The Time-Lost Guests of Elmwood Hostel, 1978

In September 1978, the manager at Elmwood Hostel in Albany found Room 12’s beds still warm and the luggage untouched, but the four guests who checked in were gone without a trace. At breakfast, staff and other guests whispered about every clock in the building freezing at exactly 3:14 a.m., stopping the second the power flickered but nothing else in the city lost electricity. Patrol officers searching the area discovered that only Room 12, out of all twenty on that floor, was coated with a fine, gray dust that no one had seen the night before. Not a single fingerprint, muddy shoeprint, or scrap of fabric was found-just four neatly folded sets of pajamas at the foot of each untouched bed. Even stranger, the guestbook showed the visitors had signed in with the names of people who disappeared from the same building in 1936. What happened inside Room 12 of Elmwood Hostel that night has never been explained, and the dust collected there is still kept, sealed, in a local evidence drawer.