Guillermo del Toro’s paranormal experience watching ‘The Wire’ in a hotel room: “Completely inauspicious conditions”
If there is any director in Hollywood who most people would expect to be a believer in the paranormal, it’s Guillermo del Toro. After all, he has spent his career telling visually astonishing tales of monsters, demons, and the evils of man that echo through the ages. He’s dealt directly with ghosts in two films, The Devil’s Backbone and Crimson Peak. Amazingly, though, del Toro considers himself a sceptic despite revealing he once had a paranormal experience in a hotel room that would make even the most optimistic believer’s blood run cold.
When del Toro made The Devil’s Backbone in 2001, he created a definition of a ghost that spoke to him deeply. In his story of a young boy in a Spanish orphanage being haunted by the ghost of a dead boy, he describes spirits as akin to an insect in amber or something left forever unfinished. As he told Little White Lies, a ghost is “an awful sealed thing…like a photograph, like the loop of a movie.”
The Nightmare Alley helmer subsequently revealed that, in his life, he’d had two paranormal experiences despite being dubious about the existence of ghosts. In fact, despite being such a fan of the macabre and the monstrous in fiction, when it comes to real-life proof of terrifying forces beyond our comprehension, he said, “I don’t want to believe.” Essentially, in fiction, del Toro is Fox Mulder, but in reality, he’s Dana Scully.
Despite this, del Toro couldn’t explain away his experiences as some trick of the brain or the creaking of an old building. He claimed, “Two times I have heard ghostly, disembodied voices, very, very clearly. And they were very scary at the time.”
Del Toro’s most bone-chilling experience came when he was scouting locations for The Hobbit in New Zealand – ironically, a film he wound up not making. He explained, “We came to… a place called Waitomo, and I had read that there was an old hotel which had a haunted room.” Even though the director and his scouts had arrived during the tourist off-season and the hotel was closed, the management agreed to open it, especially for them. Feeling curious, del Toro asked, “Can I get the haunted room?” but he would soon regret that request.
While del Toro sat in the room and idly watched The Wire on DVD, he heard something that made him turn white as a sheet. He revealed that the sound was unmistakable: “A woman shrieking for about five minutes, horrible blood-curdling shrieks. And then a man sobbing and sighing with great regret.”
The terrified director estimated that the screaming lasted for five minutes and the remorseful weeping a full ten minutes more. He did some sleuthing and figured out where the noises were coming from. He claimed, “I was able to actually track the sounds to the bathroom. I tracked them to a vent above the toilet, which went down into the cellar.”
Del Toro was adamant that nothing about the evening had primed him to think he was encountering the spirit realm. He clarified, “I was not in the middle of séance, and it wasn’t a stormy night,” and added, “It was completely inauspicious conditions for a ghost apparition.” All he was doing was watching high-quality crime drama to wind down after a long day of looking at potential locations.
Naturally, the experience freaked del Toro out. He admitted that as soon as he realised the noises were coming from the cellar, he quietly returned to bed and put on his headphones. All he wanted was to be completely enveloped in the sound of Baltimore’s war on drugs instead of that awful, disembodied screaming. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t sleep a wink for the entire night.
