The Room Above Number 12
A photographer spends one night in a quiet coastal hotel and hears someone walking in the space above his room. The problem is that the hotel has no third floor.
The first thing I noticed about the Seabriar Hotel was the smell.
It was not dampness or mould, although the building looked old enough to contain both. It smelled like timber after heavy rain, the deep earthy scent that stays inside wooden houses long after the weather has cleared.
I arrived on a Thursday evening in early May after driving for nearly six hours along the coast. I had been hired to photograph several abandoned buildings for a regional history book, and the Seabriar was the only hotel within forty kilometres that still had a room available.
The town was hosting some kind of seafood festival that weekend. Every motel sign I passed displayed the same message: NO VACANCY.
The Seabriar had no sign at all.
It stood at the far end of a narrow road overlooking the water. The building was three storeys tall from the front, although the top level appeared to be nothing more than a steep slate roof with several chimneys. The paint had faded from white to grey, and salt had eaten into the metal railings around the entrance.
Inside, the reception area was warmer than I expected. A small electric heater glowed behind the desk. There were old photographs on the walls showing the hotel in better years, crowded with families in summer clothes.
A woman in her late fifties sat behind the desk reading a paperback. She looked surprised when I entered, then quickly placed a receipt inside the book to mark her page.
“Do you have a room for one night?” I asked.
“I do,” she said. “Room twelve.”
She removed a brass key from a wooden board behind her. The number 12 had been stamped into a round metal tag attached to the key by a short chain.
“I have not seen one of these in years,” I said.
“They work when the power does not.”
Her voice was pleasant, but there was something tired about it.
I signed the register, paid for the room and carried my equipment upstairs.
Room 12 was at the end of the second floor corridor. It was small, clean and old fashioned. There was a narrow bed, a wooden wardrobe and a writing desk positioned beneath a window facing the sea. The wallpaper had once been cream but had faded to the colour of old paper.
The bathroom taps rattled when I turned them on. The radiator clicked without producing much heat. None of it bothered me. I had stayed in worse places for work.
What did bother me was the silence.
The road outside was empty, and the sea was too far below the cliff to hear clearly. I could not hear televisions from the other rooms or pipes moving inside the walls. Even the wind seemed to stop when I closed the window.
I ordered dinner at the hotel restaurant, which consisted of four tables and an old radio playing quietly behind the bar. Only one other guest was there, an elderly man eating soup by himself.
After dinner, I returned to the room and spent several hours reviewing photographs on my laptop. Most of them were unusable. The weather had been dull, and the interior of the old railway station I had photographed that afternoon was darker than expected.
At 11:50, I closed the laptop and placed it on the desk. I remember the exact time because I set an alarm for six in the morning.
I turned off the lamp, climbed into bed and lay awake listening to the radiator.
At 12:14, someone walked across the ceiling.
The first sound came from directly above the wardrobe. The floorboards creaked under a slow, deliberate step. A second followed a few seconds later, then a third.
I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness.
The footsteps moved across the ceiling toward the window, paused, then turned around and came back.
I assumed there was an attic room above me. The hotel looked large from outside, and old buildings often had floors that did not match their external appearance.
The walking continued for several minutes. It was too slow to be someone pacing normally. Each step came after a long pause, as though the person above me was moving carefully through a dark room.
I put a pillow over my head.
The footsteps continued.
By half past twelve, irritation had replaced curiosity. I got dressed, opened my door and walked downstairs.
The woman at reception was still reading beneath the same lamp. She looked up as soon as she heard me approaching.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“There is someone walking around above my room.”
Her expression changed, although only slightly.
“Above room twelve?”
“Yes. It has been going on for at least fifteen minutes.”
She closed the book and rested both hands on top of it.
“There is no room above twelve.”
“I can hear the floorboards.”
She studied my face for a moment.
“Room twelve is directly beneath the roof.”
I thought she was joking, but she did not smile.
“There must be an attic,” I said.
“There is not.”
“What am I hearing, then?”
“I do not know.”
The answer came too quickly.
She stood and removed a large flashlight from beneath the desk.
“You can look, if you like.”
She led me back upstairs. At the end of the second floor corridor, beside my room, there was a narrow door I had assumed was a storage cupboard. She unlocked it and revealed a steep staircase.
For a moment I thought she had lied. Then we climbed the steps and entered a cramped maintenance space beneath the roof.
It was not an attic in any useful sense. The ceiling was so low that I had to bend forward. Timber beams crossed the space at shoulder height, and thick insulation covered the area directly above room 12.
There were no floorboards.
No walking surface.
No room for a person to stand.
The woman shone the flashlight across pipes, electrical wires and layers of dusty insulation.
“That is everything above your room,” she said.
As we stood there, a heavy footstep sounded beneath us.
It came from below the insulation, exactly where the ceiling of room 12 should have been.
The woman turned off the flashlight.
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Another step followed.
Then another.
The sound travelled from one side of the sealed space to the other.
We returned downstairs without speaking.
At reception, she offered to move me to another room. I accepted immediately.
“Does this happen often?” I asked while she searched for another key.
“Not often.”
“But it has happened before.”
She kept her eyes on the key board.
“People hear strange things in old buildings.”
“That was not the building settling.”
“No,” she said quietly. “It was not.”
She gave me the key to room 23, which was on the opposite side of the corridor.
I moved my bags and checked the new ceiling before getting into bed. Room 23 was beneath the same roof, but there was nothing above it except the maintenance space we had just inspected.
I slept for perhaps an hour before waking to the sound of knocking.
It was faint and distant.
Three knocks, followed by silence.
Then three more.
I sat up and listened.
The sound was not coming from my door. It came from somewhere down the corridor.
After the third sequence, I realised it was coming from room 12.
Someone was knocking from inside.
I checked the time. It was 2:07 in the morning.
I considered calling reception, but I did not want to sound frightened. I told myself a window had been left open and was moving in the wind.
The knocking came again.
Three slow impacts.
Then I heard the door to room 12 open.
The corridor floor creaked.
A person began walking toward my room.
I remained in bed, watching the thin line of light beneath the door.
The footsteps approached at the same slow rhythm I had heard above the ceiling. One step. A pause. Another step.
They stopped outside room 23.
The light beneath the door darkened as something blocked it.
I waited for a knock.
None came.
For almost a minute, there was no sound at all.
Then the door handle moved.
It turned slowly until the latch clicked.
I had locked the door, but I got out of bed and pushed the desk chair beneath the handle anyway. The handle returned to its original position.
The shadow beneath the door remained.
I stood there barefoot, holding my phone, trying to decide whether to call the police.
Then a woman’s voice spoke from the corridor.
“Could you open the door, please?”
It sounded like the receptionist.
I moved closer but did not remove the chair.
“What is it?”
There was a long pause.
“I need you to come back to room twelve.”
Her voice was almost correct, but the words were delivered without any natural rhythm. Each one seemed separate from the next, as if someone had learned the sentence by listening to it repeatedly.
“Why?”
Another pause.
“You left something behind.”
I looked toward the desk. My laptop, camera bag and coat were all in the room.
“What did I leave?”
The shadow beneath the door shifted.
“Your photograph.”
I did not answer.
The handle began turning again.
This time, the movement was faster. It shook against the lock for several seconds, stopped, then started again with enough force to move the chair.
I called reception.
The phone rang twice before the woman answered.
“Please stay where you are,” she said.
I could hear fear in her voice.
“Are you outside my room?”
“No.”
“Something is.”
She lowered her voice.
“Do not open the door.”
The handle stopped moving.
The shadow disappeared.
A moment later, the footsteps continued down the corridor, passed room 23 and faded near the staircase.
I heard the reception woman lock the stairwell door from below.
Neither of us slept after that.
At sunrise, I packed my equipment and went downstairs. The receptionist had made coffee, though her hands shook when she poured it.
She told me her name was Margaret.
I asked how long she had worked at the hotel.
“Twenty eight years,” she said.
“And room twelve?”
She stared into her cup.
“My parents owned this place before me. My grandfather bought it in 1947.”
“Has that room always been like this?”
“No. Not always.”
She opened a drawer behind the desk and removed a guest register bound in cracked brown leather. The pages smelled of dust and tobacco.
She turned to an entry from October 1963. Most guests had written ordinary comments about the view, the food and the weather.
One sentence had been underlined in blue ink.
Someone walks above room twelve after midnight.
Margaret turned several pages.
A guest had written the same sentence in 1971.
Again in 1989.
Again in 1998.
The handwriting changed each time. So did the pens, the spelling of other words and the names signed beneath the comments.
The sentence never changed.
“Who was the first person to stay there?” I asked.
“We do not know. The oldest register was lost in a fire.”
“What happened in the fire?”
Margaret closed the book.
“It started in room twelve.”
I left shortly after seven.
Before driving away, I stood in the car park and took several photographs of the hotel. The morning was bright and clear. From outside, room 12 sat directly beneath the sloping roof. There was no upper floor and no attic window.
For the next few months, I avoided thinking about the Seabriar. I blamed exhaustion, unfamiliar surroundings and the kind of fear that becomes contagious when another person shares it.
Then, in August, I began sorting photographs for the history book.
One image from the hotel caught my attention.
It had been taken the previous evening, shortly after I arrived. The light was poor, and most of the building was in shadow.
There was a window in the roof.
It was narrow and tall, with an arched top. A weak yellow light glowed behind the glass.
The window was positioned directly above room 12.
I checked every other photograph. The window did not appear in any of them.
I enlarged the image.
A figure stood behind the glass.
It was difficult to make out anything beyond its general shape. It appeared to be a man, although it was unusually tall and thin. Its head was tilted downward.
It was looking toward the second floor window below.
Toward room 12.
I sent the photograph to Margaret.
She did not reply.
Two weeks later, I called the hotel. The number had been disconnected.
I eventually found a short article in the local newspaper. The Seabriar had burned down four days after my stay. The fire started during the night and destroyed the building before emergency crews arrived.
Margaret survived. No guests were injured.
The article included a photograph of the ruins.
In the centre of the image, surrounded by blackened timber and collapsed stone, one section of wall remained standing.
It contained a narrow window with an arched top.
I drove back to the town the following spring.
The hotel site had been cleared. Fresh gravel covered the ground, and a temporary fence surrounded the empty property. There was no sign explaining what would be built there.
I walked along the fence until I reached the approximate location of room 12.
Nothing remained except a few pieces of brick half buried in the soil.
I took out my camera and photographed the empty lot.
As I lowered it, I heard a floorboard creak above me.
I looked up.
The sky was clear. There were no trees overhead, no wires and no nearby buildings.
Another footstep crossed the empty air.
Then another.
They moved slowly from left to right, following the exact dimensions of a room that no longer existed.
I returned to my car without taking another photograph.
That night, I reviewed the images at home.
Most showed gravel, fencing and weeds.
In the final photograph, the empty lot was gone.
The Seabriar Hotel stood exactly where it had before the fire. Every window was dark except the one in the roof.
The figure behind the glass was no longer looking down at room 12.
It was looking directly at me.
Behind it, barely visible in the yellow light, stood several other figures.
They were waiting in a line.
At the front was a woman holding a book against her chest.
I recognised Margaret immediately.
The next morning, I called the number listed for her in the newspaper article.
A man answered.
When I asked to speak with Margaret, he was silent for several seconds.
Then he told me she had died two months earlier.
She had been found in her new apartment shortly after midnight. There were no signs of forced entry and no explanation for how anyone could have reached her.
The neighbours had reported hearing footsteps on the roof throughout the night.
Margaret lived on the top floor.