On June 12, 2007 in California Westwood premiered the film “1408”, an adaptation of Stephen King's story of the same name, directed by Mikael Hofström and starring John Cusack. Huge bets on the picture no one made - horror-adaptations of King's prose is not always brought outstanding fees, but in this case, the audience received more than competent genre picture, which is now considered one of the best tape from the film universe of the king of horror. In honor of the 15th anniversary, I probably should have made you happy with some of my next crazy theory, but I've been overdoing something with it the last few days. So I decided to approach the events at the Dolphin Hotel from a different angle - through real horror, which is more frightening than fiction.
It is alleged that King on the story of the cursed room quite ordinary hotel prompted by reading in some magazine investigation of an expert on the paranormal phenomena Christopher Chacon. Honored in his circle, the expert described his acquaintance with the mystery of the Hotel del Coronado, in which guests allegedly encountered unexplained frightening incidents, than stirred King's own impressions of hotel rooms. Remember how the movie's protagonist Mike Enslin refers to them: “...But hotel rooms are usually frightening in and of themselves, aren't they? When you enter a room, you have to wonder how many people have slept in that bed before you. How many of them were sick? How many were crazy? How many have thought about reading a few lines from the Bible on the bedside table and hanging themselves in the wall cupboard by the TV? of course, the thoughts of the writer himself.
So what kind of hotel is this, what amazing things have happened in it, and what does an old venerable building do to scare its modern visitors? Let's take a look. The Del Coronado received its first guests in 1888. The luxurious complex of several wings and ornate branches at that time became the largest building on the American continent outside of New York, which was fully electrified. Thomas Edison himself was in charge of supplying the hotel with electricity. In the early twentieth century “Del Coronado” became a favorite place of rest for Hollywood celebrities, aristocracy, politicians and even royalty - in 1920 Prince Edward of Wales, who later abdicated from the British throne, stayed here.
The mysterious event of interest occurred at the very end of 1892, when a single woman arrived at the Del Coronado from Los Angeles, identifying herself as Lottie Bernard. The guest was given the keys to room 302 and indicated that she was expecting a man to arrive. The hotel staff noted that the woman looked extremely tired and sickly, and soon one of the maids found out that the guest was suffering from cancer, which was in its final stages. Hence the assumption that Miss Bernard was waiting at the Del Coronado for a doctor.
It was the unhealthy appearance of the guest embarrassed both the staff and neighbors of the woman in the hotel, but five days after check-in, the issue with the guest was resolved in the most unexpected way - November 29, 1892 Lottie Bernard was found dead on the steps leading from the hotel to the beach. The woman's death was caused by a single gunshot to the head, the gun was lying nearby. Arriving police immediately concluded that the victim had chosen her own fate, especially since they immediately found witnesses who saw Ms. Bernard buying the gun at a local gun shop. The investigators, after talking to the staff, came to a simple verdict: the woman could not wait any longer for imminent death from the disease and decided to cut the knot in one move.
The case was closed, but after a while more and more questions began to appear. Firstly, it turned out that in Lottie Bernard's hotel room there were documents in the name of Kate Morgan, and Ms. Bernard herself had never existed. Secondly, Morgan's relatives who had been summoned did not recognize the deceased, and the photograph they presented did not correspond to what the “stranger” looked like. Thirdly, there was information that the bullet that killed the woman could not have been fired from a gun lying nearby. And the place for the last breath of the lady chose very strange - halfway from the room, where she lived in quiet seclusion, to the sea, where she could well disappear forever in the sea abyss. In general, much did not add up in the case, and subsequent researchers unequivocally agree that it was a murder.
But we are interested in another aspect. Just at the moment when the case began to show more and more inconsistencies, strange events began to happen in the hotel. First once and then on a regular basis in room 302 there were problems with electricity - the light flickered, the radio was switched on arbitrarily, and the air conditioner, installed later, had a life of its own. Hotel maids began to increasingly report that objects in the room began to move randomly, doors slammed in and out of place without any sign of a draft, and muffled voices and footsteps were heard in empty rooms. Some even claimed to have seen the silhouette of a female ghost, all within or in the immediate vicinity of the room where either Lottie or Kate lived.
A detail from the hotel's history that seemed funny at first became a problem for the hotel owners at some point. The solution they chose was simple and, as it turned out, completely ineffective - the room was completely cleaned, renovated and re-equipped. Even the numbering of rooms in “Del Coronado” decided to change - room 302 became apartment 3312. Poltergeist was not deterred by this. Several different independent researchers of the paranormal and the supernatural have repeatedly conducted experiments in the room, and although no one managed to film the “woman in black”, energy bursts were recorded by several groups. Enthusiasts have recorded a total of 37 events, confirming that something inexplicable is happening in the hotel - one of the specialists, for example, a mirror fell from the wall. Whether this proves something or not is up to you to decide.
The hotel management is not particularly eager to emphasize their “personal” ghost - they feel that a much brighter advertisement of the Del Coronado is the fact that Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin and Clark Gable have stayed here, and among the U.S. presidents who have stayed at the hotel were Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr. The only reminders of the ghost are a few historical investigative books, souvenirs in the hotel shop and the poorly lit staircase where the body was found - the hotel's electricians claim that not a single light bulb in this place has not worked for more than a day.
Definitely, the paranormal phenomena in room 3312 of the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego are not as scary and deadly as the ones Stephen King described in his story. Mike Enslin had to endure a much more intense intrusion into the real world of something supernatural. And did he survive it? Of the abundance of endings filmed for “1408” I choose the one in which the protagonist remains trapped forever. Otherwise, what's the point of all this? Could such a powerful evil, operating in the Dolphin Hotel for many years, be tricked, burned, destroyed by love or faith? No, of course not. But that's a whole other story, which is worth returning to separately on occasion.
Read, watch, do not get sick, take care of yourself and your loved ones, choose only trusted hotels !
