I remember reading this in one of those * Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark* books (the ones with the reaaally creepy pencil illustrations). It goes something like this…
A young girl is staying at a hotel in Paris with her mother. The girl leaves for some reason and gets taken on a long cab ride all around the city, the same streets again and again. When she finally returns to the hotel room, it is unoccupied and looks completely different than before. It turns out in the end that her mother died in the hotel and they wanted to cover it up, so a cab driver was paid to take the girla round while they redid the room. The book claims it was based on a true story, though I don’t remember any cites.
So, has anyone heard of this story (or something similar) before?
Here is a Snopes link regarding the story.
I remember seeing this story told on an old television show as well, possibly Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
I’ve read this in multiple “strange but true” books. Usually the story involves the mother and daughter in Paris for a world exposition of some kind and the mother taking sick. The hotel doctor sends the daughter to a druggist’s in another part of the city and when the girl gets back, the mother is gone, the room is changed, and everyone involved swears they’ve never seen the girl or her mother in their lives. It’s usually speculated that the mother came down with the plague or something similarly deadly and highly contagious and the hotel has covered up the whole thing because they don’t want to cause a panic in the very high-density crowds in the city for the expo.
“…mother takes sick…”
I knew I was going to mess up something…
Where are the ghosts? 
Hijack : I’ve seen once on TV a similar prank played on some unsuspecting guy. They refurbished his appartment and put someone else in it who pretended not to know who the poor guy was and to have been living there for a long time. Still on TV, another older prank was to hire a young guy in some shop, send him on an errand and completely change the shop meanwhile (say, he was hired in a dry-cleaning shop and came back to find a drugstore). They also told him that the former shop had closed months ago, letting him first incredulous, then terrified.
I think I wouldn’t like such a trick being played on me.