How To Raise Spirits In Hotel Rooms

The Mood of a Room Is Determined Not by Its Past, but by What You, a Traveller, Bring to It

- Sudha Pillai

I have a friend, a successful entrepreneur, who travels for 20 days in a month. Every time she enters a hotel room and shuts the door behind her, her first task is to go around the room, like an apprentice evangelist, ordering “every evil spirit to flee the room in the name of Jesus Christ”. As someone who believes in the existence of good and evil spirits, she’s certain that she was once accosted by a Victorian-era spirit with a tailored ruff in a London hotel room. She offers a logical explanation for her bizarre behaviour—“No hotel is going to reveal the truth about a room. So, it is better to be safe than sorry.”

In 2011, new research at the Columbia University discovered that some people believed that “emotional residue” can occupy an environment, that emotions leave a trace in physical space. Roughly translated, this means that if the previous owners of a physical space were happy, then the emotional residue they leave behind will be that of joy, and that this joy could then potentially be felt by the majority of future occupants.