Eastern Hotel California

Years ago, my penchant for scary voices resulted in a permanent mark on my right hand.

In my first college semester, an acquaintance heard me do an impression of the Wicked Witch of the West. Her friend was looking for people to staff a haunted house for a night. Was I interested?

I was very interested.

The man in charge, Dave, had found an abandoned house in a valley. House was surrounded by creepy overgrown trees and weeds, a perfect setting for the night’s adventure. Some of the rooms were unsafe for entry, so no one was allowed to move without a guide carrying a flashlight.

I portrayed a demented prisoner who had escaped and been recaptured. A guard, armed with a (thankfully unloaded) shotgun, was posted to see that I would not escape. I was made up to look as if I had sustained a terrible beating during my recapture and I was wearing manacles and shackles. A belly chain was the only costume piece missing.

First two groups came through our room without incident. In between the second and third groups, I decided that clawing the wall would look very scary and demented. So I tried it.

Not only did clawing the wall look demented, it was demented. I scratched off some wallpaper one time before I caught my palm on a nail. I jerked it off and continued my act, although I avoided any more contact with the wall.

Once that group was gone, I sat down in the dark and gingerly assessed my injury. I could feel a big hunk of hand protruding out the hole and a trickle of blood oozing out of it.

I told the “guard” that she had better get some help. She panicked, but at last got word to someone to help us.

When Dave showed up, he shone flashlight on my hand. I am not particularly queasy, but the sight of that big protrusion unsettled my stomach. Dave was quite unsettled as well.

We had to climb over a barbed-wire fence to reach his van and, of course, my pant leg got caught. We had an awful time getting me unhooked. Since I only had use of one hand, I was little help in extricating myself.

He was near panic by the time he got me into his van.

Once we arrived hospital, Dave left and returned to haunted house.

The town was very small and the hospital had no doctor present. My makeup was too convincing. While I waited, the nurse kept trying to treat my facial cuts and bruises. I kept repeating that my hand was injured, not my face. She would not believe me; she seemed to think that I was delirious. She said I had to have been in a motorcycle accident. I must have suffered a head injury, because I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about.

By this time, my hand was seriously throbbing and hurting. Nurse insisted upon washing off my makeup, but did nothing to treat my hand. No painkillers, no cleaning of the wound, nothing. Once the makeup was removed, she stopped insisting that I was a motorcycle accident victim. At least we were making some progress.

Finally, the doctor showed up. He looked at my hand and shook his head. “What did you do that for?” he asked.

How was I supposed to answer that?

“We’ve got to stitch this,” he said. “A couple stitches is no big deal; you don’t need any painkiller for this.”

Obviously he wasn’t working on his own hand.

The stitches weren’t particularly painful, but the feeling of thread going through flesh was indescribably disgusting. At least I didn’t look so much like a freak with the blob now reduced to relative smoothness.

He ordered the nurse to give me a tetanus shot, then left. I think Nurse missed the nursing school lesson on how to give shots. I asked her to inject my injured right arm. I wanted to have just one hurting arm instead of two. She refused. “Our protocol says we must inject the left arm.”

I said, “I’ll never tell if you inject my right arm!”

She gave me a very dirty look, then proceeded to stick me several times with the same needle in my left deltoid. She didn’t even swab injection site with alcohol. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just get it over with. Instead, she poked me repeatedly before finally driving home the needle.

A few minutes later, the rest of the haunted house staff arrived. We were 1½ hours from home and were all quite ready to leave. Unfortunately, I had no way to heat the injection site or cool the nail print site. Hospital gave me no painkillers or antibiotics.

By the time we arrived home, after one of the longest trips of my life, I was feverish and had little use of either arm. Both my right hand and my left shoulder were inflamed and infected. I couldn’t lift my left arm or close my right hand without extreme pain. I spent the next two days on my back in the campus infirmary while they pumped antibiotics into my system and tried to reduce the inflammation.

That haunted house continues to haunt me. Nearly 30 years later, the scar I received there still aches, usually for no apparent reason.

Apparently, that building was an eastern version of The Hotel California, where “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”