Independence Hotel — Sihanoukville's White Sentinel
The seven-storey modernist hotel that was Cambodia's tallest building when it opened in 1964 — host to Jacqueline Kennedy and Catherine Deneuve, later a Khmer Rouge base and a UNTAC squat — where the local press was reporting a girl who killed herself and four dead robbers in the corridors before the century turned.
Case File No. 288
FILE 01 The Legend
Designed by Leroy and Mondet and completed in 1964 as a statement of post-independence optimism, the white block on its headland hosted Catherine Deneuve and Jacqueline Kennedy, with Norodom Sihanouk taking a hand in the interiors. Under the Khmer Rouge it became a base for overseeing the port; dissidents were reportedly imprisoned in the clover-leaf swimming pool, roofed over with bamboo. UNTAC troops occupied it from 1992; criminals and smugglers used it afterwards, and by 2002 the English-language press in Phnom Penh was already reporting that locals considered it haunted. It reopened as a hotel in 2007 and now trades on its modernist architecture.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The Cambodia Daily recorded two competing versions in 2002: the spirit of a girl who killed herself in one of the rooms, and the souls of four robbers who died in the building. Guests have described figures in the corridors and a sense of being watched on the older floors; long-serving staff pass the stories on rather than deny them. The derelict decades made the hotel a fixture of Cambodian ghost-story television and later of travel writing about Sihanoukville.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The pool-as-prison detail is hedged with reportedly in every account and is not documented; the dark reputation rests on a period for which records are thin, and the 2002 article itself frames the haunting as local belief rather than reportage. The building stood open and unroofed for years, which accounts for the noises, draughts and moving light. It is now a restored four-star property; neither the owner nor the provincial authorities present it as haunted.
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