The Pretty Girl

My name is Christian and I am 24 years of age and currently work at the Comfort Inn & Suites in the city of Long Beach, CA. My job is pretty cool and I have been here for three years. It once stood as the International Inn.

This hotel has a hidden history and sometimes unregistered guests occupy these rooms. I can count 10 deaths in the time of my stay here as a boy. I knew half of them exclusively and strangely, I still do. The following entries are true reports from the employees of our establishment. The reports also consist of complaints of our guests that sadly are also true.

The Pretty girl (Courtyard)

Forth report: The girl by the pool

Not all International Inn nights as a boy were terrifying. There were plenty weekend sparklers where we kids in the Inn had our fun wars. Either with water balloons, toy action figures, pool fights, bike races, pizza parties or my favorite hide and seek in the dark. Life was new and open and the sky seemed higher. The world's problems only existed beyond our security gates. The hotel grounds, back then, had a lot of dark corners and plant life. Fitting for me to enjoy the vines and giant leaves as a perfect backdrop for my Lord of the Rings toy role play and jungle black operation missions. Speaking on the matter of soldiers, My uncle gave me his U.S. Army uniform but instead of stashing it away, It was my greatest weapon during Hide and Seek. No one could find me. I would choose the dumbest places and still would camouflage right into the dirt. It was an aspiring ninja's dream come true.

But one night as I disappeared under a bush, away from the other hiders that would give off my position, I saw someone across the pool leaning on the fence. Squinting my eyes through the branches I tried to make clear who it was. I have never seen her before and wondered where she had come from. She was thin and her black hair hung over her shoulders. She was in the shadow of one of the palms draping over the fence but I could see her pale face. She was very pretty but she looked disturbed. I climbed out of my hiding place only to be caught by the seeker. As I turned my head to where she was, she was no where to be found.

I seen her months later as I sat on a bench in the summer. I was drawing in my sketchbook and practicing my shading as I captured the pool area in ink. The girl appeared walking along the inside of the fence looking away from me into the pool. I stopped moving my pen and just watched her slide her fingers along the chain links. As soon as she passed the tree, she vanished.

The last that I had seen her myself was again on the same bench as before. A couple of years passed and it was right before we moved out of the Inn. My family lived in Building D that time and were the second to last of the tenants left staying at the Inn. Building A and B were completely stripped down. No walls remained and the doors were gone. It was sad to see the buildings that protected your life as a child stand as skeletons waiting to be completed. The gate surrounding the emptied pool was taken out. The pool itself was shallowed down from a deep 8'1/2ft to a childish 5'1/2 ft. I sat there on the bench in the night inspecting my old home when the girl arrived. This time she was watching me. She paced behind the wall that stood alone in the courtyard. I didn't see her pass the other side. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

I asked my mom if she could recall anyone drowning in our pool. She never did really like answering those questions. She'd usually brush me off and continue what she was doing. Yet she revealed to me that besides the boy and the diving board, there was a girl who drowned in the pool when she first started working there. She continued that the girl lived in the surrounding neighborhood and sneaked past the gate to swim with the guests. When we pulled her from the pool waiting for the paramedics, there wasn't anybody there to claim her. Since she didn't stay in the Inn, we didn't know where she had come from. Her brother came later that evening to pick her up from her swim and discovered what had happened.

None of the new staff here has ever seen her. Only I and my brother and the International Inn crew remember her. Perhaps she has passed on. I can only imagine that the filling of the once deep pool had remedied her disturbance. And that she is at peace knowing that what happened to her will not happen again.