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The Night the Neon Sign Went Dark Over Route 9
Description
It was the autumn of 2008, and the Starlight Motel outside Dunmore, West Virginia, had been closed for eleven years. The neon sign still stood—a crescent moon on its back, letters spelling VACANCY in pink—but the owner, an old man named Harlan Bostwick, had been dead since 1997. I heard about it from a trucker named Eddie who pulled off Route 9 one foggy October night looking for a room. He found the sign dark for the first time in memory. The office door was unlocked. The register was open to a page dated September 1997, and someone had written in a name beside every room. Eddie said the ink was still wet. He said the lobby smelled like coffee and cigarettes, exactly the way Harlan used to keep it. And then he heard a television playing in Room 7. He didn't stay to see who was watching. He drove forty miles before he called anyone. This is the story of what the Starlight Motel remembered—and what it was waiting for.