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Walden had practically made himself at home in every room of the Greyfield Hotel; at least five times, on all three of the four floors, from room one to forty-one. He even dwelled about the lobby floor of the building, in the library and the indoor swimming pool. He hung around the lobby, but not as often--for some reason, it depressed him. Also, it had too many windows spilling decayed sunlight into the room. The boiler room in the attic, however, was nice and dark, so he spent quite a lot of time there. He sat amongst the things the bellhop left and thumbed through his memorabilia and things. He barely remembered the kid, only faintly recollecting his red-haired, freckled form holding the elevator for him--Walden guessed he must have been living here with the boiler as company when he wasn't working, living off the grace of the widow owner's heart and getting scraps from the kitchen.

Walden liked the hotel's gardens--but after a decade or so, they had turned into a weed-choked jungle, and had become less of a pleasure to walk through. Never mind that stepping out of the hotel in the daytime gave him a bad case of the headaches.

He roamed around every inch of the hotel, but the only rooms he absolutely did not slip into were the rooms twenty-eight, and forty-two. His rotting body was still lying untouched and face down in the bed of twenty-two, and forty-two was where Harold 'Butcher' Burtlett had been staying at on the night of the murders. And Walden was convinced that Burtlett's spirit was still in there, and therefore didn't go near it.

Even though it was ridiculous. What had a ghost to fear of another ghost? Still, Walden kept away from that sociopath. He could hear his cackling sometimes throughout the entire house, and it thoroughly terrified him.

Walden didn't sleep, so his roaming was relentless. In life, he remembered himself to be always restlessly roaming—yet it had been different on the night he had died.

He had only spent half a night in the hotel, not looking anyone he saw in the eye or absorbing the details of his surrounding, which washed over him like water and yet never took a hold. He had been walking like the dead in his climb to his room, the gun stuffed in his briefcase in waiting to be stuffed into his mouth, and blow his brains all over Greyfield's clean wallpaper and bed sheets.

Now dead, he had all the time in the world to notice his surroundings. The architecture of his ‘prison’, he guessed, was a fake sort of French Norway style, and the inside was padded down with stone and rich wallpapers. It was like a gilded trinket, and modern for the thirties. He just hated when the flowers rotted on the tables and the lobby desk, which made the whole first floor stink of moldy roses. He hadn't had the heart to move them, or dump them out, so they just gathered dust and cobwebs like the rest of the place until they finally combusted into black decay.

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Walden is my latest in character development. He's the ghost of a 1930s small time con artist and bank robber. He is mistaken as the serial killer believed to reside in the same place he haunts, and is captured (in a jar, lord help his pride) by a human. The human needs him to help them to take revenge on someone...I don't know if he gives the person directions, helps in fighting, or what. Haven't really tried for any plot.