THE HAUNTED LORD BALTIMORE RADDISON HOTEL

An elegant refurbished gargoyle-carved-skyscraper- hotel, built in the Roaring Twenties, the downtown Raddison-Lord-Baltimore, in Maryland, is where I was forced to book a four day stay, a ghostly 1920’s restored gem, to attend a wedding of my wife’s niece.

I ran into a paranormal wall.

As soon as I walked up to the monstrous walnut desk, to ‘check-in’ in I felt the undeniable burning touches on both arms, of a spiritual attachment, something strong enough to crash my admittedly feeble defenses.

We were shown to a 18th floor corner room, a lovely small suite, but as soon as the bellboy opened the door, I was repulsed by a reek , near the window, overlooking the building’s sheer corner, a cat urine pungent smell, one of darkness, death and suicide and I announced, to my wife’s astonishment, that the room, was:

“Nope” , “Sorry”, “Unsatisfactory”.

From the frying pan into the fire, we went back down, to the haunted front desk and then back up again, in a haunted elevator, with static electricity that made my hair stand on end, to another much larger, more lovely and well appointed suite , where I sadly had persistent (over days), visions of a very young girl, in a long taffeta pale dress, screaming, with a mouth agape, a frozen- face-mask of horror…

I could not surmount my own dread and disquiet to offer solace or attempt a loving message of healing.

I had not yet advanced to try to pray FOR spirits, rather than to pray to be left free and unaware of such.

The suffering and panicked image of that young girl filled my mind and brain and would not relent.

After three sleepless nights, some replete with gangster nightmares, I was able to finally checkout and return home, from a horrid weekend, spent in a badly haunted place although the wedding affair , itself, was a joyous respite from morbid and persistent paranormal inklings.

That girl has appeared to others, as an apparition, I later learned,  a weeping young girl in a long cream colored gown has been seen playing and heard crying, by guests and staff, alike.

She broadcasted, onto the screen- template of my mind, the familiar portrait of “THE SCREAM”,

mouth agape, in raw terror, to broadcast her personal angst and horror.

I was more engaged in futile attempts to cast her off me, rather than to attempt a rescue into the light, by calling her beloved relatives to assist her.

My wife, as psychic as a rock, slept well all those nights, peacefully, like a heavy stone dropped into a deep lake.

That image, before my eyes, fully awake, prevailed and was persistent and strong, and she was both frantic and terrified.

I thought it so sad.

Ghosts almost always say, “Please help me.”

Hopefully  I will learn how to avoid being sensitive enough to be up with bad dreams all night when any lost, insistent or sinister spirits are around.

Or, even better, learn how to counsel and cross them over.

I Googled the Hotel’s name and came up with Amy’s book and wrote her and she wrote me back:

“Hi Paul, Thanks for your email. What an experience!

Here is our story about the Radisson Lord Baltimore from our book.

We’d love to use your account in future research and if we write a follow-up book.

Here’s an excerpt from my book about the hotel that you wrote me about:

The Radisson Lord Baltimore Hotel 

Another Account: 

Francesle (Fran) Carter has worked at the Radisson Lord Baltimore for many years. She currently functions in the role of captain, supervising a team of people overseeing the food, beverage, and setup needs of the hotel.

In 1998 Fran was on the 19th floor of the building preparing a small meeting room for future use. She was working at a table facing the wall with an open door to her left. She bent over the table for a few moments, absorbed in her work. Then she looked up and to her left at the doorway. A little girl wearing a long cream colored dress and black shiny shoes ran by the open doorway, bouncing a red ball before her.

Fran immediately ran outside calling after her “Little girl, are you lost?”

The hallway was completely empty. Fran, quite shaken at this point, turned around to go back to the meeting room when she saw two people walking down the hallway toward her.

The first was an older gentleman dressed in formal attire. A woman in a long ballgown accompanied him. Frank asked them if they were looking for their granddaughter because she had just run by.

She turned to point in the direction that the child had passed. When she turned her head back toward the two people, they had just vanished right before her eyes.

Fran was then so frightened that she called a security guard. He stayed there with her until she finished her work, and no more ghostly visitors appeared on the 19th floor that evening.

A few years later a guest at the hotel told Fran that she believed that her room had a ghostly visitor. She was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a child crying. As she sat up in her bed, she saw a little girl crying and rocking herself back and forth while sitting in the window of her room. As the woman rose to go to the girl, she slowly faded away. The little girl was wearing a long cream colored dress with black shoes.

One evening a few years later, Fran was approached by a co-worker who told her that three people were standing in the dark in the ballroom of the hotel. The hotel’s ballroom is a very large room, which can accommodate 1,250 people seated at banquet tables.

Three arched ceiling length windows dominate the far wall of the room- the side of the room opposite the entrance doorway. When Fran entered the ballroom, she walked across the room in the direction of the windows.

She noticed that there indeed were three people standing there in the darkened, moonlit room. One man stood before the far left window, another stood before the far right window, and a woman stood a few feet behind the two men before the middle window.

They were all looking upward through the windows. Fran noticed that they were standing in what she described as a triangular formation.

Fran passed within 5 feet of the man standing in front of the window on the left. She noticed that he was wearing a dark, possibly blue, sport blazer with metallic buttons that gleamed in the darkness. He had an ascot tied around his throat and appeared quite the dapper gentleman. She thought that his clothing was odd, but at this point didn’t know that her visitors were out of the ordinary. She then asked them if they would like some light and walked by the man in the ascot to turn on the light switch, just a few feet from where he was standing.

Light immediately flooded the room- and the three visitors were gone! As earlier noted, the Lord Baltimore hotel has had its share of guests who were very reluctant to check out. It appears that some of them never did.

Sincerely,

Amy “

Here’s my  original note, to Amy, the manager of the hotel:

“As a newly budding psychic, open to unseen energies, I found myself attending a wedding this past weekend, and I stayed at the Radisson Plaza Lord Baltimore.

I spent two sleepless nights, inundated with nightmares, complaining all the while to my wife, about the constant touches and psychic turmoil of the unseen. I have stayed at many hotels and sensed spirits, all untoward and lost.

But this hotel, still gorgeous in its age, was positively infested. A young girl, weeping, mouths agape in horror, in a very long gown dress, startled me as a persistent image.

My wife wanted no part of any of my startling unpleasant discoveries.

I also felt spirits of ignominious sinister gangster types, which didn’t surprise me in the least: if you’re afraid to cross over, why not haunt a favorite place? What can you tell me about the history of the place that supports those “images” that I had ?  “

Paul Schroeder

AN ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE : A SPIRITUAL MESSAGE

by Paul Schroeder

A spiritual message, in a time of need, illuminated a larger life path:

“The Spell of the Yukon”

By Robert W. Service

“I wanted the gold, and I sought it;

   I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;

   I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold, and I got it—

   Came out with a fortune last fall,—

Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,

   And somehow the gold isn’t all…”

I rarely ever worked overtime, or sought spare part- time jobs to make more money, seeking blue skies above to doing work indoors, and I relished my poorer beer pockets without ever developing or resenting the absence of a richer champagne taste.

Those ambitious lads of my childhood who entered finance, medicine or law,  worked 24-7 towards a salaried lifestyle that flew them first class, overseas to luncheon meetings and purchased them mansions in the  glass sky towers of Manhattan.

Effete, they would confess,”Those who say that money can’t buy you everything, don’t know where to shop!”

I  became a college instructor teacher who received a meager pittance, but though  I relished my bankers’ hours’ 9 to 3  job, I deeply longed for the respite of work, each academic year, within a ten week vacation, over the summer.

During academic semesters I recklessly ate up all of my sick days and personal days, taking escapes in the sun at the beach, and landscaped land escapes in three and four day weekends, at mountain lakes’ sites to hike in virgin woods alone.

Others in Higher Education had instead garnered many days, ‘in their bank’, saved up jealously, to trade for cash, losing one day for every two saved, upon retirement.

To me, counter intuitively, non providentially, time away to think was worth more, as an escape valve,  than half of some obscure future money.

Work was onerous and exacting, and freedom was a hiking-in-the-woods- relief, from fluorescent overhead lights, and the grinding grading of incessant exams and papers.

For release,  the best part of my chosen vocation, I lectured and pontificated, teaching American and English Literature, in a large lecture hall,  chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes, during class instructions, throughout, to self medicate.

I am presently retired, thirty-five years in teaching, and have a modest lovely home and property, and as for wanderlust, I  have long found that armchair travel is the cheapest kind of travel, content to read brochures, than take inoculations, to explore the world.

Money aversion- ennui got worse as I grew older.

 I soon preferred the sidelines of copious earnings, a spent man, seeking  to relax and to write.

Why was I, so different, to care little for “success”, measured in hard work towards riches?

I wasn’t remotely money excited,  as a child, dimly knowing on a subliminal level that God didn’t place us here, on Earth,  on a special mission,  to make money.

A spiritual message experience, I received, as a teenager, a homeless runaway at seventeen, running from a divorced household of violence and police- being -called -by- the -neighbors,

became a core influence for my slant on monied life, a purposeful one of just getting by, instead of working hard towards earning luxuries.

It was Christmas time in New York City and I was seventeen years old, homeless penniless,  and wandering.

I had exited  the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West, where I had feasted for hours, on museum eye -candy, but my stomach  had rumbled with hunger.

And now back on the street, I found that it had been and was now, snowing heavily.

I wondered worriedly where I would sleep, that night.

 A local movie manager,  a friend, Paul Gary, said that I could, when in Brooklyn, sleep in a little used old loft room in his movie theatre, the Loews Oriental, in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, in a dusty, haunted costume property room.

I was the inhabiting spirit.

The smell of freshly roasted chestnuts,  sold to passerbys from a kiosk wagon, near to the museum’s stone steps, in a blizzard of snow, wafted my way and roused me.

I had no money in my pockets; I salivated at the  sweet nutty perfume.

 Chestnuts were a seasonal treat I had  enjoyed, at this very museum’s site, when I had a bountiful existence within my cantankerous parents’ marriage’s deep pockets’ circle of influence.

I would ask my parents,  they’d  fish for loose change and I would relish the sweet flavor of fire roasted hot chestnuts, now a new symbol of want and the faded memory of childhood .

I was alone upon the streets of Manhattan, hungry and had no money.

The  snow covered shoulders and face of the man who stood behind the kiosk wagon, were wrapped in steam; he was small and dark, wearing mittens with holes for the fingers.

The snow fell heavily in sheets that made a city of asphalt shock look gentler.

I  came close enough to  inhale the dark aroma of roasted chestnuts,  a childhood memory token, an olfactory solace for my pangs of hunger.

 I  noticed that on one side of his kiosk wagon hung a large piece of grey cardboard with a blue magic marker message upon it, his philosophy of the moment, but on an unconscious level, one  for the rest of my adult life.

A raised consciousness was sparked.

It read:

“I really don’t like making money;

I don’t want to conquer the world,

and I don’t wish to ever be rich;

I don’t even want to set the world, on fire;

 I just want to keep my nuts warm.”

A spiritual message, in a time of need, illuminated a larger life path.