I had the scariest experience of my life in Bangkok recently: a man tried to enter my room at First House Hotel in Pratunam.

It was around 5am when some noise woke me up. To my horror, I saw a man about to climb in through the window. He fled when I screamed. He had pried open the latched window (on the 10th floor) because he could access it through a metre-wide ledge running alongside the building. It was fortunate that I woke up in time.

The night manager and a security guard came to my room to check but there was little they could do.

As the room was fully paid for and I only had two more nights there, I did not move out but asked for another room — a windowless one.

But what really irked me was that the night manager, in his daily log, wrote that I wanted a change of room because I was afraid of ghosts. Instead of addressing the breach in security, he brushed aside the incident and used the most convenient excuse — that I had seen a ghost.

I certainly did not imagine the incident because I had to physically push the glass window shut after the man fled. (It was closed when I went to bed).

If indeed it was a ghost, why would it need to climb through the window? Don’t ghosts walk through walls or appear from out of the blue?

Sure, some people do have ghostly sightings or unnatural phenomena in hotel rooms, but I have stayed alone in hotel rooms all over the world and have never had such an experience.

Needless to say, I hardly slept a wink the next two nights at the hotel. I left the lights on the whole night, and pushed a chair against the door as precaution.

C. L. Tan

Kuala Lumpur