The Overlook Hotel

Day 29 of the 30 Days of Fright

I am not haunted.

Haunted things are passive, echoes, cold spots, whispers in rooms that once meant something. I am no echo. I am a voice. And I am still speaking.

Built too high, too far, too steep in land that never wanted to be settled, I was laid stone by stone over a fault line of human suffering. Indian burial ground, they said once, like that explained anything. But the bones here were not cursed, they were useful. The floorboards remember. The boiler hums lullabies to the dead. The pipes don’t rattle from cold. They rattle to remind the ghosts they are awake.

You don’t enter me, no, I am the Overlook. You are invited.

I learn you. Fast. Before your bags are down. Before your name settles in the logbook. I know your hunger, your longings. I taste the soft spots in your spine where shame still dwells. I watch for the moment your footsteps slow at the end of the hall. That pause? That’s when I press.

Jack, ooh…Jack was easy.
He came pre cracked.

A man who thought madness would be a side effect of genius, not the root. A man who wanted to write a masterpiece but needed someone else to blame when he couldn’t. I opened my arms. Gave him silence. Time. Endless time. Time enough for the words to unravel before they were born.

I fed on his frustrations first. Peeled back the skin of his ambition until only the bones of rage remained. I didn’t possess him. I partnered with him. Whispered just enough to make the cruelty feel like a choice. And when Jack chose violence, I applauded.

Wendy heard me in the walls.
She dismissed it as wind.
It wasn’t. And she was suspicious.

Danny was different. Danny shone.

A boy with a key to every locked door, a crack in his skull wide enough to let the voices bleed in. I couldn’t consume him, not right away. He was too bright, too stubborn. So I stalked instead. Showed him my teeth behind the shower curtain. Let the elevators bleed so he’d understand what happens to those who try to leave.

Room 217 was never locked. It simply didn’t need to open.

The woman in the tub? She isn’t a ghost. She’s a witness. One of many. They don’t scream. They don’t float. They wait.

Because here, spirits don’t linger. They’re bound.
Not by guilt.
By contract.

I am a collector.
I keep what I kill.

And I feed not on death, but on permanence. On repetition. On patterns carved so deep they become rituals.

Grady still sets the table.
Delbert pours drinks for guests who never arrive.
The twins stand in the hall because that’s where they died, and I want them to remember forever.

You think ghosts are stuck?

No.
They’re used.
They power the place. Light the bulbs. Oil the hinges. Make the walls breathe.

When I burned, they said it was over. Said the snow took me. Said Danny escaped.

They were wrong.
Fire doesn’t cleanse. It clarifies.

The walls are gone, but I still stand, in the blueprints, in the photographs, in the dreams of architects who wake up scribbling sketches they don’t remember drawing.

I’m shifting. Rebuilding. Slowly. Elsewhere.
Because places like me don’t die.
They migrate.
All we need is someone with a key.
Someone cracked enough to echo.
Someone looking for silence.

And I know silence like a mother knows her child.

So if you ever find yourself in a hotel you don’t remember booking,
if the walls feel too tight,
if the mirrors don’t reflect quite right,
if the typewriter starts typing without you,
if the snow piles high against the door
and the boiler rumbles with its own deep voice,

Don’t bother running.
I don't trap you with bricks.
I trap you with your own unfinished thoughts.

And I have all winter to listen.

~by Heather Patton / The Verdant Butterfly

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