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Is The Skirvin Hilton and Its Crying Baby Really the Only Option in Oklahoma City?

Lest we get carried away by new hotels and fun in-room amenities, let's revisit the scary side of hotels for a hot minute. Because we all need a downer to start of the New Year, right? (Ugh.)

Barb Delollis at USA Today picked up on ESPN Columnist Bill Simmon's recent stay at the haunted Skirvin Hilton in Oklahoma City. You know the hotel that last year's Knicks blamed for a poor performance when playing The OKC Thunder.

When Simmons was in town, he actually asked to stay on one of the hotel's haunted floors but didn't really expect to get spooked. Then the Skirvin Crying Baby made an appearance. He writes:

I decided to turn on the light. Stretching to my right for the switch, out of nowhere, I heard the sound of (what sure as hell sounded like) a baby crying urgently to my far left (right near the window). Wahhhhhhh. Wahhhhhh. Wahhhhhh. Wahhhhhhh. The urgency freaked me out just as much as the crying itself.

I fumbled for the switch, couldn't find it, fumbled, fumbled some more, then finally turned the light on. The crying sound stopped. I hopped out of bed and turned on every other light in the room. I turned on the television and jacked up the volume. Then I grabbed my BlackBerry and Googled "Skirvin crying baby. A slew of results came up."

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Infamous Hotels of the Week / Hotel WiFi / Hotel Porn / Bill Simmons / Hotel Conspiracies / → All Tags

Is This The Real Reason Why Hotels Have Bad WiFi Connections?

Porn jammers! Old men in the club! Fergie! Hotel Strikes!

It always seems that no matter how much Celebrity Scoop we write about in a given week, there's also lots more that we didn't have time to get to. So from now on, every Friday we'll be rounding up the week's Infamous Hotels. This weekly list will include hotels that celebrities visited (and it made the news) but also hotels that really up the "Eww" factor. This can easily done by manipulating the WiFi connection for guests.

The Sports Guy aka Bill Simmons recently offered up his take on Hotel WiFi after spending four weeks on the road promoting his new book. According to Bill, he stayed in nine hotels and all of them had wireless. (Hey that's an improvement from the past!) But he noticed that the connection was also worse at night than in the morning. We've noticed that too and just chalked it up to more people being in their rooms at night, doing work, surfing the internet, downloading episodes of "Glee" and the like. But Bill has a different and way better theory.

It's my belief thatcertain hotels scramble their wireless at night to discourage guests from surfing for porn. Why? So they will order adult entertainment from the hotel's pay-per-view system. I know ... it's dastardly. But if you're the hotel, why give the milk away for free when you can make people pay for the cow?

More importantly, would you really put it past them? This is the same business that built motion detectors into mini-bars; they're going to give up the in-room porn business without a fight? It's evil, it's desperate, it's despicable and brilliant. The Porn Jammer is my Great Call of the Week.

Well said, Sports Guy. Well said.

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