Copyright Screen Rant
Guillermo del Toro explained how scouting locations for The Lord of the Rings' prequel film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, traumatized him. Originally set to direct the film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel of the same name, he dropped the project after a series of delays. While del Toro didn't end up helming the movie, he did help with location hunting for the hit fantasy film. In an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! the filmmaker revealed how he ended up encountering a ton of paranormal activity at an eerie hotel in New Zealand. After asking the staff for the most haunted room at the infamous Waitomo Caves Hotel, the director claimed that he heard "an entire murder" happen right in his room. He told Kimmel that whenever he goes to a haunted hotel, he always asks for the room with the most paranormal activity. "We were scouting for The Hobbit in an empty hotel in Waitomo, the Waitomo Hotel. Every hotel I go, I know the haunted room. I say, ‘Can you give me the haunted room?’ Nothing ever happened until then.” According to del Torro, he was just minding his own business while watching The Wire when he heard the ghost. "I was watching Stringer Bell and, all of a sudden, I hear an entire murder in the middle of the room. The screams and the stabbings and the crying.” He claimed that he was so scared that he was unable to rest. He told the late-night host, "I couldn’t sleep at all.” Kimmel tried to offer the director some more logical explanations behind the murderous sounds he heard. However, del Toro shot down any non-paranormal theories. He said that it couldn't have been any other guests because he was allegedly the only person staying in the east wing of the hotel. "There was nobody else in the hotel, not even the manager. They gave us the keys because it was off-season. And I was on the east wing, and everybody else was on the west wing.” Instead of throwing in the towel and moving over to the west wing like everyone else, he stayed in the haunted room the entire night, even though he didn't get a wink of sleep. "I put the earphones back, and I stayed looking at the computer the whole night,” he recalled. “I didn’t want to turn around. There was a balcony and I said, ‘What if I look and there’s something there?’”
