Unwanted Guests at Washington Suites

The summer after I turned ten my family went to Washington D.C. along with my dad on one of his business trips. We were staying in the Washington Suites (I think that was the name of them), a large, rather old hotel with conference rooms for business. Our's was large, with a formal den, a tile-floored kitchen as big as ours at home, and two bedrooms off of a short hallway. I was sharing the larger of the bedrooms with my mom, my older sister, and my younger brother. My dad slept alone in the smaller bedroom so that he wouldn't wake us when he got up at six for his morning meetings. I was sharing the bed by the window with my sister, and my mom and brother had the one across the room.

The first night passed uneventfully - for me anyways. I slept like a baby, but at breakfast the next morning my sister started telling us about a weird dream she had. In it, she was watching a woman who was standing by the window right next to her. The curtains were open, and she was pointing out all the buildings she could see in the distance. She seemed to be talking to my sister, but Ava was too sleepy to really understand anything. The woman was tall and elegant, she said, with long, grey hair and a black nightgown. She looked about sixty. Then, Ava woke up. The curtains were closed and the room was a lot darker than it had been in her dream. There was no sign of the woman. My mom laughed it off, and my brother told Ava she was crazy. My sister didn't seem to take it too seriously, but it creeped me out a little, and when we got in bed that night I had trouble getting to sleep.

I can't remember if it was that night or the next when a similar thing happened to me. We spent four nights there, and I think it might have been the third. I know it was the day before we went to the zoo. I woke up sometime during the night and heard someone moving around in the room. I opened my eyes and saw that the door was open and a man wearing a business suit was standing at the foot of my mom and brother's bed, looking at them. He didn't look in my direction the whole time he was in the room, but I watched him with my face mostly under the covers. I wasn't scared. I thought it was my dad, coming in to look at his family before he left for his meeting. He exited through the door, leaving it open. I woke up again to the sound of the door closing softly. I opened my eyes when I felt the bed move. I looked over and Ava was climbing back under the covers. She had gone to the bathroom. I looked over at the clock. It was a little after 5:00 - two hours before my dad would have left for his meeting. He had never been in the room. I was still too tired to think about it, so I went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning I told my family about it. They laughed it off the same way they had laughed off Ava's dream, but it had left me majorly creeped out, and I was scared to go to sleep that night.

Nothing else happened on the trip, or at least not to me. A couple of years later I went to the beach with my mom and my best friend's family. While we were eating dinner one night, the adults were sharing ghost stories while my friend and I listened with wide eyes. My friend's dad is a firm believer in the supernatural, and had about a million stories. It came my mom's turn to share something, and to my surprise she started talking about our trip to D.C. She said that she had a dream every night about an old woman who just walked around the room talking to no one about nothing in particular. She would sometimes look out the window, or look at herself in the mirror. Three people had witnessed the happenings in that hotel room. I made up my mind I was never sleeping in an old hotel again.