Somewhere around the 1800s, a mother and daughter come to Paris and take two hotel rooms.
The mother chooses room 342 that is decorated with velvet curtains and flowered wallpaper. She later collapses, after which the daughter calls on the house doctor who advises her mother’s medication can only be found on the other side of town.
The daughter decides to retrieve the medication herself and is taken in a carriage arranged by the hotel. The daughter is new to the city and doesn’t know the streets well, which is why she doesn’t realize the carriage is going around the same streets.
When she is told she has arrived at her destination, hours later, the daughter takes the medicine and returns to the hotel only to receive the biggest shock of her life.
Her mother isn’t at the hotel.
No one knows where she is.
The staff claims to have not seen her and insist the daughter arrived here alone.
The daughter demands to see room 342 and finds a stranger there along with his luggage. The room is no longer decorated with velvet curtains and flowered wallpaper.
Her mother’s signature on the register too has disappeared. The daughter starts to lose her sanity. Did she really come with her mother?
She reaches out to the embassy and they intervene.
In one version of the story, the woman finds out her mother had contracted the Black Plague and the hotel wanted to avoid bad publicity and had hidden her mother.
In another version, the daughter never finds her mother and has a breakdown when she’s made to believe her mother had never come with her to Paris.
She spends the rest of her life in a mental institution.
The story was an inspiration for the 1950 movie So long at the Fair.
Except in the movie, the duo is sister and brother with the brother the one who vanishes.
In the end, the sister manages to find her brother and he is cured of his ailment.
Happy ending.
This story also reminded me of the 2005 thriller Flightplan wherein the mother awakens after a nap in the plane to find her six-year-old daughter missing. No one claims to have seen her and convince her she lost her sanity after her husband and daughter died.
This time there isn’t a disease involved but a conspiracy that involved the casket of the husband where bombs were hidden as it wouldn’t be x-rayed. The woman was an aviation engineer and was going to be the scapegoat in a hijacking operation concocted by the mortuary director, the Air Marshal and a flight attendant.
This movie ends with the mother finding her daughter and foiling the terrorists’ plan.
This legend is surely creepy. Just imagine not finding a loved one by your side and everyone claiming that person was a figment of your imagination.
There is nothing scarier than to have to doubt your sanity.
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