Patrick Madrid did a speaking engagement in Oklahoma City a couple of days ago and stayed at the Skirvin Hotel downtown. He shared the story of his unusual stay on The Patrick Madrid Show on Friday morning.
“So, they say, we’re going to get you into your hotel and where you’re going to be speaking the next day is this corporate office building across the street. It’s a Hilton hotel, what could go wrong? So I get in and it’s very ornate – it’s an old hotel – I did some research on it the following day after I learned a few things and I found out the hotel had been built in 1911. It’s called the Skirvin Hotel, it was named after the guy who built it and it’s tall and beautiful and ornate … but it’s a nice looking hotel. The interior is like looking back into what it would have looked like in the 1920s or the 19-teens, and it’s almost like going back into the era of Downton Abbey if you can picture yourself in something like that.
“So I get up into my hotel room, and I’m doing my thing getting ready to go to sleep. And I go to sleep. And about 2:45am, I’m woken up from my sleep because something falls in the bathroom. Now, when I say something, what I mean is something large. It’s not like a tube of toothpaste fell … and I’m thinking, what in the world could that be? There’s nothing big in the bathroom, my toothbrush is in there and my shaving kit there’s really nothing in there that would be big, other than towels and they wouldn’t make any sound. So I bolt out of bed like, what just happened!? I thought maybe did part of the ceiling crash down or something? So I go to the bathroom to flick on the light, and nothing. There’s nothing on the floor, nothing had fallen, there was nothing to fall, is my point. Everything was just as I had left it the night before when I went to bed.
“So, I’m thinking to myself, what happened? And I can’t come up with an explanation for it. So I think to myself, the only thing that can assume is I was dreaming and in my dream I heard this big crash of something falling and that’s what woke me up. It wasn’t real, it was just in my dream but I thought it was real … so I go back to bed and I’m … just laying there just thinking and praying my rosary a little bit.”
But it didn’t stop there. “The next thing that happens about 15 minutes later, I’m getting closer to falling asleep again … it was the sound of a piano, somebody hitting the keys to make a chord … it was in my room and the sound of a piano chord, boom, and I just leaped out of my bed. What is this, what is going on here! So I’m looking around; am I on the floor below a piano bar, could that explain it? Is there something outside, did somebody drive by with loud piano music on the stereo? No, none of those things had happened.”
After another 10-15 minutes, Patrick heard another strange sound. “The next thing that happens is, I hear a child’s voice in my room about five feet away from my bed, say, ‘Mom!’ A child’s voice of about 8 or 9 years old.”
Patrick explained that this kind of thing doesn’t ever happen to him, he doesn’t watch horror or paranormal movies. “Suddenly now, I find myself in the middle of this paranormal situation that I can’t account for. And so the thought that came to my mind is, there must be something really bad that happened in this room at some point, or maybe God is permitting some restless soul to manifest itself in this way, kind of an odd way, but maybe somebody needs prayer. … So I start praying that if this is something I can help with, if I can pray for the repose of the soul of somebody in purgatory, for example, I will start doing that,” said Madrid.
The next day, the archbishop of Oklahoma City told him that the hotel was rumored to be haunted. “So I’m back in the hotel room, it’s the middle of the day … I’m packing my stuff. And after all the paranormal stuff that happened the night before I’m thinking well, that was weird, I’ll just chalk it up to odd experience and maybe the hotel is haunted, who knows. Then as I’m standing there at the bed putting stuff into my garment bag … this old closet was open and the way this closet works is that when you open the doors the light turns on and in the back wall of the closet there’s a switch. So the light was on because I had opened the closet to take out my clothing and it was empty but the doors are wide open.”
“As I’m doing this, the light not only switches off, the switch moves. I hear the ‘clunk’ of the switch. So I look over there and I’m facing this closet … and as I’m standing there watching it, the switch is switching off and on … it was haphazard. It flips on; it flips off and stays off. Fifteen seconds go by and it flips on again, flips off again.”
Patrick recounts that he was ready to get out of that hotel. He wasn’t scared, but nervous at the fact that some presence was trying to bother him. “I also had this feeling of indignation, like, if you’re a holy soul in purgatory, I’ll pray for you. But can you cut out the theatrics please? I get the idea; I’m going to pray for you. So I wondered if maybe this wasn’t a benign entity … so I just started praying out loud.”
To hear the full story and Patrick’s ideas of what could have been trying to get his attention in that hotel room, listen to the podcast here.
