Anybody Out There? (part II)

After my rude awakening I switched on all the lights in the room from the bedside panel before bouncing out of bed to pull back the curtains. The bedside clock read 11.30am which means I had fallen asleep for about two hours only. I didn't think I could sleep again in that same room so I packed my belongings and called reception asking for a room swap fibbing that the heater in the room wasn't functioning properly.

Even in the new room I refused to sleep with the lights off and the curtains drawn closed, and that remains my habit to this day when sleeping in a new environment unless I was sharing the room with a friend. I didn't, however, tell anyone about the incident fearing they would laugh it off saying that I was just having a nightmare or had indigestion or something equally comical.

Upon returning home, that very same evening as I sat down to dinner with my family I told my mum about my unusual encounter. Dear Mater being a firm believer of all things preternatural, briskly disappeared into her bedroom and came back with an image of Lord Buddha in her hand and wrote down a short protective prayer which she taught me to recite. To this day, it has become custom for me to wear that image of Lord Buddha around my neck whenever I spend the night away from home and the protective prayer always accompanies my bedtime ritual.

That hair raising event was long forgotten until about 5 months later when I was back in London and was invited over to a friend's room to join in a breakfast gathering with a few other girls. As it goes when a bunch of girls get together, a good gossip session and general chit-chat is always lively and entertaining - until one of the senior girls started telling the story of a haunted room that a number of the Singaporean crew have slept in and all have had many unexplainable encounters.

To my utter shock another girl started sharing her own experience in one of the rooms on the second floor of the east wing only recently. As I listened I found that she was relaying the exact same story of my own encounter a few months back, down to the very detail of the black clad Arabian woman standing at the foot of her bed. The only difference being the Arabian woman hadn't said anything to her. She just stood there starring at the end of her bed. I recounted my own visitation from the Arabian woman as waves of icy chills pulsed through me. If that was a dream, how can 2 people have identical ones??!! I remembered that my room was also on the second floor of the east wing but she remembered the number. It hadn't occurred to me back then to make a note of the room number. 

A week after a black list of all the rooms to avoid in the hotel got circulated. Armed with that list we were able to ask for an immediate swap should we get allocated the "jackpot" room.

Could there really be something out there that cannot be explained?