Everybody who is anybody in my small town could tell you about the disappearance of the Lechtler family. Some could probably write a book, more elegantly than me, because it's just one of those stories; a mystery with more questions than answers. But I'll do my best.

The year is 1994.

A man calls to reserve a room at the White Valley Hotel. He needs the reservation for the next night, and he will pay cash, only cash. If he can't pay cash, he will speak to the owner, Billy, who is a known pushover, and desperate for the money. The man is specific about the room. Number 13. No exceptions. No switches. He will require a king size bed, with two twins, and a bottle of brandy, wrapped in gift paper, ready to go on the dresser. He will also need towels for four.

The desk and service staff go about their preparations. The bellhop drive to the store and buy the brandy. The maids shuffle two extra beds into room thirteen. They clean, and clean, and clean again, because this is a new client, and business is bad. Business is always bad in White Valley.

The next day - the Lechtlers show up.

According to the bellhop, the father appears educated. He wears thick, horn rimmed glasses, which fit snugly over buzzed and graying hair. He is dressed in a brown button down shirt, with fresh ironed black slacks, and polished shoes. The mother, decked out in a floral print dress, ushers the wailing children like braying sheep. The Lechtlers have one boy and one girl. Each are under ten years old, and the young boy appears to be sick, because his coughs and wheezes echo through the empty halls of the hotel. Numerous guests hear his hacks throughout the night.

Mr. Lechtler hands over an envelope. The sleeve is filled with money. He doesn't offer an explanation, and the White Valley staff doesn't ask for one. The clerk confirms the booking. The bellhop leads the family to their room.

Number 13 is nothing extraordinary. On the surface, it looks like all the other rooms. A large and complicated armoire stores everything from extra power outlets to a mini fridge. There is a bathroom at the back, with a stand-in shower, and a small coat closet beside it. An oak desk sits catty cornered against the wall, and the king bed is decorated lushly, with plush pillows, a fuzzy blanket, and prototypical cream-colored sheets and comforters. A small window, on the west side, looks out into the lake below. The room can actually seem pretty peaceful, considering the modern circumstances, if it catches you at the right time of day.

The Lechtlers say goodnight. When the bellhop leaves for the evening, the father is perched at the desk, with a thousand papers spread out in front of him, and a fresh glass of liquor at the ready. Some folks assume Mr. Lechtler is a doctor. Others swear he is a scientist. It really doesn't matter, at this point, because the end result is the same. By morning, every single member of the Lechtler family is gone.

That's it. Gone. Vanished without a trace.

The room is made up. The bags are gone. The papers are gone. The twin beds have small creases in the sheets, where the children must have sat momentarily, but the bedding itself is barely disturbed. The shower in the bathroom is damp. Somebody must have used it. But every other trace of the family dropped from the face of the hotel.

The bellhop calls White Valley PD. Billy doesn't want that, at first. He insists that the guests went out. Maybe they would come back, and then wouldn't they be furious, launching an investigation into something as simple as a breakfast trip. But he must know the argument is futile. His employees are worried. The boy was sick. The woods outside the hotel are vast and foreboding. Anyone venturing out that late at night in the nineties risks something serious.

The police comb the hotel with a fine tooth comb. Nothing turns up. They check the basement. They check the room. They check the property. They look into the name Lechtler, to no avail, and declare it more than likely a pseudonym. Soon the police are looking for the town's help, ridiculously, instead of the other way around. Stories about the family volley around town like a game of telephone. Some people say the Lechtlers were spies. Some people say they were in witness protection. But the one story, the most disturbing of all, and the one that sits in the forefront of every locals mind, even if they don't mention it; is that the Lechtler family was murdered.

The small town starts to lock their doors at night.

A criminal investigation into Billy the owner begins a week later. The police traced the mysterious call and found that it originated from his cell phone. Officers move to bring him in for questioning. But that night, a snow storm slams White Valley. Billy is out for an errand, probably to stock the hotel with groceries, and he doesn't notice the finely packed ice holding up a pothole in the road. Treadless tires spin helplessly for traction. The front of Billy's station wagon catches a Maple tree. The back half flies off the road altogether. Some folks say they could hear the impact from a mile away. The town ambulances rush to the scene. The police are hot on their tails. But both are too late. Billy Walker passes from his injuries on the side of the highway.

And with him does the mystery of the Lechtler family.

Some people viewed the car accident as an admission of guilt. Billy must have known the end was near, so he hopped in his station wagon, in the middle of a blizzard, and did his best to hightail it out of town. He was running. He was a coward He must have killed them. He probably dumped them in the miles of woods that surround his creepy little hotel. He always was such a weird looking guy, on the surface, and the crash confirms unreasonable prejudices for a lot of unreasonable people.

Time passes without any fresh leads.

The story becomes sort of a tall tale. They say that every small town has its secrets, and if that's true, none seem more fitting than the legend of the Lechtlers. The police closed ranks and withheld information. The details became warped over time. Some say Mr. Lechtler was an astronaut. Some say he worked for the CIA. Nobody knows for sure, of course, it's all conjecture. But the truth rarely gets in the way of a good story. Certainly not in White Valley.

Fast forward to today.

The hotel still stands, though it is under different owners, now. A nice older couple bought the place at the start of the decade. The Abbots loved the historical relevance of the old building. The hotel has its own stories, they insisted, a rich and complicated history that has nothing to do with the Lechtlers. The grounds were used by abolitionists, after all, and if it was good for them, it should be good for the brats of White Valley, and their bastard out of town cousins. The Abbots hire college kids, home from State, and high school students, because they know they can be paid less. There are a few guests, here and there, but business is just as dead now as it must have been twenty years ago.

I worked the desk of the White Valley Hotel for about two weeks before it happened.

That evening, Mr. and Mrs. Abbot had some business to take care of out of town. Normally they would dedicate the night shift to an older guy named Jed, but Jed was sick, and the options for his replacement were few and far between. They settled on me, begrudgingly, because they knew I majored in Hospitality and Hotel Management at university. I looked forward to the opportunity as a chance to hone my skills for the future. I barely even thought about the the Lechtlers. At that point, most people my age forgot.

We had four sets of guests staying with us for the night. Mr. Sloan was visiting his mother on Mott Street, but she only had one bed, so he elected to use ours instead. The Petersons were on a cross country road trip, the Hinkies lost power in the recent storm, and Tommy and Sarah Measler, a teenage couple from town, were looking to stay in the only allegedly haunted spot in town - room number thirteen.

I know what you might be thinking. Why didn't the Abbots board it up? Why did they still rent it out? The answer is not as interesting as you might hope. Simply put, the police never asked them to, and so they never did. Any tourism is good tourism. Tom and Sarah were not the first to ask to stay in that room. Over the years, dozens of ghost hunters, psychics, or paranormal whatevers had asked to rent Room 13 for the night. They came in with their cameras, EMF readers, and bundles of money at the ready. They left disappointed.

On the night of my overnight watch, I posted up in the lobby, with a big book, and a rum filled thermos. I knew the night would pass slowly. But I never expected to be so bored. I walked around the property aimlessly. I took in the drifting snow storm from the lobby. I hopped to every one of the guests' requests on the dime, because it gave me something to do, but the calls died down entirely around midnight.

And then it was silent.

I kept myself awake by thumbing through an old short story collection by Stephen King. I don't remember the name. There was a tale in there about an upper class woman who found a secret highway through the woods in Maine. The shortcut took miles and hours from the journey to her summer home. Each time she arrived well before her gardener expected, and each time, she refuses to tell him the exact route. The story goes on to discuss a night where they finally made the journey together. The route is winding. The trees are leaning to make the road narrower and narrower. A creature jumps out into the street, larger than any the gardener has ever seen, and he swears they hit it. He swears he sees it, stuck to the rim, but the woman keeps driving, and laughing, and smiling salaciously his way.

The phone rang.

Have you ever been so captivated by a story that the fringes of reality disappear around you? That was my experience. I stared blankly at the receiver for a moment. I looked back into the storm. I couldn't stop thinking about the shortcut. Where did they go? What did they hit? Could such a place really exist?

Then the phone rang again.

I picked it up and was immediately greeted by the panicked voice of Tommy Walsh.

"You have to come up here," he whispered. "Something smells like death."

I laughed out loud and let the mystery of the King story fall around me. Sometimes the pipes in our old hotel backed up. Sometimes the staff neglected to do a thorough clean. But unusual smells would not be very high on my list of unusual hotel guest requests. I grabbed a mop bucket, and a plunger, and waltzed down the hall; whistling like an asshole, with a clear and unsuspecting look plastered into my innocent beady eyes,

I knocked on the door. Sarah opened up immediately. She had a blanket wrapped around her face. Tom was in the corner with his head sticking out of an open window. I wanted to ask what happened, but a moment later, the smell hit me. And then I didn't have to ask.

I can't use enough adjectives to describe the pure stench. It smelled like body odor and sweat rolled into a disgusting tortilla of old meat and beans. Have you ever left a piece of chicken or steak out of the freezer for too long? Have you ever let the maggots tear it apart bit by bit? Take that stink and add a thick layer of something inexplicably sweet on top of it. I couldn't get it out of my nostrils. The smell invaded my lungs. I turned to gag and even then the rancid stench still stayed with me.

"We noticed it before bed," Sarah started. "We thought maybe just old pipes...but now..."

I nodded and proceeded cautiously to the bathroom, with the plunger in front of me, brandished like a Katana. Sarah paced behind me nervously. Then she shook her head.

"Not over there," she murmured. "Here."

She pointed to the closet, A lot of uncomfortable thoughts went through my head. Panic crept up my spine like a bad trip. My mouth suddenly felt dry and my throat spasmed uncontrollably. I walked over to the closet and thrust open the door, dramatically, hardly looking at what might be on the other side.

It was empty.

Tommy shouted out that they tried that before a fresh symphony of vomiting shook his frail frame. I looked around and found the single light bulb in the closet. There were coat hangers, and shelves, and an old iron hanging on the wall. Tom's bulky North Face sat parked next to Sarah's more fashionable Patagonia. I moved them aside to search for something, anything, that could be the source of that horrible, gut wrenching odor. It had to be nearby. The room reeked. I could barely breathe through my tee shirt.

My fingers caught a break in the paneling. I pulled back, expecting it to stay in place, and fell on my ass once the entire wall came crashing down.

Standing still as scarecrows were a mother and two children. A thousand wires connected to batteries, skin, and other foreign devices littered every inch of the small enclosed space. I looked down at my hand and saw a sticky, gooey substance, and I couldn't figure out why. It was only when Sarah screamed that I noticed the horrible ball of wax sitting beside the children. Entrails and blood sat bundled together in a misshapen little pile of blood, encased by a dusty pair of slacks, and a faded button down shirt. Sitting on top of the ensemble was a distinct pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

I couldn't stop staring. Tommy couldn't stop screaming. A thick liquid leaked out into the closet and puddled by my feet. I turned to get the mop, absurdly, before Sarah's cold hand caught my shoulder.

"They're breathing," she whispered. "Look.*"

My bloodshot eyes focused on the woman's floral dress. For a moment she stayed still. Then her chest inflated. Her eyes fluttered. And she exhaled. The children followed suit.

I don't remember running from the room. I don't remember the phone call to the police. The only thing I can clearly remember clearly is standing outside in the snow; with Tommy, Sarah, Mr. Sloan, the Petersons and the Hinkies all at my side. We were desperate for answers. We needed answers. But straight answers are hard to come by in White Valley.

Mr. and Mrs. Abbot were devastated when the government seized the hotel. They called it eminent domain, and the g-men offered a fair price, but it was barely enough to cover the retired couples' affairs. For months, White Valley was swarmed by black paneled vans and folks in subtly matching black suits. The locals begged the agents for answers in the coffee shops and stores around town. But the government stayed quiet. To date, no official explanation has been given for the disappearance and resurgence of the Lechtler family, and no one truly knows what happened to the surviving family members.

But a small town will always have its rumors.

Some say that Mr. Lechtler must have been a scientist. Some say he must have been involved in cryogenics. What other explanation made sense? The movies all said it was possible, and the government is always a step behind science fiction. Some say that Mr. Lechtler took the opportunity to debut his work when he found out his son was sick. The old owner, Billy, must have known about the plan; to some degree. Some say it is entirely possible that Billy's secret died on the night of his car crash, leaving the family to fester, hibernating for twenty five years, technically alive behind the false wood panel. When the father finally passed, probably from natural causes, the smell awakened their hiding spot, and at long last, blew the lid off the entire operation.

But it's not the mystery itself that haunts me. Not exactly.

When I'm awake in bed, fighting the memory of the Lechtlers, fighting the smell, trying desperately to find sleep against irreversible anxiety, I think about the children. Were they awake? Were they aware? I pray to God often, and I think about that question every time, what kind of God would allow the children to be awake? Because I cannot imagine any worse Hell than being trapped in a closet, completely helpless, while the rotting fat and pieces of your father drips listlessly onto your shoulder.

r/MattRichardsen

r/nosleep

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