My late grandpa took the entire family back to his ancestral home in Xiamen, China when I was in high school. That was approximately 13 years ago.

One day we decided to take a 2 day, one night trip to a city nearby, called Quan Zhou and the entire family checked into a 4 star hotel. The hotel looked gloomy on the outside, maybe because it’s pretty old. But on the inside, it was quite nice. As there were 22 of us in total, about 10 rooms or so were allocated to us. Me and my cousin (same age), we were checked into the same room. Not surprising as we are close and been close since we were babies.

We received the access card and proceeded to our room. The entire family stayed on the same floor. Our room was a corner unit. The strange thing was, the moment we swing open the door the room gave a very chilly atmosphere and it made my hair stand on ends. And I had no clue my cousin felt the same, and didn’t dare to tell me.

Upon entering, the room looked much more spacious than the others, It was huge. however, what gave me the creeps was that, the colour combination of the sheets, curtains, and decoration didn’t seem to match at all. Which is strange and some stuff seemed abit messed up.

That night, me and my cousin decided to watch tv and stayed up and half way through, she told me she was going to take a shower. But! she refused to close the bathroom door, She asked me if its ok to leave the door open while she takes shower and me watching the tv. I thought that was weird because we always shower with doors closed. And it was unusual but I said ok. Somehow, I sensed she felt scared too.

After she was done with shower, I went in and took mine, with door left slightly ajar. Then we sat on our beds, talking. There were two separate beds, twin beds. I was sitting on the one next to the toilet, and facing her and the curtains (they were drawn) and window. While she was sitting on the bed next to mine, facing me and the wall behind me.

As we were happily chitchatting, suddenly, I saw the curtains flung up, and mind you, the curtains are very heavy and it was in air as if a strong gust just blew it up. and the strange thing was, only the middle part of the curtains with the partition was lifted and flung up, all the way up till it touches the ceiling. And the even weirder part was that, the outer layer of the curtain (usually there are two layers, one to block out the sunlight, white in colour) remained.

I was shocked and my face went pale. My cousin noticed something was wrong, without even turning to look, she asked me “what is wrong??” and I could see the fear in her eyes. I didn’t want to scare her, so i just said in a normal tone “uhh nothing, I just saw the curtains being flung up and it was so high that it touched the ceiling, maybe it was wind”. But I knew deep inside it wasn’t.

So I volunteered to go have a look at the windows, to make sure they were shut. My cousin came along and we opened the curtains and checked. To our surprise, the windows are sealed!! So there was no way anyone could have opened them and to have wind blowing in!

We slept with lights on that night. Next day we went out with the entire family on an excursion and got back to our room the same afternoon to pack and get ready to leave. Upon opening our room door, the room was so warm and the air conditioning wasn’t working at all and there was a strong, strong smell of gasoline. It was so strong, we both smelt it. We called the reception and told them what happened and they seemed to ignore it (maybe they know?) and we insisted so they sent a technician up for a look. And we were told the air vents were fine and everything was fine and he couldn’t explain why.

Luckily, we checked out that day