THE DOLPHIN HOTEL
Location: One of the oldest hotels in New York City, the Dolphin Hotel overlooks 2245 Lexington Avenue near Grand Central Terminal at Third and Lexington where the business district meets the theater and shopping district. Reservations can be made in advance by phone or fax up to a year in advance.
Description of Place: New York City is known for an abundance of hotels providing homes and temporary residences for locals, tourists, patrons and travelers. Almost always filled to ninety percent occupation with 350 rooms and fifty-two luxurious suites, the Dolphin Hotel is a twenty-five story structure with a drab brick and masonry appearance until one enters the lobby is is struck by the over-abundance of regal aristocratic opulence. The lobby is surrounded by Dorian columns supporting a high ceiling; the furnishings are European with a parquet floor. The hotel is proud of its Sea Bream Restaurant off the mezzanine, Coral Lounge and deluxe spa and facilities.
Getting a light turn once month, Room 1408, as described by writer and independent paranormal researcher Michael Enslin, has "a sofa, writing desk, a faux antique armoire (and) floral wallpaper... unremarkable except for a stain beneath a thrift-store painting of a ship lost at sea. The work is done by the predictably dull fashion of Currier and Ives. The second painting is of an old woman reading bedtime stories, a Whistler's knock-off, to a number of deranged children as another Madonna and child watch from the background. It does have a vague air of menace. The third and final painfully dull painting is the ever popular, "The Hunt." Horses, hounds and constipated British lords... The bedroom has one window... The panorama is typically cramped New York City view of nothing: dull gray buildings all around, honking traffic down below..."
Ghostly Manifestations: In the history of the supposedly cursed room of the Dolphin Hotel, there has apparently been only one survivor to describe the haunting phenomenon. As far as the public is concerned, the room has been the scene of fifty-seven suspicious deaths masked as suicides, mutilations, heart attacks, asphyxiations and even a drowning. The hotel staff are not open to telling ghost stories, but then, they have none to tell. The majority of the modern staff has not been around to know about the last death to have occurred in Room 1408. To hear about the mere nature of the hauntings, one must seek out Michael Enslin, writer and paranormal researcher, considered to be the only man to be pulled out alive from the room.
Bare in mind, Enslin has repeatedly confessed to have been drinking heavily during his stay and to have possibly passed in and out of consciousness during his experiences there. Even he is not sure of just how much he saw was real or imagined. He does insist that the room was a very claustrophobic experience, akin to being in a sensory deprivation tank. Why this room out of so many others has had such an affect on so many people is what is to be determined. The mere result of Enslin's subsequent mental breakdown within the room, influenced by alcohol or not, coupled with the deaths of so many others already passed to history, suggests something must have happened to him.
First and foremost, Mike Enslin is a writer then a paranormal researcher. His attitude is that he wants to believe in ghosts, but he carries his cynicism as a weapon, a partner and he can be brutally honest without his intentions. He originally came to the Dolphin and its Room 1408 to debunk it. His initial surmise was unimpressed by the rather innocuous and seemingly ordinary room, but after fifteen minutes, he began to experience things, innocent at first and then building to a pitch. Was it the hauntings of the room, or was the alcohol dulling his senses to much fall victim to it, a form of accelerated "cabin fever?" For one, he was told that electronics don't work in the room. Correction: electronics "sometimes" don't work in the room. Enslin had no problems with his cell phone or lap top, but he did have problems with the thermostat to be repaired by a hotel engineer who did not expect anyone to actually be in the room. It seems phony phone calls are common from the room by guests and visitors trying to perpetuate the ghosts. Repairmen only go to fix the room only when the call comes from manager Gerald Olin.
Staff are clearly intimidated by the room, but this is clearly the result of overeager imaginations. Their beliefs are the room is haunted, cursed or just "down right intimidating." The sensation of being watched has been described by staff tending to the room; two of whom are always present to quickly get it done and remove themselves as fast as possible. They may not believe in ghosts, but they are not taking chances. In March of 2005, two housekeepers heard the water faucet come on by itself and casually turned it off. Stepping out a second for the tools off the cart in the hall to wrap up the cleaning, they heard the water come on again and quickly cut short the job. Needless to say, when Olin came up to deal with his frightened staff, he was a bit exasperated to realize the sound of the bathroom in the next room could be heard very well through the wall.
Whatever ghost or spirit is in the room, it seems very well restricted to the room. Guests in the other rooms have complained down to the front desk about laughter and people carrying on in the room despite the fact that no one is registered to 1408 at the time. Enslin himself said he he saw two, maybe three separate apparitions during his stay. While sitting on the bed and barely paying attention to the TV, he noticed the apparition of a man in the outer suite walk across the opening to the bedroom and then climb out the window. Lasting for just barely thirty-seconds, his mind deciphered it as a tall older figure of a man, white shirt, dark pants, maybe thin tie and suspenders, bending down to the window and climbing out with a brief remissive glance to Enslin before the ghastly sentence by descent. In his history of his ghost-hunting adventures, Mike had never seen a ghost before and the whole incident had occurred very matter-of-factly. There was none of the stammering or eye-bulging fear nor the optional running in fear, it was just there one minute and gone the next.
A bit less than an hour left into his overnight stay, Enslin saw the ghost again, but not the same. He was returning to the honor bar ("Bag of chips $7? This place is cursed.") for more of the alcohol keeping him occupied during the night when from behind him he noticed a moment of movement and this time was prepared enough to get a better look of the earthbound presence. It was a short woman of heavy nature, fat and pudgy he describes her, wearing a checkered dress and passing before him as she too relived her final moment of climbing out through the window. Two suicide ghosts in one night? Was the room trying to tell Enslin something, or was he hallucinating something mired from the deep recesses of his own overwrought and contemplative imagination already deluged by the alcohol entering his body. Then there was the brief scant images of the other specter: a dark, wild-haired figure that appeared behind him when his attention was directed elsewhere. Was it the Charon to the other two? The personification of the haunting as translated by a brain suffering from several drinks of alcohol through the night? Enslin was definitely getting the treatment for his stay, but he can't say for sure if it was part of his drinking or not.
Through the seven hours of his stay in the Dolphin, Enslin recalls more events that plied him that ranged from the slight and sublime to the obvious and terrifying. He felt extreme cold at one point, the paintings in the room molding and changing their images, a phantom telephone caller harassing him over wrong orders and erroneous wake-up-calls and even the layout and dimensions of the room changing around him. At times not even sure where he was, he would walk through the room and in a unerring path through the bathroom, bedroom and back to the honor bar in an unerring path waiting for something to happen or mulling over the images he was last plied with before his senses. At least for him, the ordeal turned into a dizzying cacophony of images and emotions just before he woke up to find himself being pulled from the room by firefighters. He doesn't even recall falling asleep on the floor nor the light fixture over his head smoking from the dust on it and erupting into flames, but he does have his tape recorder with his oral observations describing the first five hours and his ex-wife reporting he called her twice during the night over his laptop. Right there, Enslin would have written off the night as hallucinations but for a few things. In the video footage his wife logged on her computer, an anomalous shadow is hovering over Enslin as he is transmitting...
And then there is the matter of the child's EVP on his tape recorder....
History: Built in 1910 and opening on October 13, 1912, the Dolphin Hotel has had a long and industrious history with clients and guests ranging from politicians, celebrities and captains of industry. With over ninety-five years of service, it was fully modernized in 1979 with computer locks fully added in 1992. The more macabre nature of the hotel is the nature of the deaths to have occurred in 1408, consisting of seven jumpings, four overdoses, five hangings, three mutilations, two strangulations and then the twenty-two reported natural deaths by stroke or heart attack.
Identity of Ghosts: Olin calls the room evil, as if it were possessed by a demonic energies from its furniture to the plaster in the room. Enslin considered the room akin to a sensory deprivation tank preying on the minds of those who stayed too long within its walls. Known psychic Dawn Rochner calls the room psychically oppressed, preying on the living with the feelings of depression and inadequacy. She wonders if anyone died during proximity of the room during construction. She senses the presence of Kevin O'Malley, a sewing machine salesman who cut his wrists open in the room the same week the hotel opened. She also identifies a few other possible ghosts, Grady Miller, who fell into his chicken soup and drowned as a result in 1973, Randolph Hyde, the last recorded death from 1996, and an indiscernible overweight woman in a checkered dress as well as Albert Hicks, a ship's captain who killed off his crew in 1908, but she isn't quite sure just how he connects to the site since he was hung before it was built. According to the perceptions of the room felt by others, Rochner remarks: "People don't understand the true nature of the paranormal; that's why they consider it evil."
Investigations: Following the fire in 1408 and interest to finally disavow any paranormal activity attributed to the room, Gerald Olin allowed and chose for five different agencies to stay different respective dates to examine the room. The owners were quick to reopen, and the investigations were unpublicized for anonymity. Chosen for their degrees of professionalism, the agencies included New York Paranormal who stayed a night in the room and captured samples of electronic voice patterns they could not decipher. The supposed spirit voices were counted as "white noise," but more interesting was the account of poltergeist activity. Ray Stantz left a videotape camera going untouched for the night, and it recorded a microphone stand that slid into three difference locations less than a foot apart untouched. These movements were undetected to the human eye and noticed only when the footage was increased to catch the otherwise imperceptible movements.
To avoid cross-influencing the parties, Olin waited until all the investigations were completed and then allowed them to produce their findings en masse after the hotel reopened and then in a meeting closed to the public. Three days after Stantz's visit, the New England Bureau of Investigation had their visit to the charred remains of 1408. Their visit covered much of the entire twenty-fourth floor tracing cold spots, catching images of supposed orbs, discrediting voices from throughout the hotel's ventilation system and culminating with photo of a shadow standing in the doorway to the room, later blamed as a trick of light and shadow.
A week later, the paranormal investigators from the Manhattan Bureau of Paranormal Investigations, a division of the Universal Science Institute, a government research corporation, undertook an investigation that was more based on historical research and examination of the structure than the pursuit of ghosts. Their visit guided by Trace Austin and Steven Neal found inexplicable indications of electromagnetic energy around the room; such fields are known to result in distractions to the brain such as discomfort and paranoia. However, these fields were not found during previous investigations with EMR detectors so just what these fields were and what caused them was undetermined. The agency also suspected that, just as the majority of the Bermuda Triangle disappearances are fictional, so as they suspect the long-list of victims of 1408. No records or death certificates could be found for seventeen of the people claimed to have died in the room.
Before they could fully research the EMF fields to their source, designers made the final clean-up of the room; restoring the walls, laying new carpet, new wallpaper and new furnishings. Ahead of new furniture, it was now time for the Atlantic Paranormal Society from Rhode Island, a team of two headed by Jason Hawes. Their investigation redetected many of the same manifestations of the prior visits. The EMF fields reoccurred, the existence of cold spots, photos of possible orbs, anomalous humanoid shadows and member Dave Tango experienced sudden sensations of vertigo and stumbled out of the room. During a recorded conversation while sitting on the floor of the bedroom with Brian Harnois, Hawes had a reaction from one his questions that was not heard during the investigation. When asked if there was a spirit in the room, there was an incoherent voice saying "I'm here." and later when Harnois asked why didn't they just pass on, a different female child's voice asked, "Where's daddy?" In his initiative to adjust a loose faucet, Hawes later felt the presence of a woman standing over him. Thinking it was a maid checking on him, he shifted his weight to get out of her way and realized he was very much alone.
Almost on top of their investigation came the Collinsport Ghost Society. The first for Rochner as a field manager and going on Enslin's warnings, she recruited a very unusual tactic to examine the room: removing the door to the room, replacing it with a curtain and sending a remote camera on a mobile probe in transmitting through a cable to their cameras in another room across the hall. Local tabloids claimed it was because she was afraid of the room, but the actual truth was to engage an investigation that could not be tainted by a human presence in the room. The CGS recorded ingredients present from the other investigations, such as EMF fluxes, anomalous sounds attributed to the building creaking at night and samples of EVP, ("I'm down here." and "Send another."), both by roughly the same voice just thirty-eight seconds apart. A gift to the CGS by robotic engineer Grant Imahara, the probe was equipped with a high-intensity light source, highly sensitive microphone and a video camera device wired to a back-up computer and could effortlessly cover fifty feet, scaling stairways and making sharp-turns. Built for crampt spaces and rickety floors too dangerous for human beings, this was the first use of the probe in an investigation and despite a few quirks and unwieldy controls, it reacted admirably on the job. In pulling it back during wrap-up, it recorded footage of a shadow passing right over it as if someone had stepped over it. The movement of this shadow was noticed from the light trickling through the curtain in the door. No one was in the room at the time, and whether this shadow was a quirk of the device is unrevealed.
In the final analysis, no definite evidence was found that 1408 has a ghost. Nevertheless, it has been removed from hotel registry and is no longer rented to guests, instead used as storage for excess furniture, broken bric-a-brac and extra furnishings. However, for some reason, the room refuses to give up. 1408 still pops up from time to time in the list of available rooms despite being taken off the registry five times! Computer error perhaps?
Source/Comments: 1408 (2008)/ Everything's Eventual by Stephen King; including interviews with Michael Enslin and Gerald Olin, General Manager to the Dolphin
Albert Hicks from The Twilight Zone (Episode: "The New Exhibit")
Hauntings loosely based upon the Hollywood Roosevelt in Hollywood, California, the Miami Biltmore in Coral Gables, Florida, Rosario Resort on Orcas Island, Washington, the La Posada in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, California.