One of the spookiest places in the Washington region is not a haunted house. And it’s not just here for Halloween.

It’s a parking garage in Bethesda.

Entering the municipal garage on Woodmont Ave, near Bethesda Ave. is a thoroughly unremarkable experience. A sign at the Capital Crescent Garage displays the number of available parking spots. The ramp is nicely paved. A machine spits out a ticket upon hitting the touchpad at the gate. You park your car. It’s about as mundane experience as you could imagine.

Until you leave. This isn’t the Hotel California, where you can check out but never leave. This is the Garage Bethesda, where you can leave but never check back in.

For the record: representatives for the Montgomery County Department of Transportation, which maintains the facility, say they generally have not heard complaints about the garage.

The first hint of trouble comes to those who, like me, occasionally walk up stairs instead of taking an elevator. Using the stairway is a big mistake, which I realized the moment the door slammed shut behind me and my wife. I tried to pull it back open, but it had locked. There would be no retracing our steps.

Montgomery County DOT says that the doors should not lock automatically. But when I looked subsequently, signs by the doors warn that there is “No Re-entry.”

Then, there was the matter of where we had ended up as we walked out. We drove in on the east side of Woodmont. But we ended up on the west side, behind the facility, when we left. At that point, the entrance we used wasn’t even in sight.

Fine. Big deal. I remembered what floor I parked on when we came back to the garage at the end of the evening.

This is where it gets really spooky. I groped around the buttons in the barely lit elevator until finally pushing the one representing the floor where I parked, and then walked to the exact spot I expected to find my car.

Only the car wasn’t there. It was a moment straight out of the Seinfeld parking garage episode.

Turns out, there are two sides to the garage. But walking around to the other side of that level doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll find your car.

Forget Seinfeld. Now you’re wondering if there was a Twilight Zone episode about a car with a mind of its own. (There was.)

My wife and I must have spent a half-hour wandering around, searching for our car, the first couple of times we parked there. One of the times we had friends in tow, a couple who naively accepted our offer to drive them home after a movie, on the simple assumption we knew how to get to our car.

You’re even liable to run into someone who’s flustered trying to find their car, too—perplexed, disoriented, yes, almost as if they’d seen a ghost. We saw WAMU’s own Kojo Nnamdi not long ago, someone who surely knows his way around the region, desperately searching for his car.

But everything that’s spooky, every haunted house, has a logical explanation behind it. Right? Right?

Whether you exit by climbing a stairway where the door locks behind you or you take the elevator at Woodmont, the floor you exit from and the floor you parked on are almost always different.

About 90 percent of the parking spaces require you to walk downhill (literally; whether you’re going downhill figuratively I can’t say) when returning to your car. So if the elevator says G1 when you get in there after parking your car, chances are it says G2 near where you’ve actually parked your car.

I spoke with Jose Thommana, the parking management division chief for the Montgomery County Department of Transportation. He wasn’t amused at all by my tales of wandering aimlessly around a municipal garage. In fact, he and Esther Bowring, the public information officer, sounded understandably proud of an otherwise state-of-the-art parking garage, replete with relatively wide parking spaces.

“We’ll go out and re-examine the garage,” Thommana says. “And see if anything can be done to make this easier for people to remember” where they’ve parked.

Which means you might have to act quickly to enjoy the full, mysterious experience.