Here are some of the most haunted hotels in Europe, by the way, just in case you’re headed over there and in the mood for collecting a couple of hotel ghost stories of your own.

My cousin, who claims to have a third eye that enables her to see spirits, recently recalled checking into a chateau hotel in Bordeaux, France. She said she saw images of people from the past all along the hotel corridor, as she was walking to her room.

“They all looked pale and were lined up against the wall expressionless,” she told me. And this is what I said to her after she told me this: “If we ever travel together somewhere, and you see a ghost in one of our hotels, please don’t tell me about it.“

However,  hotel ghost stories are quite normal in Europe. Mos Europeans I’ve spoken to don’t seem to care much about having to live with spirits long gone. They even put up patiently with the idiosyncrasies of the ghosts – taking everything in with an amused air.

Perhaps banging doors and footsteps on the second floor ar as much a part of their lives as cable television and the internet.

Many years ago, I checked into a small hotel in Innsbruck, Austria which had all its walls painted black. The somber atmosphere should have foretold of eerie occurrences.

However, I naively chalked this up to a taste for the avant-garde and a penchant for dark colors. In the middle of the night, however, the radio began blaring at full blast. Startled out of my sleep, I immediately shut it off.

Later, amidst the fog of a waking dream, it came on again. The skeptical might attribute this to faulty wiring but who really knows? And why did the radio only turn on at midnight?

I automatically assumed it was the air conditioning and so I called the front desk to complain. The night clerk arrived within minutes, white as a sheet. Without explanation, he moved me to another room where I promptly resumed a comfortable rest.