Sesame Hotel

In the early years when tourism resources concentrated only on Alishan and Sun Moon Lake, one of the most favorite tourist attractions popular in northern Taiwan was Shimen Reservoir. Seeing the potential for business, a construction company lavishly spent four hundred million Taiwan dollars building the once-sensational Sesame Hotel beside the reservoir in the 1980s. When the hotel was completed, the Gross National Income per capita was just ninety thousand Taiwan dollars. You can thus imagine how enormous the investment was to put up the hotel. However, because of cash flow problems, the five-star hotel, where business celebrities and politicians once gathered, was forced to close down in 2008. All the furniture and furnishings that could be removed were taken away; only the empty building was left here deteriorating.

In fact, before the company found themselves unable to sustain the operation of the hotel, weird or superstitious events had taken place. For example, the room numbers for the top floor (the 8F) started with 1, yet the numbers for rooms on the first floor, where the lobby stood, started with 8. As a result, hotel guests usually got confused about which floor they were on. When the days of the hotel were counted, rumor had it that supernatural events began to happen. Since the hotel was said to be haunted, tourists did not have the courage to stay a night here. Now there are some fearless youth exploring the hotel in the middle of night. Sometimes they see shades of ghosts. What’s worse, they even see elevators without electricity to operate falling from upstairs. These creepy episodes scare away even nearby shop owners.