seizethefuturewithxs:

(image source)

Stayed up just now watching the ‘Martin’s Ultimate’ tribute to Tower of Terror at DHS. (click the link to get the torrent for yourself at MouseBits.)

Really captivated me, all the ambiance footage and detail around the attraction, especially compared to the bare bones version at DCA, and so it got my mind to wandering….

That attraction, Florida version, really captivates me. I love many Disney attractions, but with a lot, there is a level of disconnect: hard to think of the Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, or MuppetVision as a place in the ‘real world’ and the fantasy concepts could be real. Tower of Terror, though…for me, it offers that opportunity, to play along, or imagine that more. Thinking along the lines of what those events actually would be like for the people involved: Halloween night and a big party, all the guests and hotel staff, cooks, entertainers, big Hollywood stars, maintenance staff being rushed out of the hotel when it is hit by lightning, and then realizing eventually…five people are missing….

Years pass, and the bodies are never found, or even evidence of them. The hotel being locked up basically and rotting from within. Newspaper stories, retrospectives, the families looking for what actually happened, and the mystery just grows of where those people went. Talk of ghosts, and curses, and doubtless organized crime conspiracy theories.

It’s a captivating and enthralling fantasy backstory if you let your mind imagine it really happened, and you’re going into this long-shuttered hotel still containing artifacts people just left close to seventy years ago, not knowing what was happening, rushed out by hotel staff and management. Rooms full of rotting food, abandoned clothes and belongings, musical instruments, things that will never see the light of day. And in this place you’ve entered, five people still might be there, dead, decayed, lost: or worse, shades of them trapped forever, roaming the hallways. You might see them.

If you let your mind run with the fantasy, and hit it at the right time when no other guests are about in a certain area, just you, the eerie, distant vintage music, the clank and groan of the boiler room, a distant, half-heard whispered voice…quite chilling indeed.

And all this makes me wish I was there, right now, in Florida: local time, 4:40 a.m. Imagining no other people about, no guests, employees magically out of sight, and wandering the dimly lit lobby, the library, the boiler room, the exterior grounds. It would be amazing. Pitch black still and the chill night air, silence, apart from the thematic attraction audio. Give me the shivers just thinking about it. I’d love it.

And there ends my ranting…but here’s a little night music, from the Hollywood Tower Hotel to your eardrums:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prCaTEc_a0c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsWmfljeIq0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuWNN8DZo78

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FLPvQg985g