Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

Four years ago I was spending a large part of the summer traveling through Europe. I spent two days in Verdun, France, touring the World War I battle sites. I was staying in a hotel that occupied a very old building, one that was certainly there before the 1914 -18 war. I was in a room on the top floor of a three story building with a window face eastwards, toward the battlefield.

The bed was situated by the entrance to the room, with the foot of the bed in the direction of the window. When lying on my back, with my head on the pillow, I was actually facing the window.

The second night in that room, I went to bed around 10:30 and fell asleep quickly, but something woke me up a couple of hours later. I had a few seconds of that state in which you are awake, but are not fully aware of the fact that you are awake. As I slowly realized that I was no longer sleeping, my eyes opened and were draw to the window. Within a few seconds, I realized that there was a figure framed in the window, a human figure.

I raised myself up onto my elbows and looked harder at the figure in the window. It looked like a man wearing a military looking jacket and a French style Kepi hat, with his back to me. He appeared to be leaning on the window sill and staring out the window in the direction of what would have been in the Front during the war. I did not think of it in these terms at the moment, but in retrospect I it looked like ghost of a French officer gazing out toward the battle lines.

There was a light beside the bed, and I switched in on – and the figure was gone. It was also not there when I turned the light back off a few seconds later, so I know that the figure was not a shadow cast from outside the room.

I turned the light back on and got out of bed to look around and see if there was something I could have seen and was mistaking for a human like figure. I walked up to the window and looked around, and it was at that moment that I remembered something – I had lowered the window shade when I went to bed, and now it was up! That thought raised the goosebumps on me, because I knew I might have imagined the figure of a man at the window – but I was not imagining the fact that the window shade was now up.

So, for the past four years, I have believed that I saw a ghost in my hotel room that night.

Sent in by Pat, Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com