The Ghosts of Sleepless Inn

The Ghosts of Sleepless Inn
Legend has it that a couple of newlyweds were on their way to a rental house in Florida for their honeymoon, when they stopped at the Sleepless Inn on the coldest night in December of Sixty Three and were never seen again. John J. Thompson and his new wife, Tina, pulled over to the inn so they could get some rest because they were on their way from John’s home in Iredell County, North Carolina to a rental house in Destin, Florida. John went to the front desk to see if there were any vacancies, and the landlord gave them the key to room thirteen. So, John and his wife settled down in the room and went to bed early.
Late that night John woke up to find his wife shaking very badly. She complained of being extremely cold, even though the heater was on. She asked John to turn the heater up, so he did. A short while later he awoke to find Tina sitting up staring at the door, which had mysteriously become unlocked and open. He got up and closed the door then he locked the doorknob and bolted the door shut. Tina turned to him and said that she wanted to leave because something didn’t feel right, but John insisted that they stay since they had already paid for a full night’s stay and also because he didn’t want to drive at 12:30 in the morning on such a cold night. They went back to sleep.
When Tina got up to go to the bathroom to get some water she noticed that there was a strange smell in the room, it was the cologne that her father, Jack King, used to wear until he got put in jail for attempted murder. She remembered the whole fiasco like it was yesterday. It had been back when John and Tina had first started dating, Tina’s father had told her quite clearly that he didn’t like John because of the way he acted when he wasn’t with her. Jack told Tina that whenever he saw John, he was always shouting, using foul language and being disrespectful to the other women that he was around. Then he said with all the sincerity that any father can possibly possess, “If you marry him I will find and kill both of you, and it doesn’t matter where you go.” Then he turned away and left her.
Even though she was scared she didn’t end her relationship with John. A few months later on July 14, exactly on week after John’s seventeenth birthday, John stopped by a small Quickie Mart to pick up a few things when he saw Jack standing by the drink section. John thought he would stop and say hello. But when he said hello Jack turned around and looked at John as though he wanted to kill him. Then, just as quick as lightning, Jack was on top of John hitting him as hard as he could. The fray didn’t last more than two minutes, but when the police pulled Jack off of John, they saw the extent of his injuries; his face was so bloody that he looked almost like a lump of bloody meat. After the hearing Jack King was found guilty of attempted murder and was sentenced to four years in a federal prison. Then coming back to her senses, she drank the water and got back into bed, and just as she fell asleep, she realized something; John wasn’t there. She got up and started to call John’s name when out of the darkness an all too familiar voice said softly, “Your beloved John is not here, he caught the one o’clock ride on the Cutlery Express.” It was her father. When she lit the little candle they had been given as a light, she turned around and saw her father standing over John’s lifeless body, and in Jack’s hand he clutched a bloody dagger. Then he moved over to his daughter and said “You knew I never approved of that boy and you still married him.” Then without another word, he moved forward and stabbed her right in the heart. Then he turned away and drove home.
It was only a year later on the anniversary of John and Tina’s death that the police received a call from one of Jack’s neighbors who said they thought there might be a fight at his house because they heard some screaming, and because of Jack’s history the police rushed over to the house. But, when the got there they had to break down the door. It had been locked at the doorknob and bolted shut. Then they searched the house and then they found Jack. He was lying in the smallest room that was lit by a single candle with two butcher knives in his heart. One handle said “John” and the other said “Tina”, and as they looked around they saw this message, “I killed John and Tina Thompson.” The message was written in blood. The neighbors say that every year on the anniversary of his death, you can hear Jack King scream for mercy as his daughter and her husband murder him, and if you are brave enough to go into the room where this horrifying act took place, you can hear Jack scream for mercy, then you will see the bloody message slowly write itself. Some people say that he killed himself because he couldn’t live with the fact that he killed his only daughter. But most people think that John and Tina’s ghosts came back for two reasons: to tell everyone that he killed them and also to kill him like he killed them. And, if you go to the Inn on that coldest night in December you can still hear Tina calling for John and if you listen closely enough you can hear her father say “Your beloved John is not here, he caught the one o’clock ride on the Cutlery Express.”