Hotel Hallway

A few weeks ago a friend and I decided to dine at a popular Chinese restaurant in the city of Adelaide. The waiter at the restaurant told us we would have to wait about an hour to be seated (we hadn't booked) and so we decided to head up the road a bit to a hotel for a pre-dinner drink or two.

I had worked for a while at this hotel in the eighties and related to my friend how several staff members at the time claimed to have had unsettling experiences in the hotel, usually when closing up at night.
One particular story I remember being told detailed how one night, after closing and just as the hotel was to be locked up, a staff member remembered something he had forgotten in the bar and went back to deal with it. He found that all the plants (in rather heavy planter boxes) had mysteriously moved from the walls to the centre of the hallway in the hotel. No one else was in the hotel and he had only moments before walked down the hallway and the plants had not been lined up in the centre of it.

While I worked there, I never saw or witnessed anything like that, but remember that I sometimes felt uneasy while working alone out in the back restaurant/bar and experienced that "being watched" feeling.

So anyway, after a couple of drinks, I mentioned to my friend that our table would soon be available at the restaurant up the road and that I was just going to use the toilet. He said he needed to go as well and would accompany me. As we were walking up the hallway he was a few steps ahead of me. Clear as a bell I heard my name being spoken, softly in my ear, as though by someone just behind me. I turned and looked behind me, there was no one there. I said to my friend "Did you hear that?". He shook his head, he had heard nothing. The hallway is carpeted with plush carpet and the walls are thick and wooden. The door to the bar was closed and the sounds of the patrons inside the bar were muffled, a combination of humming voices, clicking pool balls and cues, and the music being played on the juke box. I had heard my name spoken softly and distinctly in a man's voice, right next to my ear! "Did you just say my name?" I asked my friend again. He looked at me with a look on his face as if to say "Why would I?". I know this friend well, and if he was having a joke with me he would have let me know.

After that, I felt rather nervous being there, I used the bathroom as quickly as I could and felt quite unnerved until we left the bar.

Since then I have thought quite a bit about what I heard. I don't go out much and haven't been to that particular hotel for many years, so it could not have been that I was recognised and called out to by someone. I feel quite sure that what I heard was in that hallway and spoken by someone/something I could not see.