She had fallen in love with the wrong man: a monster.

I was sitting, buttery bottomed nekkid in a porcelain trough in Petaluma, calling it "research", tax-deductible work expense, luxury room, as part of research for my Simon & Shuster planned bestseller about haunted hotels and motels.

The short hairs on the rim were part of my gratuity for the hospital staff, but not like leaving something of a sample for the sex island staff.

What was that about pizza and killing babies?  Was that a Bernie fundraiser email, or a conspiracy theory?

I was musing into my digital recorder, "there are no haunted rooms, only haunted people coming into the rooms", something along the lines of "leave a little of the love you bring with you", or "get a load of this"(like back at the island standing over a silver dish about to leave a little something).

There was a devotchka, was what housekeeping said, and something of a body bag, and some other, black and white pictures and all, and something that made a nice paragraph in the local news.  I procured the paragraph for the book, and all the permissions and all, emails and phone calls from agenty lawyer-like peoples.

When there were kind of more provincial light fixtures, for the somewhat then-new technology of electric light bulbs, kind of a cheap candelabra chandelier thing that the lady took a swing from in a kind of dark turn of mind, and like I said, "leave a little of the love you bring", and such was more commonly the way, people believe something of the ill-repute and negativity leave kind of a thumbprint of something, spirits, ghosts and so forth.

My thought: the place was important in her life, but she wasn't happy there, so why linger?  But that wasn't the common thinking, it was all dodging into dark corners and so forth, and not the love you bring or all of that.  I mean she was like, "I'm out of this bitch, tomorrow, so one-night only please."

But, there was another part of me that wondered if she had ordered pizza from the room before her bucket-punt.

I walked through the open bedroom doorway out of the bathroom, and a frigging, of all things, lamp shade hit me on the shoulder,

and I nearly shat myself.

I was in the hallway half-steamed cleaned in a second.

When I gathered myself up, I had went back in and looked, expecting Tales From The Crypt or something unfolding right before my eyes, something on the order of looking through time and space right into the great beyond, or just some old bag standing there with the butcher knife, but neigh, neigh, a lampshade on the plush carpet.

Two long gray hairs on the lamp shade.  I know.  Because I looked carefully.  I pestered a high school biology teacher until she let me use some of the optical stuff and get telemetry on the thing.

One odd thing.  The high school teacher was previously familiar with human hair under high magnification.

The overseer of the hotel was ho-hum about the whole thing, kind of not trusting me, but enjoying the story, while also not wanting the thing to be known.  But then its sometimes good advertising.  That said, the manager knew about the book, but seemed so sure prior that nothing untoward would happen.

Before I walked away from that conversation, "good room" I said, then went about towards the voyage home, away from Petaluma.  Later, I would wind-up couched with a heroine addict in New Mexico, listening to her breath most of the night, just to make sure she kept breathing, her in a sort of unconsciousness that was sleep but was something else.  I was thinking then, the ghosts in that second room weren't dead yet.

I guess it was a "good room" and I was the scribbler-for-hire doing my bidness on it, kind of half-drunk on white wine.  I had thought to muse in general on hauntings and the immortal remnants of mortal torment, how some things, as said, linger, but I instead referred my eyes to a hit-list of different sites for my book research.