The service industry is an interesting one to work in. It has a way of always keeping you on your toes, thanks to the constant flow of strangers encountered throughout the day. And hotels are a shining example of this. The chances of interacting or witnessing incredibly strange behavior increase tenfold when you have people from all around coming to stay with you for at least one night. This is especially true when you add alcohol into the mix, which many people end up consuming while on vacation. Just take it from the following people, who recently took to the internet to share stories about some of the craziest and weirdest things they have ever witnessed a guest do.
45. A Blinding Image
We had a guest on the 1st floor who left his blinds open and slept naked. The owner called him to ask him to close the blinds. He must've been super embarrassed.
44. Mobile Microwave
I checked a guest into a room and they immediately came back down holding the microwave from the room. There was a partially microwaved sprinkler head inside. I upgraded them.
43. Hopping Around
Our guest requested room service to bring her some food. When the room door opened she was wearing a full body bunny pajama/costume, ears and all. She asked for the concierge to wait for a little, went to the other side of the room, came hopping and took the plate with both hands together like a bunny "would do." She said thanks, hopped around to leave the plate in the room and back to close the door.
42. Hotel Vape-ancy
Not really strange but last night there was a sweet 16 in the party room. I work in the restaurant and literally every 10 minutes a group of 16 year old boys would come out for a smoke break thinking they were the coolest. They had the whole bar yelling "EVERYONE GET OUT OF THE WAY THEY'RE BACK FOR A PUFF!!" I hope the boys' parents show up to drive them home later and see them out there.
41. Spoiled To The Core
We had a family from the United Arab Emirates who owned some sort of huge construction company, and they brought their entire family to stay at our hotel. I think at the peak of their three-week stay they had probably rented out our 12 largest suites. The youngest boy was an absolute nightmare, literally the epitome of a spoiled rotten child. I think he was about 8, and had to weigh at least 160 pounds. He threw his iPad (new in the box) into the swimming pool in the midst of a tantrum, and the next day he came back with the family, three bell carts of shopping bags, and a new iPad. I've never seen people just spend money like that, not even the actors or championship athletes who came to our property.
40. Cold Corpse
I was working in reservations and some guy called to reserve a room. After booking the room he asked if he could store his wife's corpse in our walk-in fridge overnight. Said he had all the appropriate legal docs to transport her over state lines and was trying to get her home to be buried.
39. Going Bananas
I caught an inebriated guest sitting behind a large potted plant eating a banana, just gnawing into the peel like it was a regular apple or some stuff. It was like 2:30 in the morning and no one else was around. I took pity on him and gave him cookies and a peeled banana from the lobby in exchange for his unpeeled banana.
38. A Vanishing Act
Disappearing.
My parents used to own a guest house (small, family-run hotel) and one guy came to stay. My mum checked him in and showed him to his room. He was never seen or heard from again. My mum was the last person to ever see him alive. She reported him missing to the police and as far as we know was never found.
We lived very near a coast path and police think he either fell or jumped off it somewhere.
37. Naked And Afraid
Guest mistook the hallway door in his room for the bathroom and locked himself out of the room naked. He panicked and tried to kick the door to his room in and ended up breaking the handle off. He came down to the desk wearing nothing but a garbage bag and since the handle was broken and it was the middle of the night we couldn't get into his room until maintenance fixed the door the next day, so I had to move him into a different room, where he remained naked until morning.
36. Romaine Calm
As the owner of a bed and breakfast place for the last 8 years, the craziest thing I ever found was an old battered notebook with "Why I love salad" written on the front and then literally 40-80 pages on why salad was amazing. There'd be the occasional suggestion that the author believed salad to be alive in some sense. Looked like it had been written on and off over the course of several years.
35. Food Safety
I had a guy who said his microwave didn't work. I went up to the room and he had locked a plate of food in the safe.
34. Morgue And Movies
I used to serve room service in a hotel that was near a major national hospital, and the two locations had reached some sort of business agreement where people going into surgery could stay at the hotel the night/nights before for a discount rate. During my three years there, we had about six guests pass away during the night while waiting for surgery. It was always handled in a really hush-hush manner, but it was always messed up to hear about.
33. Extra Mayo
A mate of mine worked at an Ibis in Sydney (cheapish hotel brand in Australia) as a temp cleaner. Not really disgusting or weird, but the residents had decided to cover the floor in the bathroom with mayonnaise, and the same with the mirrors.
32. The Goatysburg Address
A goat dressed like Abraham Lincoln.
There's no more story here, at least none that I know. Working as a cleaner in a hotel, went to clean a guest's room, dreading it since they'd been there for a bachelor party, found the goat. Don't know how it got there, or how it was removed, but it made a good story for a while.
31. Nailed It
I was working at a luxury hotel and we had a fairly big-name band staying with us. There were no noise complaints, and they seemed to be perfect tenants. When they left and we went to clean the room, EVERY SINGLE PIECE of furniture was nailed to the ceiling in roughly the same configuration that it was in on the floor. I found it to be quite amusing. Management didn't.
30. Fishy Behavior
My family is in the hotel business. One day a particular room just started to stink to high heavens for no apparent reason. We checked everywhere multiple times looking for the source of the scent, no dice. We sprayed everything in the room numerous times with deodorizer to no avail. Left the room open daily for months to air it out without any change.
Finally, we somehow tracked the smell to the table lamp. We were dumbfounded, asking ourselves how it could be emanating from there. The previous tenant had broken the thing, put a fish in it, and glued it back together. My brother and I died laughing and actually applauded this guy's ingenuity. He got us good, and I ain't even mad at that.
29. An Apple A Day
Front Desk Supervisor here. We once had a guest check in at the beginning of a month. She did not come down for breakfast in the mornings. She refused any and all service to her room for an entire month. No new sheets, no new towels, no general cleaning. But every day she would come down to the front desk and ask for 4 bars of regular soap and an apple. That's it.
We tried looking her up on Google to see if she was a missing person somewhere or wanted or something, but we came up with nothing. Finally, after about a month, her bank called us to try to figure out why she was staying here for so long, suspecting fraud. We verified the account with the ID and it all checked out, but she refused to talk to the bank herself, so the bank wouldn't let her transactions keep going through. We had to evict her from the room because her card would no longer be authorized for the room.
She left the room out of a side door with no belongings, in the same clothes we had seen her in day after day asking for those bars of soap. Inside her room, they found piles and piles of unopened soaps, just sitting there. Blood was everywhere, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, all over the sheets and the duvet. And there were apple cores everywhere on the floor.
We never figured out what the heck was happening, but that's the weirdest story I've had so far.
28. Towels And Cake
I did housekeeping for a summer and it pretty much all sucked. But one day I came into work and my boss was overly angry that morning, grumbling about how we were low on towels or something. How is a four-star hotel low on towels? Well, I got my list of rooms to clean and went on my way. I got 3 or 4 rooms in then I got to room 237...like in The Shining. Still haunts me. So I knocked, "Housekeeping!" Nothing in response, the sign that I'm clear to go in and do my job. Just opening the door it smelled sickly sweet and I was already worried. I opened the door and... Cake. Everywhere. All over the carpets, the beds, the desk, even smeared all over the ceiling.
At this point, I was in awe. Who the heck has the audacity to do this to a room? So I decided to check how bad the bathroom was, and I could barely open the door, maybe a half foot. At this point, I was expecting a body or something terrible. Poked in my head and what do ya know? There's got to be all the missing towels my supervisor was freaking out about, about 50 square foot room, about 4 feet high covering the entire floor, all the towels, soaking wet. This actually made me giggle a little for the irony but still, what idiot delivered half our towel stock to one room? Either way, I just said screw it, called down to my supervisor, and told her I needed help or I quit.
You should have seen her face when I showed her why I called to say that.
27. The Christmas Corpse
A friend of mine worked at her parent's hotel. One of the guests alerted her to a bad smell on one of the floors. She went up and traced the smell to one room. When she opened the door, a very large man was sitting on the end of the bed facing her and looking at her. She asked him what was going on, but he didn't answer. Turns out he'd had a heart attack a few days prior while putting on his socks. It was Christmas Day when she found him.
26. Belongings In The Bible
Normally I never find anything too crazy, but I always have to check the Bibles; people will leave anything from love letters to gift cards to rubbers in them. One of the girls I work with said she found one with just pictures of cats in it.
25. Bombs Away
Whilst working in a Travelodge in the UK, I had a cleaner completely lose her mind because of what she saw in a room. She came running out screaming that someone had turned a room into an explosive factory and everyone needs to get out. This annoyed me, as screaming that to guests is never the best option. I went and checked the room and I discovered that the guests had been using loads of nitrous, and there were loads of little canisters left. Not a big deal, and certainly wasn't cause to scare the living daylights out of all the guests and cause a hotel-wide evacuation and the involvement of the police. She couldn't understand what she did wrong which annoyed me even more, especially as it meant I had to fill out loads of paperwork and go through a lot of red tape. Ugh, I'm so glad I left that job.
24. Killer On The Loose
We once had a guy check in with his wife and young daughter. They had no reservation, paid in cash and got a room on the 12th floor. About three hours later (around 10PM) he called down to reception to tell us someone was looking in his window. Since he was on the 12th floor this was impossible, but one of the guys went to go see him anyway. He came to the door, and told the receptionist to leave and that he had never called (even though we knew it was him because the switchboard shows the room number).
Two hours later we got another call saying someone was trying to hurt him, this time three managers went to the room including myself. The wife and child were nowhere to be seen (turns out they had left not long after he checked in), there was evidence of drugs in the bathroom, and the guy was lying on the bed giggling insanely. The weirdest part was that the room was filled with feathers and stuffing; he had torn the pillows, quilt, and mattress apart with his bare hands and coated the room in the contents.
Police were called, and he was asked never to return.
23. Washed In Wine
One time I had to make a room service delivery, a full bottle. I knocked on the door, and an elderly woman who identified herself as an artist opened the door. I opened the bottle for her, handed it to her and she asked me if I wanted a "blessing."
Being in the service industry, I said sure and she asked me to take a step back. She took a big swig from her 45 dollar bottle and spit in my face.
I turned around and walked back to the floor dripping with formerly-delicious, old-lady-filtered red drink.
22. Getting Lucky In The Elevator
I was a security guard for a casino with a hotel. One night my supervisor called me to the hotel. I met him at the elevator, and he called it to our floor and the doors opened...to a couple being intimate. I guess they didn't notice the camera in the elevator.
21. Shower Smoothie
My fiancé was completing her daily workload when she came across a room that smelled like a tropical air freshener. Apparently, the person staying in the room attempted to make a smoothie in their bathtub. The kicker is that she couldn't remove the blueberry stains from the tub.
20. Playing For Keeps
We rented a hotel room for New Year's. I was looking around and got so excited that the room had a microwave because I had never been in a hotel room with one before. I noticed black and blue cardboard behind it. As a PlayStation gamer, I knew what it would be. I pulled out a Call Of Duty edition PlayStation Vita and a starter pack with a controller, HDMI cord, and USB cord.
19. Loose Change Left Behind
We had a guest check out, then come back the next morning hollering about how he really needed to get back in his room. We had checked other people into his old room, so I told him that he wouldn't be able to access the room. He asked if housekeeping had found anything in there, and I looked in our database and said no, they hadn't. He said, "You need to call the people in the room and have them let me in because I have $10,000 in cash under the mattress in there and I forgot it yesterday." What the heck!? Why would you leave $10,000 cash in your hotel room? He started causing a scene and was super insistent we had to wake up the family in the room at 7:30 in the morning. He ended up retrieving it after security got involved.
18. Disassembled And Unhinged
One guy (who we later learned was not well) stayed it our $300-a-night hotel for about a month. Once he bounced some checks we went up to his room to lock him out, and we went in and looked around. All he had in the room was a large bowie blade in the bathroom and a cut in half melon that had been sitting there a while, a laptop that was completely disassembled and laid out on the floor (he had flipped the beds against the wall) and some intricate drawings of a ship in yellow crayon. There were no clothes as he wore the same thing every day (black jeans, white button-up, and a leather vest with a Playboy bunny sticker on the back). All the pictures had been taken down and the outlet covers and light covers had been removed.
He was pretty nice when we asked him to go, but when he came back a few months later he told us that he was the master of the whole corporation and we would be ruined. About a year later I found him wandering the hallways and when I asked him what he was doing, he said looking for a job application. So we got him one and he left.
17. The Forgotten Friend
My buddy works in a hotel down on the Panama City strip. Told me last year the maids were doing cleanup after a group of college students on Spring Break checked out. So as to be expected there were bottles everywhere. The bathroom door was locked. Once they get it open, they found one of the students passed out on the floor. There had apparently been some big fight and she went and locked herself in the bathroom and in the morning everyone had forgotten about her and left. Luckily they weren't super far down the highway when she called them screaming at them for forgetting her.
16. Satan And Sinners
I'm the lifeguard for my hotel but housekeeping was short staffed so they asked for my help. They got me to clean the business suites and such on the top floor. Sure. Fine. Business people are generally clean.
I was two rooms in when I came across a messier room. A man asked us to clean and organize his room while he was at a meeting. No problem. I got new towels, and soaps. Took all the dirty towels and blankets. Went on to the desk to pick up a used cloth and underneath it was a stack of about 20 cards. On these cards was a red haze or smoke with Satan in the middle. It read "Have you worshipped Satan?"
To my understanding, this man was a Christian man who is trying to convert sinners, or in his words "satan worshipers," to Christianity. The cards were for anyone who wanted to get help, but at first glance, it was messed up and strange. Still strange nonetheless.
15. Disorderly and Inebriated
Worked at a small hotel for a short time. A couple spent two nights. The first night the man got inebriated and accidentally entered the wrong room. It took about 15 minutes to convince him he was in the wrong room. The next day a mirror fell off the wall in their room and broke, but the boss figured it just wasn't secured well.
At checkout, the guy told me that the toilet had broken and he left the piece that broke on top of the toilet. So I went to check it out after he had left and the toilet was broken, and there was a piece on top of it. It didn't belong to that toilet though. We never found out what happened to the piece that broke off the toilet and we have no clue where the piece he left there came from.
14. Pocket Stopper
I work at the reception of a luxury hotel in Europe. One morning as my colleague is checking out a very happy looking couple, she asks how their stay was and they respond that everything was great except for one thing. The woman said that when she had put on the bathrobe, she noticed a tissue in the pocket. She pulled it out and realized that there was a USED STOPPER inside. The craziest part? it didn't faze her, and she said she would definitely come back.
13. Stealing Signs
On the weekends during the summer we'll have a lot of sports teams stay with us. Nothing really professional, just things like basketball teams filled with teenagers, lacrosse teams, soccer teams. All adolescents, no one really older than that. One weekend one of the basketball teams decided it would be a grand idea to tear down a sign from a restaurant and leave it in their guest room. Housekeeping goes in the next day to clean the room and lo and behold there's a large electrical sign in their room. That specific team didn't get kicked out at that time; however, they were asked to not return and were also required to write a letter of apology to the housekeepers. Good times.
Image by akiragiulia from Pixabay
12. Messed In The Head
I have worked front desk for ages and oh, the stories I can tell. The one that sticks with me the most happened around Christmas. I'm sitting there at about 2AM when a guy comes running down with a screwdriver sticking out of his face. "Call 911 and hide," he manages before he passes out. I grab the phone and run into the room where the security tapes are, lock the door, and call. On camera I see a second man walk down, place a pillow under screwdriver guy's head and then sit on the lobby couch. He was the attacker. Cops come, arrest man #2, whisk man #1 off. He lived. I guess this whole thing happened because man #1 home-wrecked man #2' s relationship SEVEN years prior. Yeah, I took a leave after that.
11. Coffins And Cheating
Used to work at a hotel. The most bizarre thing we saw was in a room a man was staying in, in which he stayed for a few days. When one of the cleaning ladies went to clean it while he wasn't there we saw he had a coffin in the bed. Next day when we cleaned it we noticed the coffin was open and he had an axe and he had a freaking pet snake just loose in the room. The room was always neat except for the bed not being made and dirty towels. Creepy.
10. Keeping Watch
We discovered our security guard sneaking into the rooms at night and watching people sleep. He was quickly fired after a woman woke up to him staring at her on the bed.
9. Preparing The Parts
My friend works at a hotel and the one that stood out the most was an organ in the freezer. Apparently, people like to eat them.
8. Faking It
Probably the strangest thing I've ever discovered actually was brought to light by a guest complaint. He had sold his laptop to another guest for 100 bucks, and when he went to spend the money, discovered it was counterfeit. We called the police, who broke down the door to find a printing press and a large counterfeit operation.
7. The Peeping Perv
I worked in a resort hotel in the Catskills. We would have a slow period in the winter so many employees would stay on and do room maintenance (painting, varnishing woodwork, etc.). We noted peepholes drilled in the hall doors. The holes would be drilled at an angle to best view the bed or the dresser mirror, which was always on the opposite wall of the bed. The owner of this hotel was a real creep.
6. Binging And Purging
I helped an ex run a small hotel. A regular customer, a fat, middle-aged mid-level businessman, would stay for several nights each trip. Every night, he drank and ate junk food while lying down in bed, until he threw up over himself and the bed/pillows and passed out. Every night.
5. Struggling With Hygiene
I'm actually at work right now. It's not so much what I have found in a guest's room, but because I live in central Alberta, lots of the guys that stay here live here for months at a time. I've become friends with a few of the guests and therefore I find out a lot about them. One guest, in particular, does not brush his teeth (his roommate vents about his lack of hygiene), rarely showers after work (road construction), sleeps in his work clothes, wears the same shirt every day since he bought it, and currently has tar in his bed. This guest is a great guy, just not sanitary. Also, he steals loose change out of his roommate's work truck to buy new socks and underwear instead of washing clothes.
4. Checking In Lice
I had a woman meet me in the hall with her room's dirty sheets. No big deal, we were right by the laundry room and I could switch them for fresh. Except, of course, that as I turned to walk to the laundry room she informed me that the sheets I was now carrying were infested with lice. The family had come to stay at our hotel to de-lice themselves.
3. Blood Bath
I used to work for an adults-only all-inclusive resort. An older German couple were celebrating their 40th anniversary when they called for help, and I was the manager on duty. They were taking a bath together in the jacuzzi when one of her varicose veins popped and pumped blood, filling the tub. It was absolutely disgusting.
2. Just Some Housekeeping
A lawnmower. I had a guest call down one day and when I went to check the room, a lawnmower was literally shoved in her closet.
1. Getting Mugged
My parents own a bed & breakfast in Florida. We had a lady stay for a week one time with her husband; the husband seemed normal enough but she seemed a little off. As the week went on, the mugs that my parents put out for coffee every morning started disappearing...around 3 or 4 gone a day. My mom went to clean these guests' room and found the wife's entire suitcase stuffed with our coffee mugs. Later that day the cops knocked on our door and asked questions about the lady (she wasn't with them, nor had my mom seen her since she found the mug stash. The cops told my parents that the lady was shopping at the nice boutiques downtown and store owners caught her SWALLOWING multiple necklaces...ended up being about $5,000 worth of jewelry. Turns out she was a big thief and did this sort of thing regularly. It takes all kinds.
