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The original was posted on /r/ghoststories by /u/CapKashikoi on 2025-06-30 07:12:30+00:00.
Happened to a close friend of mine. His wife is all about the great outdoors. You know, camping and hiking. But my friend never did any of that stuff until he met her. So she wants to spend a few days hiking in Joshua Tree NP. He lets her handle all the details and because they have a baby, she books their nights at the Pioneertown Motel outside the park. They drive out there. To go hiking, they have a baby chest pack, and all goes well until the last night.
My friend is sleeping in the bed of their motel room. His wife is there too with the baby between them. At some point my friend wakes up because the baby has started to stir. So he holds her until she falls back into a deep sleep. But now he's awake and can't fall asleep right away. He's just lying there in the dark when something strange happens. There is an antler fixture on the ceiling that has a few light bulbs attached to it. Its the main light in the room. It comes alive, but not as if the wall switch was flipped. It slowly lights up, becomes abnormally bright, then slowly dies back down until its off again. My friend is of course spooked. In his head he's trying to make sense of it. Maybe it was a power surge or electrical problem. The motel is old after all.
Not too long after that, another light appears in the room. Its actually two pale blue balls of light hovering in the air off the foot of the bed. My friend's first impulse is to jump out of the bed and turn on the room light. But he hesitates. He's seriously not sure if he's dreaming or hallucinating. And he doesn't want to wake his wife and kid, only to startle the shit out of them, then have a crying baby on his hands. So he pulls the sheet over his head, shuts his eyes, and pretends like there is nothing there. But when he peeks, he can still see the balls of glowing light through the sheet. So what's he do? He closes his eyes again. And thats when he feels something on his feet. Like a pressure pushing down. And it slowly spreads to his legs. Like someone is pushing a wooden board against him. And the pressure spreads all the way up to his chest. Not in a painful way, but terrifying nonetheless. Then there comes a hissing sound, like air being slowly released from a balloon. Still, my friend refuses to do anything. He convinces himself that its just a dream, and holds still, his eyes firmly shut. Then the sound and pressure disappear. The room is calm and quiet, and the presence gone. My friend is just there listening, now convinced he really is awake because his heart is beating wildly in his chest.
Unable to sleep, he waits in the dark. He peers around the room with his phone light every now and then. But nothing else happens. Finally, at the crack of dawn he wakes his wife. He tells her he wants to get an early start to get back home and that they should leave ASAP. She goes along with it, and they drive away. The funny thing is that he never tells her what happened. He doesn't want to scare her, or for her to think he had some kind of hallucination.
But he tells me all this months later as we are in his backyard seated across from one another, his fire pit between us. Im past the point of getting goosebumps. My friend is not the lying type and I believe him 100%. And I too am trying to make sense of it. I go online and look up the Pioneertown Motel. Decades ago, when it was used by Hollywood actors who filmed Western movies nearby on location, a spurned lover committed suicide in one of the rooms. And on review sites people say they experienced weird things in the Motel, especially in the room where she died. I ask my friend if that was the same room that he stayed in, but he says he can't remember. It must have been. Thats the only logical explanation. The motel was haunted and my poor friend got a taste of the supernatural.