Celebrity ghosts?

Last weekend I attended a dinner party with some people who had worked the front desk at several celebrity hotels in NY and LA in the late '80s/ early '90s. The conversation got really interesting when they described their experiences at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

Chateau Marmont was and is a favorite place for celebrities to stay while in Los Angeles. It sounded like the people working there almost had a bed-and-breakfast relationship with the guests in the early 90's-- the guests knew the service people by name, they had conversations over lunch, and the service people helped the guests like they were family.

There were LOTS of stories of drug abuse, wild behavior, celebrity secrets, and who's nice/who's a jerk. Most of them are things that probably shouldn't be written about by me in this blog because they aren't my secrets or stories to tell. However, there were a couple of stories that were fascinating and (I'm pretty sure) won't get me sued for slander-- they are the ghost stories at the Chateau Marmont.

Several people have died in the hotel (including John Belushi), and several of the rooms are reportedly haunted.

One guest (she was a well known celebrity, maybe RuPaul (correction from previously Angela Bassett)?) came down to the desk one morning and asked if the maids cleaned up in the middle of the night. The desk clerk told her that the housekeeping staff hadn't shown up for the day yet. She then said that she had come back late the previous evening and taken off her clothes and jewelry and sort of left them as piles on the floor because she was tired. The next morning she woke up and found them neatly folded and placed on the bureau. She couldn't explain it. The desk clerk's explanation was that she had a very 'neat' ghost :)

Another story involved a man who was researching a book on The Doors. He happened to stay in the suite that the group used to stay in back in the 60's. He was awoken in the middle of the night by what sounded like loud partying so he went to the window to see if there was a party in the garden below. When he got up, he realized the sound wasn't coming from outside, but from inside the room around him. He checked out of the hotel in the middle of the night.

Another woman had come down to the desk in the middle of the night and reported that she had been sleeping when she heard the window slide open and an intruder walk over to the bed where she was sleeping. Thinking the intruder might potentially harm her, she laid still in the bed. She then felt the intruder sit on the bed and lay down next to her. She lay there for a while waiting for something to happen, but nothing happened. She then turned in the bed to see her intruder and when she turned she saw nothing. And then she noticed that there were bars on the window to prevent someone from breaking in from outside and that the window had indeed been opened.

The most haunted room? 79. We were told not to stay in room 79 because it is the most haunted room. Even the hotel staff don't like to go in there. Apparently somebody died in that room? And several hotel guests have reported hearing knocks on the door, and seeing lines of ghosts pushing on the door trying to get into the the room. Furniture in that room gets moved into odd positions. One woman reported a head floating outside of that window. And even a straight-laced accountant reported hearing things in that room.

From the skeptics point of view, there was a lot of drug use in the hotel and some of these ghost sightings could easily be explained as hallucinations, or other brain processing anomalies in the middle of the night.

But there were so many reports of the same things from a wide variety of people that it makes the ghost stories seem very real. And sort of fun. Just as long as I'm not the one experiencing them.