Around 1990, I took a trip with my girlfriend to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. We regularly visited museums and galleries to see the interesting exhibits and learn new things about both history and art.
After touring several different exhibits this particular day, we decided to go to the Early American section of the museum. I can't recall exactly where we were at the time—the exhibit may no longer even be there—we may also have been visiting an adjoining section of Early European exhibits. We saw a lot of rooms that were representational of the furnishings people had in their homes back then. We saw lots of bedrooms with canopy beds and paintings and dressers. Several of them were in pristine condition and almost looked like something you would see in a dollhouse display, or in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.
When we arrived at this one particular room, I immediately felt a strong spiritual presence. The entire room, covered by some sort of tapestry or wallpaper, was done in a strange pea-green color. The presence was of a young man who had been in this room for a long while—perhaps due to illness. The room felt sickly and he was very sad all the time.
I also felt he was a prince or ruler—a man of importance during his life. The air in the room was not cold but it was very stuffy and smelled of mildew. The mildew had a strange almost sweet scent to it. It was like the windows were never opened to let the fresh air inside.
Without much of a second thought, I immediately turned to my girlfriend quietly and said, "This room is haunted."
We looked at the room and pondered things for a minute or two more, and then turned to leave for the next exhibit. Right at that moment, another couple came walking around the corner and the woman exclaimed to the man she was walking with, "Look honey, there's the room they saw the ghost in!"
While I lived in New York, I may have gone back to that museum and the haunted wing one or two more times out of curiosity to see that room. (It's interesting about haunted places. There is a certain energy that draws us back there time and again, like watching a motion picture you've seen a dozen times but you watch it again because you like the emotional ride.)
I would occasionally search the Web for that haunted room because it would come up in conversations with people about ghosts and personal encounters. But I could never find it.
Finally, after years of searching, by total chance, I located the room on the museum's web site. As soon as I saw the photo of the room, with the greenish gilt décor and the canopy bed with the red quilt, I got the ghostly chills of a presence all over again.
I suppose the museum had been cataloging and photographing all their exhibits and placing them online, so it was just a matter of time before this one showed up.
Here is the room I experienced a ghostly visitor in. And it may indeed be haunted by a prince! The bedroom is from Sagredo Palace in Venice (circa 1718).
http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/120003585
