Phantoms and Monsters

N.Y. Knicks Blame Loss On Ghostly Tales
Indonesian Locals Warn Guests About 'Satan's Hotel'
Disc-Shaped UFO Photographed By Hungarian Fighter Pilot
Wanted: Terminally Ill Volunteer Willing to be Mummified in TV Documentary

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 10:18 AM PST

nydailynews - The Knicks were afraid, very afraid. And it had nothing to do with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

For two days, several players had trouble sleeping because they were convinced that their downtown hotel is haunted.

"I definitely believe it," Jared Jeffries said. "The place is haunted. It's scary."

Eddy Curry claims he slept for only two hours Sunday night because he couldn't stop thinking about ghosts roaming the hotel.

For years, guests staying at the Skirvin Hilton have reported ghost sightings and strange noises. Legend has it that sometime in the 1930s, a woman jumped to her death while holding her baby in her hands.

"They said it happened on the 10th floor and I'm the only one staying on the 10th floor," Curry said. "That's why I spent most of my time in (Nate Robinson's) room. I definitely believe there are ghosts in that hotel."

Assistant coach Herb Williams teased Jeffries and Curry for believing that the Skirvin is haunted, but Curry wasn't laughing.

"There are too many stories," Curry said. "Something is going on there."
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THE SKIRVIN'S STRANGE PAST...AND PRESENT

This beautiful, grand hotel was built during 1910-1911. by oil and land development entrepreneur, the always well-dressed, proper William Balser Skirvin. William and architect Solomon Layton created a most luxurious, deluxe hotel on the land that he owned at 1 Park Avenue and Broadway. William Skirvin originally wanted a 6 storied building. However, the plans were changed, adding an additional 4 floors, at the recommendation of his architect Solomon Layton, who designed the Oklahoma City Capitol building,

Impressive woodwork, high ceilings and the best of materials and craftsmanship surely does create a high-end, classy hotel. "Malakoff bricks for the exterior, ornate marble for the lobby, and rare woods for paneling" were some of these high quality materials. The hotel had its own gas pipeline to the building, three wells to provide for its water supply, and its own electric plant. These extras allowed the hotel to have its own laundry facility and cooling system. Air conditioning, running water, telephones and private baths in all of the rooms, and a large, 500 seat ballroom were some of the amenities offered to its guests.

A wide range of people enjoyed their stay at the Skirvin Hotel. Being close to the State Capitol building brought in a wealthy clientele, who could afford the price of admission, and enjoyed the perks of the place. Also, other clientele reflected the "frontier character" of Oklahoma, an up and coming state. Indians, ranchers, and drillers were also welcomed.

A new 12 story wing was added to the hotel in 1926. Because of the new oil boom in 1928, $3 million dollars worth of improvements were made to the hotel. By 1930, all floors of the hotel had 14 stories, creating 525 rooms and suites, plus additional features making better use of the hotel, and providing more opportunities for income. While it was a while before the suites on the 14th floor were ready for guests, the rooftop Venetian Room and Restaurant & cabaret, located in the middle wing was up and running from the start, and was very popular.

An additional $75,000 was spent in improving the lobby. It was "doubled in size, furniture was reupholstered in floral designs, specially designed Gothic lanterns costing $1,000 each were suspended from the ceiling, and hand-carved English fumed oak was added to the walls and doors."

During the prohibition years, The Skirvin Hotel provided a safe room for private drinking for its guests; a perk they were never busted on by the authorities, who had bigger fish to fry.

During WW 2, the hotel suffered some decline, and lost some of its luster. When William Skirvin died in 1944, The Skirvin Hotel was sold to Dan W. James, who spend the next 10 years investing money in its upkeep and making improvements. In 1963, Mr. James sold The Skirvin Hotel to Chicago investors, which was the beginning of a period of struggle for this hotel. This hotel passed through several owners, who did their best to keep the place going in the right direction.

In 1979, The Skirvin Hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, which gave it some protection from developers. The Skirvin Hotel was in need of major renovations in 1989, but there were not enough funds to accomplish this, so this hotel was closed, and remained so until it was purchased by Oklahoma City in 2002. In 2004, The Skirvin Group began restoration and renovation efforts, in partnership with Marcus Hotels and Resorts, and funded mainly by a financing package developed by the Oklahoma City, City Council. This huge restoration project, costing millions of dollar,was finished on time and within budget. This newly restored, grand lady of a hotel reopened on March 2007, as The Skirvin Hilton Hotel.

The Hauntings

During the prohibition years, high class "social escorts" perhaps made their way to the Skirvin Hotel, past the main desk to service gentlemen guests. This hotel was so large it would be hard to know what was going on in all 224 guest rooms, and outside entities probably invaded with ease, as William Skirvin welcomed everyone, in the spirit of hospitality. As an unintended consequence of one such encounter, a young woman met her end in one of the rooms.

Sometime during the 1930's after all the floors were 14 stories, it is said, perhaps by his enemies, that W.B. Skirvin himself had an affair with a young maid, and a pregnancy resulted. To avoid the scandal and the ruination of his name, the legend says that W.B. Skirvin held the maid captive on top of the 14th floor, before and after her pregnancy. The distressed young woman supposedly would scream and bang on the door, but no one would help her out of her prison. The maid eventually went mad, and jumped out the window with her baby in her arms. The one flaw in his dastardly tale is that by 1930, William would've been a pretty old man to be chasing the maids around the bed. He was born in 1860, which means he would've been in his 70's.

This may be just a libelous story, but it is true that a maid did jump from the ledge with her baby, perhaps suffering from a combination of postpartum depression, abandonment by her lover and a sense of hopelessness in her life.

Manifestations

Cries and screams of a woman are heard.

Strange noises and items being moved by an unseen presence have been reported.

Female entity of the young prostitute:

Male guests of the Skirvin Hotel throughout the years have reported hearing a disembodied female voice propositioning them.

On occasion, this female prostitute appears in the bathroom when an unsuspecting male is taking a shower.

One male guest reports that he woke up with this amorous female entity in his bed! I bet he made a quick exit!

Entities of the maid, known as Effie by the staff, and her baby girl.

A maid's cart, with no person attached to it, has been seen rolling up and down the halls of the hotel.

Her apparition has been seen, wandering up and down the hallways, trying to find some peace, as suicide seldom brings relief from the distress of life.

Her apparition has been seen standing a distance from the window she jumped from. One witness saw her run to the window, like she was going to go out, and then fades into nothing.

The cries of the baby sometimes keep female guests awake.

Sources:
www.strangeusa.com
theshadowlands.net
www.hauntedhouses.com
www.okc.gov
www.dreadcentral.com

Indonesian Locals Warn Guests About 'Satan's Hotel'

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 09:48 AM PST

thejakartaglobe - Thunder crackled ominously and rain lashed down from a leaden sky. The headlights of the trucks plying the Surabaya-Malang highway were orange smears in the dusk. It was time to stop for the night.

The hotel I was headed to loomed up on the right, a five-story hulk of salmon-pink masonry towering over the low-rise town of Lawang in East Java. "Hotel Niagara" read the sign above the door.

"Yes, we have a room available," said the man at the desk, adding, with what could have been a sinister smile, "It's on the third floor."

The third floor? Wasn't that where they said the locked room never rented to guests was located? I put the thought from my mind and followed the receptionist past an empty dining hall and up gloomy flights of tiled stairs. There was a faint smell of furniture polish and old wood.

The room was at the back of the building. It was enormous, with a high ceiling and a balcony. The receptionist handed me the key. "Breakfast is included," he said, and turned away, his footsteps fading along the dark corridor. Breakfast? I had to get through the night first …

My arrival at Hotel Niagara, seemingly plucked from the opening scenes of a scary movie, was entirely appropriate. The suggestion of spending a night there had prompted near hysteria from my otherwise rational Indonesian friends.

The century-old colonial relic, about 70 kilometers south of Surabaya, was haunted, they said. Many years ago a Dutch woman had thrown herself from one of the balconies — or perhaps she had been brutally murdered there by Japanese soldiers during World War II. But whatever the details of the story, all agreed that the building was the abode of terrifying spirits. The fifth floor, rumor had it, was so riddled with malevolent ghosts that it was closed to the public, there was a room somewhere in the hotel that had a tendency to fill with blood at night and, of course, there was that locked room on the third floor.

All that only made me more determined to go and investigate.

"Just make sure you sprinkle salt under your bed," one friend suggested — an apparently fail-safe anti-ghost measure.

"And don't be surprised if you don't wake up in the same place where you went to sleep," added another.

It had all seemed rather silly at the time, but now I wasn't so sure.

At the back of my room was a locked door. I tentatively slid the bolt. Behind it was a flimsy sheet of wood. It gave way slightly to my touch and a gust of icy air rushed over my fingers. Could the notorious locked room lie behind it?

Apparently not. There was another occupied room beside mine; the sheet of wood merely blocked an old dividing doorway. But there were plenty of other spooky corners. At the head of the stairs was the entrance to the old elevator shaft. Again the teak-and-glass doors creaked open to my touch. Again there was a gust of icy air followed by a nervous retreat.

The way to the floors above was blocked by a "do not enter" sign, and beyond it a sturdy metal gate. Through the bars I could see a corridor and half-ajar doors in the gloom. The fourth and fifth floors were decidedly off limits. What was up there? The bleeding room? The ghost of the Dutch woman?

Night had fallen. I went back to my room and turned on the television. No lank-haired demoness crawled out of the screen. I took a shower. No blood poured from the taps. I settled down under my blanket. Was that the distant sound of mournful singing in Dutch. Or just Indonesian pop music from the television in the next room? I wasn't sure, but before long I was fast asleep.

Ghost stories aside, Hotel Niagara certainly has an interesting past. Today the little town of Lawang is just a string of concrete shops. Modern travelers from Surabaya merely shoot a nervous glance at the haunted hotel and head on to Malang. But in the colonial era, Lawang itself was an upland retreat of considerable renown.

The hotel was originally built at the turn of the 20th century as a private villa for a wealthy local Chinese businessman, Liem Sian Joe. The architect, Fritz Joseph Pinedo, was also responsible for various notable buildings in Surabaya, but for the villa he eschewed the usual Indo-Nederlands style for what could best be described as proto-Art Deco with Latinate touches. Five stories high with an elevator, it was a cutting-edge design for its time.

The building remained a private residence until the 1960s when Liem Sian Joe's family, fallen on hard times, departed for the Netherlands. But most of the original features remain — the tile-work, wood paneling, vaulted ceilings and the windows, still bearing the "LSJ" motif of the original owner.

Unlike other colonial-era hotels in Indonesia, the Niagara has not been restored; it has been preserved. And though the balconies may be a little mildewed, with the simplest of the 14 rooms costing only Rp 75,000 ($8) per night it's both authentic and cheap — and there's always the chance of a haunting thrown in.

Clear-headed questions are best left for the morning, and after waking up in exactly the same place where I went to sleep, I set out to quiz the hotel staff.

Two uniformed young men, Adi and Gunawan, were cleaning the room next to mine. Were the ghost stories true, I asked.

"I've been working here for two years," Gunawan said, smiling at the familiar question. "I've never seen or heard or felt anything."

"I'm still new here, but neither have I," Adi added.

But what about the rumors — why were the upper floors closed? "They're under renovation," Gunawan said.

And was it true about the locked room on the third floor? They laughed: "Nonsense, we use them all. You can see if you want," Gunawan said.

According to Gunawan the lurid ghost stories had their origins in nothing more than the fact that the Niagara is an unusual old building. "The people who say those things are always people who have never stayed here," he said.

Their smiles were reassuring, but I glanced in the direction of the locked gate and the forbidden floors. Could they be hiding something? Don't be silly, I told myself, heading downstairs to check out.

When I asked Ratti, the woman working at the reception desk, about ghosts, she said, "I've been here for seven years. I stay in the hotel 24 hours a day and I've never seen anything strange, and neither have any guests I know of. Why? Did you?"

"Well, no."

"Floor five was never renovated when they converted the building to a hotel, and it's not safe. Floor four we used to use, but now it's just for storage. That's why they're closed, not because of haunted rooms."

I paid my bill and Ratti bade me a cheery farewell. I went outside and started my motorbike. The sky was already dark with rain clouds. Lack of ghosts aside, Hotel Niagara had certainly been an interesting place to spend the night, and at least I would be able to disabuse my friends in Surabaya of their wild ideas.

There was another reassuring smile from the security man at the gate, and I glanced back over my shoulder for one last look at the towering pink-and-white facade. The lights were on the fifth floor…
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A GUEST'S ASSESSMENT OF THE NIAGARA HOTEL

At a hotel, in the business of offering hospitality and service, one, of course, expects that standardized warm, blabbering, unstoppable promotional introduction from any of its staff. So what's going on in here?

The distant look of the staff is off-putting. Therooms are well lit but appear gloomy. A reproduction of an old painting of Dutch girls and the plastic flowers on the dining tables, large teak window panels and the dusty elevator all add to the hollow feeling that this is a place which time has sadly passed by.

"I am new here, so it's better you talk to pak Willy," he said, breaking the awkward silence and introducing a polite, sharp-eyed security guard.

Saying he was a new employee was a polite way of excusing himself from saying anything about the hotel, or having to answer any delicate questions. Only eight people work at the hotel, most of them locals, although Willy was from Flores.

When one sees the beauty and faded elegance of the hotel, it's especially confounding that the people running it seem to be doing their best to keep it out of the public eye.

But perhaps they have reason to be wary. Their indifferent attitude is best characterized as a defense mechanism, for the hotel has long been the
subject of a particularly nasty rumor that has kept visitors at bay.

Media, including leading Kompas daily, have "exposed" the story of the supposedly haunted hotel. Now it's the first thing that comes to mind for locals, and others from all over who have heard the story, true or not, of a suicide on the premises (the legend also comes in various other grisly versions).

Well, those kind of things surely kill business. People's interest in coming, even to drop by for a coffee or another item from the hotel's limited menu, soon vanishes.

Travelers from Surabaya would rather give the hotel a furtive passing glance on their way to Malang, an hour's drive from Lawang, to stay the night.

"What are you doing at satan's (devil's) hotel. It's spooky. No one goes there anymore," a taxi driver chided, the second or third person to proffer the warning.

Still, not everybody buys the tales of hauntings; poet W.S. Rendra and actress Yessy Gusman and her family are among those who have stayed there.

The building, dating back to 1918 and designed by Brazilian-born architect Fritz Joseph Pinedo, is one of East Java's designated heritage buildings.

It was originally a magnificent villa owned by Chinese trade baron Liem Sian Yu, who later fell on hard times and left for the Netherlands. The building was bought by a local family and converted into a hotel in the 1960s.

Sources:
www.niagaramalang.com
www.endlessindonesia.com
www.mail-archive.com/ppiindia@yahoogroups.com

Disc-Shaped UFO Photographed By Hungarian Fighter Pilot

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 08:42 AM PST

Translated commentary - Budapest, Hungary - 2001. On 29 September, a Hungarian fighter pilot allegedly made a video recording of silver, disc-shaped object. Right hand approached the object, and then passed to the next plane, and disappeared into the clouds, as it appears on the tape well. The Defense Ministry did not respond to questions regarding video shooting, and also pointed out that they will not officially comment on the case. The denial notwithstanding, it became apparent that the person really belongs to the Hungarian Air Force, and indeed carried out reconnaissance flight over the capital."

NOTE: it seems that the Hungarian Defense Ministry has been sitting on this sighting for awhile. Since it's seen in a cumulus cloud canopy, the altitude is likely to be between 10K-20K feet. It's difficult to determine distance. Reports from eastern Europe tend to be embellished a bit, but since this came from the government gives it a bit of credence...Lon

Wanted: Terminally Ill Volunteer Willing to be Mummified in TV Documentary

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 07:03 AM PST

dailymail - Channel 4 looks set to become embroiled in another taste row after backing a project which seeks to mummify a terminally-ill volunteer for a TV documentary.

The body of the candidate selected to be embalmed could then end up being displayed in a museum.

If the project goes ahead it will follow a trail of programmes which seek to challenge views on death. Television audiences have been shown an autopsy, carried out by the controversial German anatomist Dr Gunther von Hagens, and an on-screen assisted suicide.

Channel 4 and production company Fulcrum TV have advertised in magazines for possible candidates to volunteer.

The advert reads: 'We are currently keen to talk to some one who, faced with the knowledge of their own terminal illness and all that it entails, would nonetheless consider undergoing the process of an ancient Egyptian embalming.'

An English scientist claims to have unlocked the secrets of mummification. His efforts at recreating the work of Egyptians will be the subject of the documentary.

Embalming was a common death ritual for 3,000 years, when some cultures believed it was necessary preparation for the afterlife.

The Egyptians were able to 'mummify' bodies for longer than any other civilisation, and are believed to have used resins found only in Burma - more than 4,000 miles from Egypt - in the process.

Fulcrum TV's Richard Belfield told a reporter from the Independent newspaper, posing as a volunteer: 'We would like to film with you over the next few months to understand who you are and what sort of person you are so the viewers get to know you and have a proper emotional response to you.

'It may sound rather macabre but we have mummified a large number of pigs to check that the process worked and it does. We have lined up scientists to support the project and found a place approved by the Human Tissue Authority where the mummification would take place.

'Afterwards one thought was – though this is not obligatory – to put the body in an exhibition in a proper museum so people can properly understand the mummification process. That is something we would be flexible about.

'But we would like to keep the body for two or three years to see that the mummification process worked. Then the normal funeral arrangements could be made.'

He said payment would not be made, but that costs would be covered.

Mr Belfield added: 'The Egyptians were extremely clever organic chemists. Some of the materials they used came from as far afield as Burma and the Far East. One resin they used we know only existed in Burma. One thing we want to explore is how they developed their knowledge of chemistry.'

A Channel 4 spokesman told the newspaper that it had given development funds to Fulcrum. These are used to look into the project's viability. The spokesman added: 'We're fascinated by the research that is taking place. If the scientists are able to find a willing donor we'd be interested in following the process.

'And if you were to question why we were interested we'd say "If the scientists have solved one of the ancient world's most enduring mysteries [the process of mummification] it would give us a unique insight into science and Egyptian history and may well prove to have other significant benefits for medical science."

In recent years there have been several programmes which seek to challenge views on death.

Eight years ago, Dr von Hagens performed an autopsy in front of a theatre audience in East London, the first in public for 170 years.

Wearing a black hat throughout, he cut up the body of a 72-year-old former chain-smoking German alcoholic in front of 500 people.

Before he carried it out he was warned by the Department of Health that he would be breaking the Anatomy Act by holding a post-mortem examination on unlicensed premises.

The autopsy was shown on Channel 4 and resulted in 130 complaints.

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