy was wandering a 5 star hotel dressed in army fatigues carrying what looked like a rather hefty gun. He also looked like he had been out in heavy rain. It had been raining on and off whilst I was over there but not that day. Up until that point all the security guards I had seen by the gate and wandering the hotel had been wearing blazers and though they were armed they had little hand guns. The room next to me was empty so no one would have reported a disturbance there so what was going on?
The front desk hadn’t called my room to check on me and he hadn’t knocked on the door. For the rest of my stay I didn’t see anyone dressed like this. The more I thought about the encounter and the 5 minutes before I met him I started to think had I just met and spoken to a ghost?
I thought about contacting the front desk but wasn’t sure what to say that would not result in security guards coming up to my room and some strange lost in translation conversations about gun wielding soldiers wandering the hotel.
I behaved myself afterwards and went back to the National Geographic Channel and watching reruns of Life on Mars on my work laptop.