August 22 — I was alone in my room, telling ghost stories that happened in other people’s rooms.

▲ Hotel room (illustration / photo by reporter Cai Wenjun)

By Yu Jiayun

In anticipation of the upcoming Ghost Month, my supervisor asked every reporter to submit an article related to a terrifying travel experience. This really posed quite a dilemma for me. For one, I never listen to ghost stories (not because they’re boring, but because they scare me), and secondly, I knew I’d be heading to Japan on a business trip in a few days. The thought of writing this stuff alone in a Japanese hotel room at night made my scalp crawl. So, for this business trip, I deliberately picked a bright and sunny morning to ask a fellow reporter to share a somewhat creepy—but not terrifying enough to give me a heart attack—experience. As I listened to LYRA’s “Fish,” sipped on some yogurt, and tried my best to stay composed, I was just hoping to finish this article quickly.

Enough rambling—let’s get to the point.

It wasn’t a bright and sunny morning; on the contrary, it was a stormy, windy night. A media group got stranded on a small island in the Pacific due to a typhoon and had no choice but to find a hotel to stay in temporarily. Because the booking was made late, the only options left on the island were either extremely expensive luxury hotels or super cheap small inns—and they went with the latter. The moment the group arrived at the inn, they all felt uneasy. Rather than a proper inn, it was more crudely reminiscent of a student dormitory: a seemingly endless corridor with rooms on one side and walls on the other—an eerily shabby setup. Too scared to be alone, most of them decided to pair up and share rooms. But one female reporter insisted on sleeping alone, so she ended up in a room by herself, next door to the photographer from the same company.

However, the next morning, the two of them were found sitting on the sofa in the hotel lobby. Everyone found it odd and approached to ask what had happened—only to find the female reporter pale as a ghost. It turned out that her room had had an uninvited guest the previous night.

According to the female reporter,the night before, her room had been filled with strange sounds coming from the toilet—not the usual plumbing noise, but as if the toilet was flushing by itself. Though she found it strange, it being late, she forced herself to get into bed and try to sleep. But no sooner had she lain down than she faintly felt someone touching her. She was instantly terrified, her scalp crawling. Slowly opening her eyes and turning her head, she saw a shadowy figure standing right before her. The frightened reporter immediately rushed—without grabbing anything—straight to the photographer colleague’s room and started banging on his door frantically.After explaining what had happened, the two of them decided to spend the night on the hotel lobby sofas and swore they’d never go back to their rooms.

The reporter who shared this story with me said that the female reporter was crying as she recounted the incident, completely shaken. As I listened, I kept thinking—if it were me, I’d probably choose to sleep on the street rather than go back to my room. Being touched while sleeping alone is definitely not romantic at all.

Postscript: It took me over two hours to write this story. In between, aside from talking on the phone with friends to distract myself, I also powered through writing a “normal” travel piece. All I can say is, trying to write about ghost stories that happened in other people’s rooms while sitting alone in a tiny three-square-meter hotel room at midnight—how on earth is anyone supposed to sleep after that?