Our apartment is conveniently located near a very popular, seasonal “haunted trail” attraction. Hoards of people pay $40 apiece to walk down a path, as various theater grads who couldn’t make the cut for Disneyland jump out of the forest in zombie make-up, and say “boo.”
The haunted trail draws a real, particular sort of crowd. The types of geniuses who equip their vehicles with especially noticeable exhaust systems, and loudly broadcast their favorite music at all hours. There is a significant spike in honking, shouting, revving, and burnouts as October progresses in our neighborhood, as this luxury condo block transforms, culturally, into a high school parking lot.
The haunted trail is not for me; but maybe you’d like it. For example, did your dad never give you enough attention as a child, and are you now an adult carrying deep-seated rage and an unquenchable thirst to be seen and acknowledged? If so, I think you might make friends at the haunted trail.
I’m being a little harsh, but it’s been a few weeks of chaos out there, and my patience is running thin. I’m not a total Halloween/Fall grinch - I enjoy Okoberfest, pumpkin carving, coffee, brisk air, costumes, and I even don’t mind hearing Thriller and the Ghostbusters theme played on repeat for a couple weeks. I’ve just never been particularly into the ghouls, zombies, witches, and gore side of things.
Podcast Ghost Stories
Ghosts are another Halloween-adjacent thing I’m not super interested in. I’m wary of people who are too fascinated with topics like that. One such person, overly fascinated with ghosts, is podcaster, sportswriter, and cultural critic Bill Simmons. He seems a little obsessed with ghosts.
I’ve mentioned Simmons here before as a formative writing influence of mine. Fun fact, he’s also the first podcaster I listened to. I don’t believe anyone considers him by any means the inventor of the genre, but he was in early on podcasts, and probably did a lot to mainstream it along with the likes of Marc Marron and Joe Rogan, and so some level of innovator credit is certainly due.
Anyway, lately, Simmons believes that his house is haunted. I listen to a couple of Simmons’ podcasts regularly, and this stupid ghost keeps coming up. On the October 15th episode of “The Bill Simmons Show”, he added a few details.
“We have a feeling for what room they’re in, and things like that,” he said. “Ben (Simmons’ son) woke up like five days ago because he was having a dream that somebody was grabbing his arm, and he woke up and thought somebody had been grabbing his arm, but nobody was there.”
I’m not a total skeptic when it comes to ghost stories, but this one seems quite weak. The other evidence he’s cited for a ghost was that people have repeatedly bumped their heads on a rafter in the house. Sounds to me like clumsy, aging, people, in a new unfamiliar house, bumping their heads. No need to go call a priest or anything.
Simmons seems like a smart guy - he built a media empire and pioneered podcasting. One wonders why he might be harboring such an irrational fear?
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard Simmons get worked up about ghosts. In 2010, Simmons had a supposed ghost encounter at the Skirvin Hilton, in Oklahoma City. I remember listening to his podcast after it happened. At the beginning of his show -which was going to be about sports - he went entirely off topic to share what he’d been through, days prior. He had decided to stay at this particular hotel because he was attending an Oklahoma City Thunder basketball game that night, and had a passive interest in a haunting rumor there. His experience is summarized on the sidebar of his weekly NFL picks article from right around that time.
At first, I heard a baby crying and realized that was why I woke up. I thought it was one of my own kids before remembering that my kids weren't babies anymore, then remembering that I was in Oklahoma City and not Los Angeles. Suddenly, it dawned on me that I wasn't alone. I had an overpowering sensation that someone else was in the room. Until you've experienced that feeling, you can't understand what it's like. Your blood is swishing through your veins at 200 miles an hour, only you don't understand why -- your body reacts a few seconds before your brain does.
I decided to turn on the light. Stretching to my right for the switch, out of nowhere, I heard the sound of (what sure as hell sounded like) a baby crying urgently to my far left (right near the window). Wahhhhhhh. Wahhhhhh. Wahhhhhh. Wahhhhhhh. The urgency freaked me out just as much as the crying itself. I fumbled for the switch, couldn't find it, fumbled, fumbled some more, then finally turned the light on.
I thought he was being genuine. Seemed truly disturbed. I still had my doubts, but his reaction in telling the story left an impression.
The Skirvin Hotel and the NBA
I did a little bit of research about the Skirvin. That hotel has a long, interesting history, and an alleged ghost. If you google this, you’ll find a million different articles that start out giving you the entire history of the hotel and its original owner (Skirvin), who, so the legend goes, had an affair with a maid named Effie. Effie was then locked in a room on the 10th floor, to hide the affair, until she took the baby and jumped to their deaths. Hence the ghost.
Pretty dark, sorry; but if it’s any consolation, none of that is real. The same million articles will go on to mention that there is no trace of anybody named Effie, and no historical evidence of any maids - or women for that matter - ever jumping out of the hotel like that. And if it had really happened, there would certainly be stories, because Oklahoma City had reliable newspapers keeping good records during the time frame in question. Furthermore, the ghost story reportedly traces back to around 1970, whereas the Effie incident is placed somewhere around the 1920’s.
Bogus or not, the legend of Effie got a spike of popularity around 2009. That’s when the NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder. As one might suppose, Oklahoma City does not have a plethora of options when it comes to premium hotels for millionaire athletes to stay at, and so the Skirvin Hilton became the default couch for visiting NBA teams to crash on.
And with that, the ghost stories started coming in. The New York Knicks very famously blamed a loss to the Thunder on lack of sleep, due to the ghost bothering them in the night. Other players in the league began to refuse to stay at the Skirvin, or insisted on having a roommate. Eventually, Ron Artest, aka Meta World Peace declared that he had an inappropriate encounter with the ghost (of course he would), and so the whole legend started to get a little more difficult to take seriously.
Kyrie Irving announced his interest in producing a documentary about the ghost, and that’s when I’d say Effie credibility hit a low-point, as the ghost legend now joined fake-moon-landing and flat-earth as causes Irving has championed.
Corroborating Podcast Evidence
Well, fast forward to 2018, and a different radio/podcast name. Random background, I’ve spent some years working in Catholic media, and I’m pretty familiar with the work of a guy named Patrick Madrid. Madrid has, for years, run a morning radio show about news and Catholicism, and he’s another podcast guy that I’ve listened to so much, that I feel like I actually know him.
I happened to follow Madrid on Twitter in 2018 and noticed him post something about a disturbing incident he had while traveling for a speaking engagement in Oklahoma City. My ears perked, remembering the NBA folklore, so I made a note to listen to the podcast once it was available.
The original podcast is no longer hosted online, unfortunately, but a summary is still published here: "Patrick Madrid’s paranormal hotel stay." I remember listening to it in 2018 and getting a little deja vu to when I heard Simmons’ podcast in 2010. Once again, I had a familiar podcaster, completely changing the focus of his podcast, in order to relay to his listeners a baffling experience of poor sleep at the Skirvin Hilton.
Unlike Simmons, Madrid was totally oblivious going into it. He didn’t know about the ghost rumor at the Skirvin when he checked in. He has no interest in ghosts or the NBA for that matter. And yet, he had a strikingly similar encounter. His sleep was repeatedly interrupted by crashing sounds during the night, and what seemed to be an 8-9 year-old child in the room. Furthermore, the next day, he observed an invisible hand flicking a light switch on and off in the room’s closet.
Is There Any Point to Your Cool Story, George?
To those of you unfamiliar with both Simmons and Madrid, this whole story is nearly meaningless. Fine - understandable. However, given my familiarity with the two podcasters cited, I personally believe them both, and conclude that something inexplicable and weird is definitely going on at that hotel.
I’ve actually pitched this topic to another favorite podcast of mine, “Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World.” On his show, Jimmy explores all sorts of weird topics, from aliens, to ghosts, to miracles, to Bigfoot. I’ve got a pretty high success rate on getting feedback from the show, and if you check out any of the “Listener Feedback” episodes, you’ll hear him address a number of goofy comments from “@GMcFly on Discord”. I’ve written to the show a couple times specifically asking him to do an episode about the Skirvin, but it’s not made it on list of topics.
Since I’d written all of this out already for Jimmy, I thought I’d turn it into a blog post here, rather than let it go to waste. The subject matter of podcasts seems to make for an acceptable tie-in to my techy theme.
Unfortunately, unlike Jimmy would on his show, I don’t have any answers to the mystery at the Skirvin. Well, maybe I have one question solved. Simmons isn’t stupid - he’s just traumatized. Something happened to him there in 2010, so now he’s understandably paranoid - even to the point of concluding that ghosts are the culprit when he bumps his head on the rafters.
That hotel has a legitimate problem on its hands. Whether it’s an impressive, elaborate, long-running staff prank, or something actually paranormal - such as the manifest spirit of the heartbroken and betrayed Seattle SuperSonics fans - I think the disturbances are really happening. I would not stay there, for the simple, practical reason that there’s an above-average likelihood that I wouldn’t sleep well.
That’s no way to end an article - too creepy. So in closing, please accept this photo of the George G family’s 2023 pumpkin carving work, as proof that I’m not a Halloween grinch. Mine’s the giraffe.