Things I Feared Most to Write, Part Four

Folds in Time and Space? The Kennedy Warren Redux, and The Haunted Omni Hotel

I’m picking up again with my reluctant essays on the metaphysical, that have been so surprisingly warmly received.

I shared in the essay “Things I Feared Most to Write, Part Three” some creepy experiences that Brian and I had with a realm that seemed — well — ghostly. Again: I don’t seek out these experiences, I don’t want to believe in them, I don’t want them around. And yet it seems these days that a dimension is, or perhaps many dimensions at once are, merging into us and descending upon us and manifesting among us — good ones and bad ones and plain old unnerving ones.

It often feels these days like that moment when the optician tries your right eye with the left one blocked, then tries the left eye with the right one blocked, and finally pulls away both eyeshades to show you your new ability to focus with both eyes with new sharpness in three dimensions.

Everything every day becomes more and more different than it has been, for better and for worse.

A few months ago I went to Washington, DC, to stop for some meetings on my way to visit friends in Virginia. I checked into the Omni Hotel, on Connecticut Avenue, which is a familiar street to me. I was back in what had once, long ago, been my neighborhood.

When I was a young bride, in the early 1990s, and when my then-husband was one of President Clinton’s speechwriters, we used to live in an elegant, famously haunted, art-deco masterpiece: an apartment complex called the Kennedy-Warren, right next door to the National Zoo.

Our apartment at that time was on the first floor, which was below the street grade: so the windows looked out to the rear of the complex, into the fresh green foliage of Rock Creek Park.

At night, from somewhere across the ravine, you could hear the zoo elephants trumpeting. In the morning, you heard the screech of the cheetahs and the chatter of monkeys. Nothing was visible from our windows at that time but waving, billowing leaves, as far as the eye could see. It was like living in a glamorous 1930s-era treehouse.

Our then-baby daughter learned to crawl on the gold-and-grey medallions of the deep carpet on the hallways of the Kennedy Warren. And when she was four or five months old, she had a little wheeled baby-scooter in which could sit and push herself with her feet; though she could not yet walk, she would go zooming down the long hallways, racing with a manic grin past the doorways of retired Cold War-era spies and retired Vietnam-era policy wonks. We called her contraption, ‘the Maserati.’

Decades later, long after that young marriage had ended, and by the time that then-racing-baby was a young woman, and her brother, not yet then born, was a young man, I found myself in the Kennedy Warren again.

This time, I was with Brian, the man who would become my second husband, and with whom I was in the process of falling deeply in love.

Brian had looked for a place to live after his own marriage had ended, and he had found the right apartment for him, and for his shared custody of his then five-year-old son, at — the Kennedy-Warren.

This time, the apartment in which he lived, and in which I visited him, was on the fourth floor, not on the first.

But this apartment too looked out over the same ravine as the one I had overlooked 27 years previously. There were the same green treetops, only this time seen from a higher perspective.

I had the surreal experience of waking nearly three decades later next to a different man, but in the same green light as that in which I had awakened decades before, to the same imponderable sounds of the roar of elephants, and the shrieking chatter of monkeys.

When I checked in at the front desk, this time around, some of the staff were the same as when I had lived there in the 1990s. I had the bizarre experience of going with Brian into the gilded, old-school clubroom — it hadn’t been there in the Clinton era — and being greeted by some of my former neighbors from that time; people now elderly and slow-moving, who recognized me, and who were just as gossipy as before.

At one point I followed five-year-old Alex, Brian’s son, down the long carpeted hallway, and he started to race with joy. I ran after him exactly the way I had once run after my little baby daughter, and I felt nearly vertiginous with the sense of deja vu.

What a surprise to find a little person in my life again — and myself as a participant in a new little constellation; but somehow in the same place as the last time I had raced after a tiny person down these same hallways in this same elegant art-deco structure.

I had the otherworldly feeling at that moment, that time was not a line but a spiral. Perhaps it was even a circle.

Why was I back, starting a new role as a stepmom, exactly where I had begun when I started my new role as a mom? I felt as if I was being recycled. I did have lots more ‘motherishness’ in me left, to give, it was true. But did the universe work this way? Did the universe — know that? Did Alex and Brian and Brian’s wish for me to be there with them, magnetize me somehow physically, back to the Kennedy Warren?

Do our needs and desires magnetize others always, perhaps, and maybe even magically draw events and places, toward us?

It was like a “Sliding Doors” episode in my life. It felt more symbolic than coincidental.

It made no rational sense at all; but also, it made a kind of poetic sense.

####

So — now, eight years after that time in my life, and now married to Brian and stepmother of a teenager, I was back in my two-times previous stomping grounds.

This time around, I was checking in to the Omni Hotel, which was down the street from where we used to live. The Omni was from the same era as the Kennedy Warren: it too is a famous Art Deco structure, built to great fanfare in 1930, over another ravine of Rock Creek Park.

The hotel does not seem unusual superficially. It is a popular location for conventions and for events. It has hosted, over the course of its history, many luminaries. It’s no doubt been utilized as a love nest for many illicit assignations. It’s not a spooky place at all, at least in its outward facing press: you can find it on Booking.com, and it is part of a familiar chain hotel brand:

“[T]he Omni Shoreham Hotel hosted more than just Hollywood’s finest—it quickly became an established haunt for some of the nation’s most prolific politicians. In total, the hotel has hosted seven U.S. senators, 18 congresspeople, and more than a dozen U.S. Presidents throughout its history. President Harry S. Truman was considered something of a regular at the hotel, as he was seen playing poker regularly in Room 406D with Speaker of the House John McCormack, Senator Warren G. Magnuson, Representative William “Fishbait” Miller, and Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington. President John F. Kennedy was also another common guest, who often sipped on cocktails in the Blue Room with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy. The Omni Shoreham Hotel even became the sight of 12 different inaugural balls, starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1933.”

Press copy promotes other visitors: “Countless stars have held many shows at the hotel over the years, including Aretha Franklin, Eartha Kitt, Bob Hope, George Kirby, Phyllis Diller, and the Smothers Brothers. […] Most of these acts occurred frequently inside the hotel’s legendary Blue Room, where sightings of celebrities still happen to this very day.”

The Beatles at the Shoreham:

It all seemed fine.

I checked in at the front desk, and some faint impulse prompted me to joke to the staff, “Just don’t put me in a haunted room.” They chuckled, but did not respond, and they gave me a key to a room on the seventh floor.

I made my way to a wing that seemed a bit dingy, and that had a heavy atmosphere. I opened the door — it looked like a standard, slightly dusty, room in a three- or four-star chain hotel.

There were the regulation grey-upholstered chairs facing one another at the circular glass table at the window, and there was the big comfortable bed with its plush white coverlet. Nondescript black-and-white photographs of Washington, DC sights, in black and silver frames, hung on the wallpapered walls.

I felt a sense of oppression, but I assumed that I should just open the window and turn on some lights.

As I was washing up in the bathroom, I had my first unnerving moment. As I brushed my teeth, I noticed that every tissue in the bathroom was waving gently, as if in a distinct breeze.

I looked at the bathroom window — it was closed. The bathroom door too was closed! I opened the bathroom door and looked out into the room itself — could the breeze be entering from the front door? But a closet door faced the bathroom door squarely. There could be no breeze entering the bathroom from the front door.

Yet I had clearly seen the motion of the breeze. From where was it arising?

Uneasy, I moved to the bed and got under the covers. I chatted on the phone with a loved one who lived in DC.

“You’re at the Omni?” he said with concern. “You know it’s haunted, right?”

“Don’t tell me anything” I replied. “I have to sleep here tonight.”

“Okay,” my loved one said doubtfully.

At four o’clock in the morning exactly, I awoke with a start. I stared into the darkness, rigid with fear. I was lying on my side, facing away from the door. I had been awakened by the sensation of the mattress being pressed down behind my back, and by a ghostly hand, that felt like the hand of a small child, pressing lightly against the small of my back.

I was in that state of fear that was like the fear-state I experienced when I heard the ghostly footsteps in the cabin in Massachusetts. It was as if time and space were locked with a metal lock, and I was immobilized.

Somehow I eventually slept again, and early in the morning I started to get ready to go down for breakfast. I began rationalizing to myself. Did I imagine all of it? I hoped so. I had a second night to get through in that hotel.

I then put my cellphone on the top of a dresser and turned away, to finish buttoning my dress. When I turned back to retrieve my cellphone from the top of the dresser, the cellphone was gone.

I looked around, confused. I then saw my cellphone: it was now squarely in the center of the king-size bed, with none of the linens disturbed from the way they had been a moment before. It was as if someone bored and disembodied was in the room with me, simply playing games.

I was having no more of it. I jammed my clothes willy-nilly into my suitcase, grabbed my phone and purse, shoved my sockless feet into my boots, and raced out the door. I hurtled, not caring how disheveled I must have looked, to the end of the long, spooky hallway, and pressed the button to the elevator over and over, with a racing heart.

I got myself to the lobby and checked out. It was not yet full daylight. It was six thirty in the morning.

In the cab — having told the driver to take me right to Union Station for my unexpectedly early onward journey — I checked my phone. I googled “Omni Hotel — Haunted.”

I got this, from the Omni Hotel’s own website:

“Shoreham Fun Facts:

• The Beatles stayed at the Shoreham during their first trip to the U.S. Their hand-written set list is printed on Shoreham stationery & displayed in the lobby.

• Our Ghost Suite, #870, is said to be haunted by two ghosts; former Executive Housekeeper & a young girl. [Italics mine]

• “Hail to the Redskins!” – the fight song for the Washington Redskins – was written in the Blue Room and debuted on August 17, 1938.

• When Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his first presidential inaugural ball at the Shoreham, the hotel had a ramp and elevator installed to accommodate his needs.”

The fact that that part of the hotel was known to be haunted, was not a “Fun Fact” to me! I had been on the seventh floor, almost directly under Suite #870.

It turned out that there were many websites devoted to the well-known unearthly inhabitants of the Omni hotel. “Boo: Omni Shoreham Hotel’s Haunted History” explains:

“[T]here was darkness behind the glittery facade. After the hotel's construction, a minority shareholder and wealthy businessman, Henry Doherty, moved with his family to an exquisite eighth floor apartment with the executive housekeeper of the hotel, Juliette Brown. Brown woke up ill one morning and reached for the phone to dial a doctor. A few hours later, an engineer noticed a phone line was off the hook, and he discovered her dead, with a phone hanging just inches from her hand.

The coroner reported she died of natural causes, but later, the Doherty family's daughter also died in the suite, leading to rumors of suicide or a drug overdose. The family left the suite in 1973, after four decades of residence, and for a number of years, the suite remained empty and shut off from the rest of the hotel.

Despite this, the hallway around the suite had a number of minor disturbances, like moving carts and unexplained breezes. [Italics mine] The room where the strange occurrences were reported have come to be known as "The Ghost Suites." Guests have claimed to see a little girl was running around the halls and an older woman in a long, old-fashioned dress roamed the halls. In 1997, the hotel decided to renovate the suite. During renovations, a worker fell to his death from the balcony. Some of the more superstitious staff members refuse to even go up there alone, and complaints from guests on the floor still come in frequently.

Are you brave enough to spend a night in the Ghost Suite? Book a room (when the hotel re-opens in January 2021) and find out if the stories are true!

But, you might want to sleep with the lights on . . . just in case.”

NBC4’s article “The Omni Shoreham’s Haunted History” has more detail, and it is even more disturbing. This account describes drawers opening and closing by themselves in the “Ghost Room”, a woman in the long dress appearing in the hallways, a worker’s antenna being flicked against his back, a pool of blood on the carpet that appeared and then disappeared, flickering lights, ghostly piano music, suicides, and more.

A journalist for The Washingtonian who tried to sleep in Suite 870, experienced repeated mysterious creaking, doors opening and shutting, and lights turning on inexplicably. He gives a bit more detail about the housekeeper who died: “One night at 4 am, Juliette Brown, the family’s live-in housekeeper, dropped dead while placing a call to the hotel’s front desk.”

The staff say that some workers refuse to enter the suite; others say that the key to “the Ghost room” jams, and that entry is sometimes prevented, in effect, by whoever or whatever is in there.

#####

I’ve had time to reflect on my horrible, horrible night in the Omni Shoreham hotel.

I would like to explain away everything that happened there as having been caused by everyday forces, but I can’t.

I hadn’t read about the history of the hotel, when I experienced these events.

So — how coincidental was it that the hand I felt on the small of my back belonged to a child? How coincidental was it that I awoke exactly at four am, just when the housekeeper Juliette Brown was said to have passed away, and exactly when other guests also report having been awakened?

How coincidental was it that I too, without having read about the hotel’s impossible breezes, also experienced an impossible breeze?

Maybe all of this is a set of coincidences. Maybe it is not.

I was glad to take my onward journey, scruffy and a bit shell-shocked as I no doubt looked to the other train passengers, away from this dimension of weirdness, and into the sun and relative peace of the Virginia countryside.

But all of this left me once again reflecting.

Everything is obviously other than what we have, via a credo of seeing nothing as being real but secular materialism, been told.

How can nothing be allowed to be real but secular materialism, and yet the DC press is full of people seeing and hearing, in this one hotel, the same things, all of which are not supposed to exist? How can both of these things be true at once?

On a happy note, maybe we really do get drawn by forces beyond our understanding, or even by human need and desire, to wonderful people and places and experiences that God or Fate or the universe, has arranged for us. Maybe we materialize our reality by our consciousness and and are materialized by others’ consciousness in turn.

But the darker possibilities must then also be true.

Maybe some places are actually changed by sinful or by cruel or violent events, and that those in turn change reality in those places. Perhaps such events even warp the normal laws of physics; creating folds or vortices or interruptions of some kind, in the normal fabric of reality.

Maybe there really are discarnate spirits.

And maybe we really do need protection from them.

And, at the same time,

Maybe they really do

Need our prayers.