High Strangeness at Bally's Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada - Part One.

This is a long and ongoing story/investigation that is still unfolding. Recently after my second loss of important journals and papers, I decided the universe is prompting me to keep the important stuff in a second location.

My husband David and I eloped to Las Vegas in 2008. My dream is to go to Paris but as I was marrying a single dad, the closest we could come to Paris was to honeymoon at the Paris hotel and casino in Las Vegas. We had a wonderful wedding and a great time. It was the first time in Vegas for us both. Immediately we were wanted to return to Vegas for our first anniversary. My parents were married in Vegas in 1976, so I've always felt drawn to the city. My father was there a lot.

When I travel I like to take photos of everything, but one of the weird things I take photos of when we go on vacation somewhere special is the room number on the plate outside the door, a photo of the actual room we stay in, and a look out the window if its a high rise.

We weren't able to get back to Vegas in April 2009, but we were able to get back there in August when my mother in law took the kids for a few days. We really liked the location of the Paris but decided to stay somewhere else. I had my eye on the Flamingo because I'm a huge history and true crime buff, and I heard Bugsy haunted it. Ultimately we were on a budget and decided to stay at Bally's, which is linked to the Paris and next to the Flamingo. I knew nothing about Bally's except that we walked through, it was clean, where we wanted to be and cheapest in the area, so I booked. I have used personal journals and Facebook to accurately retrace our steps leading up to our high weirdness.

I always think its important when you're reached out to or contacted, to examine not only the entities contacting you, but why they may have chosen you. So basic biography information that may be applicable:

I was 31, working for a large corporation in the marketing department. I was making goo d money but the job was sucking the soul out of me, and my priorities were all fucked up. I was into Louis Vuitton, Chanel and chasing general show-off bullshit. I was caring for my father who was ill with Lewy Body Dementia and dealing with the VA, caregiving, Medicare etc. My uncle who was like a father to me passed in January that year and I was deeply in mourning. I was on medication and in therapy for depression and anxiety. I was overweight and lost. I've since gotten much healthier.

He was 34, working at a TV repair shop and going to school for an Accounting degree in the evenings while I held the homestead down with the kids. His ex-wife is mentally ill and we were spending thousands of dollars on attorneys trying to keep his children safe. We were happy with our relationship, but things were challenging everywhere else to say the least. We also just had purchased our first home together. Photos taken by us.

Upon arriving to Bally's, I used the old "$20 sandwich trick"(I'm sure it's at least $50 now) and asked if there was a room with a nice view upon my arrival. She had one with a nice version of the pool on an upper floor in the North tower and we happily took it. I took a photo of the door plate as well, but I'm not going to publicize our room for now.

The first night we were at Bally's (8/29/09) we got in late but were ready to blow off some steam. Immediately I went over to the Paris to get one of the gigantic Eiffel tower daiquiris that I saw on our last vacation, I was after the plastic Eiffel tower. It's now in our bedroom at home holding change. This blue couch is inside our room at Bally's:

We wandered around and had some drinks and ended back up at the room afterwards. As you can see, the mood was quite festive. Here's Dave going up the entry to Bally's.

First night was completely uneventful. The next morning we woke up and went to the wax museum and had some fun with the employees there (we were the first ones there in the morning and I had fun posing with the creepy stuff and the employees) and then we walked around the strip for hours.

We were having the time of our lives being our weird selves. We wandered around all day and dropped into bed happily exhausted.

8/30/09 was a normal day, as much as you can be normal in Las Vegas. We drank heavily, so if anything weird happened we were oblivious.

8/31/09 was the last full day in Vegas, and we had tickets to see Andrew Dice Clay at the Riviera. This was to be the highlight of our whole vacation, as we are both hugs fans of the Dice. That evening a few hours before the show, we decided to go back to the room and shower and change, as we were covered with desert and sweat. As I was leaning over in the mirror putting on my makeup, Dave began to become restless and said that he didn't feel well.

He began pacing and complaining that his chest hurt and he couldn't breathe. Lying down did not seem to help him. He felt extremely anxious with chest pain for about half an hour and couldn't stop coughing and pacing. It was to the point where I was getting ready to get into the rental car and drive him to the Urgent Care. He was arguing that he was fine, gasping in pain as he tried to breathe, when it suddenly seemed to pass as quickly as it came. His chest felt bruised to him from all of his coughing, but he could now breathe. He seemed confused and lethargic and wanted to lie down to take a nap.

Dave does not take naps, so I watched over him as he dozed. He never has had anything this happen to him before (or since), and by the time he was feeling better we missed the Dice show. We were bummed but decided to make the best of the evening anyway. He still wasn't 100% so we decided to stick around the Bally/Paris area. We took the elevator down to the casino level as I wanted a steak from the steakhouse. Neither of us had been drinking this day as we had plenty the night before.

We had been in the hotel complex for three days, and as I said before spent a lot of time in the Paris/Bally complex a year ago so we knew the area pretty well. Inexplicably, somehow from getting off of the elevator to the short walk to the steakhouse we got utterly and completely lost.

Dave was still feeling loopy from his experience before and things just started to feel weirder. For fifteen minutes we looped around and around the same hallways, lost. It got to the point where I started uncomfortably giggling after noting specific items in the hallway (room plaques) etc that seemed to be repeating. I made a joke about being in the Stanley Hotel. We simply could not get out of that hallway for fifteen minutes for some reason. What was even weirder was that this entire time we were looping around the hallways of the Bally we didn't run into another single person. If you've ever been inside a Casino in Vegas you know how strange this is.

Finally after taking the same turns we took again and again we managed to get out of the hallway and found the steakhouse. You can see here on the map, the elevators are close to the steakhouse, and there's no reason it should have taken us that long to get there. You can see the elevators from the North Tower and the steakhouse (blue):

I thought Dave was going to kill me when we finally walked up to the entrance and I got a chill and looked at him and very honestly said "I don't want to eat here anymore."

"What?" Dave said, totally exasperated. I was the one that wanted a steak, he doesn't even like steak.

"I don't want to eat here anymore. Let's go to the Flamingo. This place is weirding me out."

Even then Dave knows that if I say I need to get out of somewhere that I need to get out, and so we left out the front entrance. I instantly felt better leaving Bally's and we spent the evening in the Flamingo gardens before heading back to our room to sleep. There was only a feeling of peace at the Flamingo. Nothing else weird happened the rest of the trip and we got on our flight the next day with no problems. We just chalked it up to a weird day and a bummer end to the trip.

We didn't really think about it much at all. Which, over the last ten years I have learned, is pretty typical after experiencing high strangeness.

When we flew back home, Dave did go to the doctor, and ended up being diagnosed with a pulled muscle in his chest from coughing and had to wear a brace around it for four weeks. The photos we took in Vegas went into the album, and that was another vacation in the books.

I went back to Vegas in 2011 but nothing weird happened at Bally's. I stayed at the Hard Rock and felt a hundred years old instead.

2019

Ten years later my sister (by heart, not blood) is getting married in Las Vegas. In planning our next journey,  I decide to look up Haunted locations in Las Vegas, as in the last 5-8 years especially I've been deep into paranormal research and investigation. I've had too many weird experiences in my life and notice high strangeness all around me and I'm in tune now to the shit that matters, instead of Louis Fucking Vuitton.

Before a few months ago I had no idea that Bally's used to be the MGM Grand. I had no idea that the MGM Grand had a fire on November 21, 1980 and 85 people died. The fire started in a restaurant on the Casino level, in the old Deli, which is a stone's throw from the hallway where we looped lost for fifteen minutes looking for the steakhouse.

As soon as I saw an old black and white photo of the Old MGM tower in flames I knew exactly what happened to Dave the night we missed the Dice show. The irony of course is he's interested in the paranormal, but nowhere the level of obsession that I am. I'm the seeker. The reasons he was chosen to have an experience become clearer the longer I research this fire.

I have combed over the fire report probably thirty times. I've watched every video I can unearth. As soon as I began researching I couldn't stop. I still haven't stopped. The information and the synchronicity of things - dates, numbers - there's so much. 85 people died in the fire and over 650 were injured. There are over 2000 rooms in the North Tower. We stayed in one of the 17 where someone died.

What I've found will absolutely blow your mind. I promise I'm going to share it all. First we have to go back our 2009 hotel room in Bally's this April. It also is complicated because the person that died in the hotel room that we stayed in still has living family in the Las Vegas area, and the last thing I want to do is bring any more suffering to an already agonizing situation for this family.

The fire report can be found here:
http://www.clarkcountynv.gov/fire/Documents/MGM_FIREInvestigationReport1980.pdf

A video overview of the fire can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o8dRs1R6O0

Ultimately, a number of reasons caused this fire, but it boiled down to greed. The MGM was too cheap to put in sprinklers and smoke detectors that would have literally saved everyone when the wiring was faulty.

(Greed...much like someone chasing acceptance through material items...much like the woman who was lost in the halls back in 2009...)

If you're a legitimate paranormal investigator in the area, we will be back 4/19-4/21. 4/19 and 4/21 are basically dedicated to boots on the ground research and back to the room with equipment this time. I'm always willing to share all the materials I've found ahead of time. I'm putting this out there and on Twitter because if someone else is supposed to go on the next leg of this journey with us, you'll find us. This entire case has just been about synchronicity, so I'm letting it come to us.

What I'm really needing from anyone that wants to help:

1. I need information on day to day operations for room service and what it was generally like in the morning. Ultimately, I'd love to talk to anyone that worked at the Hotel, especially in the Coffee House or any of the food service operations at the MGM at the time of the fire.

2. What did the room service uniforms look like? Were they navy?

3. Where can I get a copy of a driver's license from Clark County, NV in 1980? I'm looking for height/weight on a specific person and possible recent (pre-death) ID photo. I DO NOT WANT TO DISTURB THIS PERSON'S FAMILY FOR THIS INFORMATION. I have found family on Facebook and I will NOT disturb them in any way for the sake of our investigation. It is simply to verify an ongoing theory.

4. I have a photo in the room with light anomalies. I generally think orb photos are bullshit, but given the activities in the room and lack of orbs in other room photos I took on the same camera (digital) it makes me wonder. In addition, the anomalies are in the area of the room specifically where this person was found after dying from smoke inhalation/CO2 poisoning. Anyone that's an expert in this area, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the photo.