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So after Hearst Castle we headed out to San Louis Obispo. We checked into The “Madonna Inn” in – you guessed it – another supposedly haunted room.
Now both my Dad and I picked up a weird vibe as soon as we walked up to the door of our room. It was weird when we opened the door, but after we turned on the lights it wasn’t as bad. The floor and most of the walls were made out of stone. The bed was red velvet. And they had a really neat couch. But no chairs and of course the internet didn’t work.
It still had a little bit of a creepy feeling but not too bad.
But before we got settled we turned on the heater and ran out the door because we had a reservation for dinner at the “world famous” Apple Farm. ( http://www.applefarm.com/ )
But dinner really wasn’t that good- just okay. I really wasn’t impressed actually. My Dad didn’t really like his pot roast either, but he did love his apple pie. (I tasted his pot roast and honestly my Dad makes a lot better one than that.)
Afterwards, we walked through the Apple Farm shops then drove around San Louis Obispo but I guess at this time of the year nothing is happening. There were like three people on the streets. It was so dead.
Anyways, so then we went back to the hotel. We stopped off and looked at the post cards of all the crazy rooms in the lobby, then went to our room.
If you have never been to the Madonna Inn, (http://www.madonnainn.com/ ) it is something you have to see to believe. They have all these different themed rooms, like a “Cave Man” room, and a “Cowboy room” etc. Our room was the “Swiss Rock” room.
The Madonna Inn is a flamboyant motel in San Luis Obispo, California. Opened for business in 1958, the motel was the creation of Alex Madonna, who died in April 2004, and his wife Phyllis. The motel is a monument of unremitting kitsch, a Swiss-Alp exterior, and lavish pink common rooms. Each room in the Madonna Inn is uniquely designed and themed. Its famed rock waterfall urinal is a fixture along California’s Central Coast. Many tourists come to visit the urinal, to the embarrassment of males who genuinely need to use the facilities.
In 1966, the Inn’s original units were burned to the ground in a dramatic fire. It was reopened a year later, and by the end of the decade, all of the rooms had been rebuilt in all their luridness as they are known today. There are 109 rooms.
Haunted – the Madonna Inn is believed to be Haunted by spirits from the fire of 1966 and more recently by the Spirit of Alex Madonna himself who died in 2004.
Visitors have reported many unusual sights, sounds, and occurrences in the Carin Room, the Caveman Room, the Edelweiss Room, the Swiss Rock Room, and the Traveler’s Suite.
Management of the Madonna Inn does not acknowledge or encourage such reports.
So we obviously got one of the haunted rooms. The Swiss Rock Room to be exact.
We had trouble with our room from the very start. As soon as we got back, it was still freezing cold in our room even though we turned on the heater before we left. Well, the heater didn’t work. We called the management and they couldn’t walk us though getting the heat on over the phone, so they sent a maintenance man.
Well guess what! He could not get it to work either. He called the head maintenance guy at home and he couldn’t do anything. Finally they brought in some portable heaters to warn things up and then they gave up. Suddenly a half hour after they left (they must have been working on the heater for an hour) the heater just started working on its own.
Then the TV was doing strange things too. It would go on and off by itself. Yet my Dad’s computer was on. Then the clock would stop every now and then too. Definitely strange things.
We stayed up for a little bit then decided to go to sleep. I slept soundly as usual but my Dad had some strange nighttime and morning time experiences.
During the middle of the night he woke up and went to the bathroom. He came back to bed and looked at the clock and it was 4:31. He couldn’t sleep and lay there tossing and turning and thinking for what seemed like and hour then he looked at the clock again and it wad only 4:32. He tried to sleep some more and lay there again for what seemed like another hour then looked at the clock. It was 4:33.
Finally he managed to get back to sleep after that, but he woke up again about 8 a.m. in the morning. He got up and went to the bathroom again and when he came out he was startled momentarily by the figure of a man standing by the door looking in towards the bed. The figure vanished quickly but my Dad had the figure framed in his mind and the doorway he could see the relative size of the figure. When I got up (much later) he showed me and told me about it and we figured out it had to be a short man about 5’4” to maybe 5’7” or so.
We both wondered if it might have been Alex Madonna but we had seen a picture postcard of him and he looked to be a tall, slender man, much taller than what my Dad had seen in the room. So we discounted that idea and figured it had to have been someone else.
We went to order room service only to find out, much to our dismay, that the Madonna Inn offered no room service. So then we got up and got dressed so we cold go to the restaurant for a Sunday Morning breakfast.
I guess this turned out to be our biggest complaint and upset with the Madonna Inn because we went to the restaurant only to find out there was a waiting line for over an hour to get in. No one told us on the phone when we called earlier that we had to have a reservation and they had no system to give their hotel guests priority to eat in the restaurant. Apparently it is a local favorite for Sunday morning breakfast.
The only good thing that came out of our fruitless walk to the restaurant, was that we walked around the restaurant and shops in that building. We saw many pictures of Alex Madonna and the pictures had other people in them. It was quickly obvious that Alex was the same height as most of the women in the pictures but none of the men.
He was a short man. By comparing what we saw in the pictures to the height of known celebrities that we saw in the pictures. It appeared that Alex Madonna contrary to our first belief was indeed a short man in the 5’4” -5’7” range.
Was this the man my Dad saw briefly in our room? Well my Dad couldn’t see him long enough to see all the details of his look. But clearly the general description and height does fit Alex Madonna.
Strange things happened in this room. Perhaps the strangest yet of all the places we have been.
….I liked the Madonna Inn, but not the service. And I guess all things considered it did seem a little haunted – the feeling, the electrical problems, the figure my Dad saw. Yeah it was definitely haunted.