Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

A little background on this story – when I was still in middle school we would take one week-long class trip a year (we called them “Spring Trip”) and we would go places that had relevance to whatever topics we were studying that year. Because class sizes were small, grades 6-8 were taught together for a majority of the classes. Spring trip took all three grades at once.

This particular Spring Trip is one I will never forget. I was in the eighth grade and we were visiting the city of San Francisco. I don’t remember the name of the hotel we were staying in, but I ended up in a room with one of my friends. Over every bed in the place was what appeared to be a painting of an elderly man in wire-rimmed glasses. In his hands was a lady’s heeled boot and he appeared to be sitting inside of a workshop, like he made boots.

On the shelves behind him were piles of leather and paper. There was a candle on his desk. Oddly, his eyes seemed to follow you around the room, and it was like, even when you closed the bathroom door you could feel him staring at you through the wall and the door. The room itself was quite small. There were two single beds pushed into one corner, and then a dresser behind the door. A television was hung over the top of the dresser and there was a coat rack next to the door going into the tiny bathroom.

At night, it felt even more crowded, and the picture was hung over the beds, making it feel like this old man was looming over you.

Due to the nature of the trip, we were almost constantly out of the hotel, visiting museums and landmarks, going to get meals and basically having a good time. The first time we noticed something was up, we had come back in early evening with an assignment to write about what we had learned about over the course of the day. Afterward we would be getting together in our student-teacher groups to discuss, and to get the detailed itinerary for the next day.

When we went back in the room my friend stopped dead in the doorway and looked at the picture. “Wasn’t the boot in his hands?” she asked quietly, pointing at it. When I looked at it, a cold chill went over the back of my neck. The boot was no longer in the man’s hands. It was now on its side on the shelf behind him. His hands were folded in front of him and he seemed to be smiling unpleasantly.

Bothered, but wondering if we had simply made a mistake when we had initially seen it we sat next to each other and worked, keeping our eyes on it the whole time. We commented on how creepy the painting in our room was when we went back to our group for discussion. When we went back for bed the painting was back to normal, and the man had his neutral expression back on his face.

However, over the course of the week the painting changed several more times- one time he was looking at something to the side of the frame, when he had previously been staring straight ahead. Another time, he was making a new boot instead of holding the finished one. The day before we left, he was standing up instead of sitting down and the boot was back on the shelf behind him again.

I don’t really know what was going on, but when we came back we both did some research on the place where we had been staying. That specific floor was supposed to be haunted by a cook that had worked there many years ago. The two of us still get cold chills when we talk about it, because we know what that painting looked like the first time we went in, and we know for sure that it had changed several times over the week we were there.

Sent in by Kxaltli, Copyright 2010 TrueGhostTales.com