Glasgow's Central Hotel has a long and distinguished history - originally built in 1882 by Caledonian Railways alongside their Central Station, it had 420 beds for guests plus 170 beds for their servants - these were the days when the upper classes travelled in style! When the station was extended in 1906, the hotel was also extended.
The hotel received the first-ever long-distance television transmissions, transmitted to the hotel on the 24th of May 1927 by John Logie Baird. It played host to celebrities from Bob Hope and Charlton Heston to Roy Rogers (who booked a room for his horse, Trigger) and the Queen.
Sold by British Rail in the '80s, it passed through various private companies before becoming a Quality Hotel - the company went bust earlier this year, but the hotel is now in new ownership and long-overdue refurbishment is beginning.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that I'm an atheist with not a supernatural bone in my body. Any study of the history of the hotel comes up with lots of ghost stories as you'd expect, but I did see a couple of rather strange things, as you'll see. I'm certain that there are logical explanations, they're just very odd.
This is the first strange thing - walls of one room covered with pages cut from a book. And not a Bible - it's a dictionary...
The hotel looks down on the glass roof of the station:
Another odd thing: Some online stories talk about a room where "blood ran down the walls". Yeah, right. This room, though, was strange - something had definitely been running down the walls. It had run down very evenly from top to bottom, on every wall. It looked perhaps like smoke or very thick tobacco staining that had then been sprayed with water - or, yes, dried blood. There was no sign of fire on the bare floorboards, no signs of damp, and the corridor outside and all neighbouring rooms were normal.
The third strange thing: Off a small attic room is a closet under the eaves - only 4 feet high. It has been carefully lined with very sharp razor blades pushed quite firmly into the wall:
Something cheerier:
More, as usual, in my Flickr set...
