For your next Ghostbusters convention, it sounds like one of these hotels would be perfect: “Heavy footsteps. Doors slamming. Cool drafts. This is just the beginning of the unexplained occurrences at Historic Hotels of America member hotels.”

A few of my favorite stories:
The Grande Colonial Hotel in La Jolla, Calif., freaked out a guest when she heard thumping on the stairs and a door slam coming from a nearby meeting room–turns out that 60 years earlier, WWII servicemen lived in that room temporarily. Since it was the anniversary of D-Day when she heard the noises, “Perhaps what the guest heard was the spirit of those soldiers who were reliving the events of the 60th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion.”

Then there’s the Hotel Monaco in Washington, D.C., where “Legend has it that Hotel Monaco’s Paris Ballroom was used as a surgical room during the Civil War. Guests and employees of the hotel have reported hearing whispering in the ballroom thought to be the murmurings of doctors in surgery, and many have claimed to see the ghosts of doctors and nurses hurriedly walking the hotel’s long corridors.”

Hey, I live in an old house with a mischievous-but-benign poltergeist, so I’m used to this sort of thing. Kind of.

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You may not know a wiki from a walrus, but chances you may have already used one.

According to an article on educause.edu, wikis—open-source sites that allow anyone to add, delete, and edit the content—are often used to post provisional agendas. “the URL is distributed to the participants, who are then free to comment or to add their own items. Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda serves as a note-taking template, and when the meeting is completed, the notes are instantly available online, allowing the participants or anybody else to review and annotate the proceedings.”

If you haven’t yet wiki’d, or have and really like it, I have a proposition for you. E-mail me if you’d be interested in participating in a meetings industry wiki that would explore the industry’s hot topics (I know, we’d end up beating attrition to death again, but what the heck—it’s still a major problem for many), or whatever else you decide you want to talk about collaboratively as a community of meeting/hospitality industry professionals. I’ll set it up, then set it free to do whatever you want with it.

So, anyone want to wiki with me?

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For info on hotel status in hard-hit states, go to:

here for Florida.

for the Caribbean

for the Gulf Shore of Alabama

Couldn’t find a good resource for Mississippi or some of the other Ivan-pummeled areas. If you know of any, please let me know and I’ll add them here.

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly blog update, e-mail Sue.