The Ghost of Room 12

The Thistle House Hotel stands on a narrow street in the old part of Edinburgh. It has fourteen rooms, a creaky staircase and a reputation. For years, guests have said that Room 12 is haunted.

Valeria had been working at the reception desk for only three weeks when she heard the story for the first time. A tired businessman came down at two in the morning, still in his pajamas, and asked for a different room. "Someone was knocking inside the wall," he said. "And then I heard whispering. It can't have been the wind. The window was closed."

The next week it happened again. An American couple left at midnight and refused to come back, even for their suitcases. "There must be a ghost in there," the wife said. "Something was scratching above the bed, and it was moving."

The owner, Mrs. Ross, just sighed. "It's always been like this," she told Valeria. "My mother used to say it was the ghost of a sailor who died in the house in 1820. We only give that room to guests who don't ask questions."

Valeria didn't believe in ghosts. She had grown up in Valparaiso, in an old house full of strange noises, and her father had always found a sensible explanation for them. So one quiet evening, when Room 12 was empty, she took a torch and a notebook and went upstairs.

For an hour, nothing happened. Then, at about eleven, she heard it: a knock, then another, then a long, low sound like someone breathing. It wasn't coming from the bed or the window. It was coming from the wall behind the wardrobe.

Valeria wrote down what she knew. The noises always started late at night. They happened more often when the heating was on. And the room was right under the old chimney, which nobody had used for years. "The knocking might be the pipes," she thought. "But pipes don't scratch."

The next morning she asked Mrs. Ross if she could call a plumber. The plumber moved the wardrobe, opened a small panel in the wall and laughed. Behind it, an old water pipe was loose. When the hot water came on at night, the pipe was shaking and hitting the wall. That explained the knocking and the breathing.

But the scratching was something else. The plumber climbed onto the roof, looked down the chimney and called Valeria to come and see. At the bottom of the chimney, on a pile of twigs, there was a nest with four noisy baby birds in it. Their parents had been flying in and out all spring.

Mrs. Ross was almost disappointed. The plumber fixed the pipe, and they waited until the young birds had left the nest before they closed the chimney with a metal net.

Room 12 is quiet now, and it's the most popular room in the hotel. Mrs. Ross still tells the guests about the sailor, though. "People love a ghost story," she says. "They just don't want to sleep in one."