The Magic Cabin- my airbnb story.

Every so often I’ll be in a conversation with someone and they'll ask :

"Have you ever stayed in an Airbnb?" 

 The short answer is yes. The long answer is as follows.…..

 In August of 2017, Jeff's parents decided to have a family reunion at Tobyhanna State Park located in the Pocono Mountains near their very old and very rustic family cabin. If you've never heard of the Poconos, chances are you're not a Yankee or from the Northeast quadrant of the US. The Poconos is a popular mountainous wooded resort area two hours west of New York City and two hours north of Philadelphia. Jeff's parents owned an 200 year old run-down cabin that saw its prime in 1887. His family grew up going there and had fond memories of roughing it in the old cabin.

I agreed to stay in the cabin once; and only once. I was surprised, after spending the night there, that Tobyhanna authorities hadn’t wrapped the perimeter in police tape and condemned the place. My husband knew I’d never sleep there again. Since writing this, that mouse infested rotted boards cabin has been completely demolished and rebuilt.

While planning the upcoming trip, I knew that Jeff's parents and younger brother were going to be tent camping. I opted not to camp with them, given we were driving my minivan with five of us driving 14 hours from Michigan, then traveling on to New York City, the Atlantic City shore, and Gettysburg afterward.

Option two was Jeff's rotting family cabin. Jeff loved that cabin. The nostalgia and childhood memories he held onto clouded his reality of what its current state of the cabin was. He was definitely trying to sway us into staying there.

I had to hold my ground. Even his 70 year old parents chose to tent camp and, “generously”, let us have the cabin instead of them. “I'll stay there again when hell freezes over”, I said, then passed the generous free cabin offer on to Jeffs brothers family like a regifted birthday present. They also declined.

 I kept hearing about Airbnb, this new company where you could rent people's homes in lieu of a hotel room. As I was searching for hotel rooms, watching them fill up at $350 a night , I decided it prudent to check out this new Airbnb thing everyone was talking about .

I searched three bedroom rentals that could sleep a minimum of five people and soon landed on a place deemed "The Magic Cabin." I couldn’t believe my luck. An entire house?? Three bedrooms, full kitchen, and large bathroom. It had a big outdoor deck in a gated community for only $150 a night??I could see why I kept hearing about Airbnb. What luck!

By the pictures displayed on my screen, it appeared to be clean and nicely decorated. It was owned by a beautiful black woman named Joelle. I learned this by reading her profile under “ host summary” with a fashionable headshot of Joelle included on the Airbnb website. Her profile described her as a tarot card reader and psychic. I didn't think much of the psychic stuff since we were just renting the place from her. We were saving a boatload of cash, I didn't care that she was a psychic on her own time.

It looked like it was booked the rest of the summer except for the days we needed it. The reviews were decent enough; some said Joelle had read her tarot cards for them. I guessed that was an option we could ask for when she was giving us the keys to the place if one wanted such a thing.

 What I didn't yet understand about Airbnb is their filter system where the customer (me) is expected to filter out rentals using the toggle options at the top of the webpage. I missed the following options :

A) “host” staying with you

B) “host” not staying with you.

Unknowing to me, everything was returned in my search, including all the too good to be true bargain deals I was sifting through. Deals like magical whimsical cheap cabins in gated communities for $150 a night. When I saw the rest of the summer had been booked up already, I quickly clicked the reserve button anxious that someone else might rent it before me.

Just a few minutes later, Joelle accepted my reservation and I breathed a sigh of relief . I'm not much of a trip planner, and so was feeling proud to have accomplished this task months ahead of our summer trip.

When the time came, all five of us crammed into my dodge caravan and headed for the Poconos. When we started getting close to the Magic Cabin, I began texting back and forth with Joelle. How to get the keys? Any instructions for her place? How would we get in the gated community?

I expected she’d meet us there and would have to drive from her other home to give us keys to her vacation rental. I gave her our ETA so she could time everything right. Maybe she had another job, maybe she had other rentals to get to?

She was being pretty vague in the texts an not really answering any questions. Maybe she psychically knew I had no idea what I was doing and was about to get the surprise of my life. I was still completely clueless that we were all about to share the magic cabin with Joelle, Jeff, myself, 16 year old Miles and my 10-year-old twins. 

 When we pulled up to this magic cabin in the woods, I was sort of looking around for signs that Joelle had arrived. “Where's her car”? I wondered allowed. “She must not be here yet”, I told my crew starting to unpack their suitcases . We waited outside standing around our minivan waiting for her car to pull up. It never did.

We got curious enough about the place so made our way over to the front of the house. There we were, standing on the front deck of this A-frame cabin, gravel driveway, surrounded by woods, with giant winged insects whizzing all around us in the middle of this immensely hot sunny August day when……,suddenly , the front door started to slowly creak open revealing a very large framed woman wearing a slim ankle-length black dress whose face was covered by a black lace veil coming down from her tiny black hat. It was like a scene from the Adams family. She looked quite morose as she stood there in the doors frame, silent, and dressed like she was opening the door to leave for a funeral and it was 1925. It looked like Joelle from the profile

Except, Joelle was a man. A very large framed man with an Adams apple and the calves of an NFl linebacker. “Joelle”, most assuredly, was a convert from “Joe”.

The doorbell continued to chime away eerily as we all shuffled through the front door hesitantly waiting for Joelle to give us a warm welcome, instructions, and keys to the cabin.

Joelle’s morose demeanor didn't change much, sHE quietly and calmly moved about the cabin pointing out the kitchen one direction , the bathroom in another, our bedroom, and then the loft where the kids would sleep. Then sHE pointed out the bedroom, in between the kids sleeping areas, where sHE stayed.

“Did sHE just say that was his room?” I elbowed Jeff as we were following Joelle to the kitchen.

That was the point a lightbulb went on and I finally recognized the learning curve I drove off with Airbnb. I was wrapping my head around this new lodging arrangement I hadn't realized I'd contractually agreed to, when Joelle, feeling the need to explain her noticeably morose disposition, turned to me and said :

 "I'm so sorry, I've been in mourning. Several people I know just died."

 Instantly , my heart melted with quizzical compassion hearing such tragedy, "Oh God , I'm so so sorry , that's awful ", I responded, still newly disjointed from just having also realized our Midwest Michigan family was about to spend the next two nights sharing a home with a drag queen two hours west of NYC.

"What happened to them?" I asked as the doorbell continued to chime strangely in the background, nearly five minutes since we’d been standing at the front door in sheer ignorance. “Did we even press the doorbell?” I wondered.

 "Oh, they all died in their sleep", Joelle answered.

 That's when I transitioned from a sense of compassion FOR Joelle to a sense of impending horror. Reminiscent of watching a scary movie , that point when you realize all the dum dum actors are about to be murdered, one by one, after a series of undeniable clues pointing to their demise becomes obvious.

And just like those scary movie characters, I stayed. I didn't want to be dramatic. On the outside, I remained cool. But inside, my anxiety tornado was devastating a large thriving city in Oklahoma, shredding two story homes and large buildings to mere splinters as cows were being carried miles away.

My anxiety started asking my brain questions...

"Are we going to die in our sleep here?”

“Were the dead friends the people that had rented this Airbnb before us?"

“Have I heard any reports of missing travelers in the Poconos recently?”

“Should I be contacting the local authorities to search the woods behind this house ?”

I kept my thoughts captive as I continued to assess the situation. 

The logical side of my brain started to chime in.  We were there, there were beds, Joelle could be totally harmless, maybe I was being dramatic, and it could be totally normal that several of her friends had somehow died in their sleep without further details or explanation.

The cheap side of my brain added it’s two cents to logic :

“We are $360 into this thing, hotels are booked up everywhere, we don’t have tents, and believe it or not, it still seemed like a better option than Jeff's rat infested family cabin that was rotting away right down the road. We decided to stay and make the most of it.

 We went to our minivan parked on the hot gravel driveway to get our bags , gathered the kids in a circle, held hands, and proceeded to bless the house in the name of Jesus. We prayed for Joelle's broken heart, then we unpacked and got ready for our two nights at the magic cabin with Joelle, the grieving psychic.

 The doorbell sound never stopped our entire stay there. We finally realized it wasn't a doorbell chime at all, but Joelle's music. The boys liked it, of course, they told us it was very artistic just like Joelle was. The boys really liked Joelle too. They also loved Joelle's cat, “Queen Elizabeth” who wore a diamond-studded kitty collar.

I spent some time chatting with Joelle the first morning. Joelle had moved to the Poconos from LA a few years prior for a boyfriend who had recently dumped her. sHE’d been feeling quite depressed about it. Left without a car and nothing to her name but this little cabin and a deck of tarot cards. sHE was trying to figure out whether or not to go back to LA. Joelle was very very sweet. sHE never offered us any psychic advice or tarot card readings. Yes, sHE had a large manly frame, but also a very soft demeanor. sHE spoke and giggled like Michael Jackson.

 I won't lie, there were definitely things about The "Magic" cabin that unsettled me beyond the host living there. For instance, there were peculiar paintings of things that looked like demons with twisted faces hanging on the walls and Idol statues placed here and there. Random piles of rocks were set up in neat circles in a few corners throughout the cabin for their "spiritual energy".

There were tree branches hung on the walls as decorations that were reminiscent of something out of the Blair Witch Project. A spiral staircase connecting the two floors had a different crystal or small idol placed on the edge of each step.

Joelle was a tarot card reader and a self-described psychic. I knew that stuff was demonic. But, it was Joelles thing, and it was Joelles magic cabin. We prayed blessing over her home and for Joelle specifically as we were the guests who asked to stay there. We played worship music on our phones and invited God to be there with us.

 There were some notably unique things. Joelle had an operating disco ball in her bathroom; that's not something you see every day. And a strange blue light in the bathroom that made the shower stall, that hadn't been updated since the seventies, look like it was underwater with moving light wave patterns.

 I didn't like the bugs, and I didn't like that the boy's bed literally looked like a squatters mattress on the floor without sheets in their room. Perhaps she’d used the sheets to wrap up and dispose bodies in the woods behind us of the people who’d stayed before us. Either way, I was glad we brought our own blankets and sheets just in case we needed them.

Our first night there, the twins' room was so stuffy that I opened the window to cool it off . Instead of experiencing the cool breeze I anticipated , we were met with a flurry of moths from the surrounding woods. There was no screen on the window. I frantically rushed to close it and spent the next 20 minutes removing flying moths from the room.

We tucked the twins into their squatters mattress on the floor , and then spent another 20 minutes praying we'd all live to see daybreak.

 Miles set up wasn't much better, he had a mattress on the floor of the open loft next to Joelle's bedroom. He was also the lucky enough to be sleeping in the space that housed the computer that belted out the continuous ding dong music we heard from the moment we arrived.

The second night we stayed there Miles said he had gone to bed with his (screened) window open; then woke to the window closed. This meant at some point during the night, Joelle had leaned over him in his bed to close the window. Or, was it magic that closed the window? 

 Our bedroom was fine, a few bugs here and there which meant I didn't sleep well, but I also didn't get stabbed to death in my sleep, so a win for me. Unlike the kids, we actually had a real mattress atop an actual bed frame with sheets and a dresser and everything that makes a bedroom suitable to rent. Jeff slept like a baby. 

 There were so many bugs everywhere in that cabin in the woods that Miles came down the spiral staircase shirtless after our first night there to use the shower when a large spider literally dropped from the ceiling and landed on his back. This sent him into a panicked frenzy and made me reconsider whether or not the rotting family cabin would be more desirable for night two. Then considering the cabin didn't have A/C, it was 100 degrees outside, and was just as likely to be filled with bugs, I took my chances swallowing spiders during the night and my family being murdered in our sleep for one more night.

I spent most of the second night laying in bed imagining Joelle standing at her front door days from now, freshly showered after working hard burying all five of us in a shallow grave in her backyard woods using our own blankets , telling unsuspecting Airbnb guests that she was mourning the death of several people that had just died in their sleep. 

 To our surprise, the next day we'd learned that Jeffs family, camping in tents, woke up at 2 am to horrendous rainstorms that caused rivers of water to run right through their tents!! So, in some way, we had some consolation that our decision to weather the magical cabin was still better than what they'd lived through. 

 The day we left, we took a few pictures in front of the spiral staircase. The weirdest thing happened. Without anyone noticing, even me..the one facing the stairs taking the pictures; Joelle managed to travel up and down those spiral stairs, which always made a noise when we used them. Somehow, we never saw her, we never even realized she'd been there until later in the day when we were looking through the pictures and there she was in the picture right behind them! How on earth did she do that?! The place really was magic.

 The best part was explaining to Darby and Cooper that Joelle was a man. They were so confused, as any small town Midwest Michigan kid might be. They didn't believe it. This took some convincing on my part.

I had the pictures of Joelle on the staircase I unknowingly took from the photoshoot. After seeing the Adam's apple and impressively large calf muscles, they were convinced. When they finally came to terms with it, Cooper turned to Jeff and said "Jeff, ....if you ever become a girl...we'll call you Jeffeny".

So yes, I've stayed in an Airbnb. We've since learned to filter rentals without hosts staying with us. But those stories aren't nearly as interesting.