Boys Will Be Terrible
“I had a room a few weeks ago with two boys aged 18 with a bunch of bottles and smokes. They left vomit all over the beds, toilet, and sink. I was scared the room would smell like vomit but it didn’t because they smoked so much.
They ran off through the emergency exit, which should not have been possible. Luckily one of them left their ID behind so the manager contacted him so he could come and get it back, but only after paying a fine.
I think the worst part is when my manager told him how unacceptable it was how they left the room behind and he replied, ‘Isn’t that what cleaners are for?’
What a piece of garbage.”
How Did He Drive Away?
“Pre-Airbnb days, my friend’s elderly great aunt rented out a not-so-fashionable 1960s but in a great location Jersey beach house. One day, the cleaning guy called my friend (who did the big maintenance on the place), and he then called me in a huff and asked me to rent a truck and come down to the shore to help him. The one-week renter had pulled a filthy transmission from a small truck and somehow carried it upstairs on a tarp and left it in the middle of a small bedroom (renter took the bed out of the room and laid it down in the family room against the wall).
There was also a Ford crate engine box in the hallway and old engine parts all over the master bedroom floor around the queen size bed. We really only had to clean up grease and oil from one room but getting the thing down the stairs on the tarp was a monster of a day.”
“Come Have A Look At This”
“I worked on reception, so this is something someone missed, but I got a call from a couple who had just checked in saying they had found something. I went to the room and they were both standing by the drawer of their bedside table. One had their hand over their mouth in shock, the other one was absolutely peeing themselves with laughter.
‘Come have a look at this,’ they said.
I went over and looked in. Lined up in the drawer was a bubblegum pink toy, a vibrating toy, a pack of AA batteries, and some wet wipes.
After apologizing profusely, I came back with some rubber gloves and a bin bag.
Instead of taking them straight to the bin, I spoke to a chef and asked, ‘Guess what I found.’
They then joined a small collection, curated by that particular chef, of special toys found in hotel rooms. Nobody ever really questioned him on it, because there was always a very real risk he’d give an answer.”
Was This On Purpose?
“My best friend worked in housekeeping at a hotel chain. I’ve heard some nightmare stories, but there are two that really stand out. The first was after a furry convention came through town, and there was an absurd amount of adult toys left behind. It was pretty common to come across them from time to time, but this almost had to be purposeful.
The second was a massive unflushable poo. She refused to dispose of it and left the task to her manager. She described it as inhuman, and the size of a football. She said they all smelled it way before they found it. She said the entire third floor smelled like boiled bodies. It took a spatula and a knife from their kitchen to make it manageable enough to flush. I think the spatula and knife both were thrown away, but they should have had them mounted in the lobby next to a picture of the giant dump.”
No Questions Asked
“I worked at a hotel through high school and into college. I was the maintenance man, Mr. Fix It – but I worked there long enough that I did pretty much everything. Anyway, this goes down as one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life – including all the crazy stuff I’ve seen there. These two guys were checking out and they were moving an unordinary amount of stuff out of their room. They spent a long time packing everything up into cardboard moving boxes. Then they were hauling everything out to a box van/truck using the luggage carts. I offered to help them and they accepted.
What was all of this stuff? Half of it was a frick ton of cases of Smirnoff Ice and similar fruity drinks – Captain Morgan Parrot Bay, Seagrams, etc. All unopened 24-pack cases and not one empty bottle in the room. And what was the other half of all this stuff? Tube socks. Unopened multipacks of plain white tube socks – the kind you find for sale at a hardware store or something.
I didn’t ask any questions. What was I going to ask? They thanked me for helping them and said I could take as much as I wanted. I was in college, had four roommates, and drove a little pickup truck, so I loaded up about 10 cases in the back of my truck.
This happened like 20 years ago now. And I’m still baffled by what two dudes would be doing with a bunch of bad drinks and tube socks.”
Caught Brown Handed
“I went to a call about an issue with a guest who had to check out but was so wasted that they couldn’t wake him. The room was covered in poop. Floors, carpets, walls, bed, sheets, bathroom. Even the ceiling had stains. Fortunately, we did not have to take the guy (who was also covered in it) with us as he woke up and agreed to some kind of deal with the hotel.
Another similar call happened to another hotel years later. Similar issue but not as much poop and the walls and ceilings were clean. The guest had already left and the hotel wanted him to clean up his mess or pay for cleaning (no credit card involved as it was a local person). Called him on his phone, he denied everything until we told him that there was poo even between the bed and the mattress (there was).
‘No, only bedsheets and floor!’ He exclaimed.
And that’s when he knew he messed up, agreed to come back, take a look and pay for damages.”
He Saw Some Stuff
“We found a kid (about four years old) wandering around in the Holodome (A big open space with amenities for the guests. It was a Holiday Inn creation), with clothes on. He was able to tell us his mom’s name, so we brought in the police, opened the door, and there was mom, passed out on the bed. The room was filled about knee-high with garbage. A huge hole had been burned in the middle of the carpet, and she was surrounded by a rather large amount of Tito’s bottles. The police were really cool about it too. Found out the mom had left a husband that was abusing her and the kid. They called in a social worker and found her temporary housing.
About two weeks later, I was heading home, tired from a long day at work, and wasn’t paying attention to my speed. An officer pulled me over for speeding. The cop saw the hotel logo on my jacket and recognized me. He was the one that responded to the mom and kid situation. He said, ‘Man, you go through some wild stuff at work! I wouldn’t want your job. Just slow it down, please. And that was that.”
They All Got A’s That Day
“I study at a Hotelschool that operates its own hotel. We have first-year students doing the physical work and second-year students acting as managers/supervisors with instructors above them.
Once there was a guy who booked a room for a week. He paid for everything in advance and because this was a simple hotel with no extra amenities etc he didn’t have to leave a credit card.
This man had explicitly requested for nobody to enter the room for the duration of his stay, as he valued his privacy. No problem. He was always very nice to the students and in general a pleasant gentleman.
After he left, they inspected the room for cleaning. And, oh boy, that was a scene. The room was covered in bodily liquids and feces. I’m talking on the ceiling, all over the bed and drapes, in the bathroom, it was everywhere!
Unfortunately, he came under a false identity. Turns out, he pulled that stunt in other small hotels too. He was never caught. The students who were working that week all got maximum grades for their efforts. Real shticky situation through and through.”
Dumb Kid
“I was a seasonal police officer in a beach resort. One summer I was in the substation writing a long report on a series of grab and run thefts, a lot of paperwork. We did end up catching the thieves. While typing away, a radio call came out for another seasonal and a full-time officer to respond to a hotel to collect contraband left behind by a guest.
At the time it didn’t register with me. People leave weed behind all the time so I just shrugged it off as a normal call and went back to work. A full hour later (yes it takes that long), I was finalizing my paperwork and the two officers came back to the substation carrying four full paper bags of substances. Not lunch bag-sized paper bags, grocery store-sized paper bags. There was something like four, gallon-size bags of high-quality weed, a couple of bundles of coke, a couple of bundles of smack, a couple of sheets of acid tabs, another gallon bag of mushrooms, and a couple of pill bottles of assorted uppers and downers.
What had happened was the cleaning staff went up at checkout time and saw his room still had stuff in it. So they gave him a few hours of courtesy time. When they came back it still was full of his stuff. So they went to gather it up and take it down to be picked up later. They threw back the bed covers and lo and behold, they saw this veritable buffet of illicit substances and call the police. The best part was, as the officer was cataloging evidence, the kid (and I mean like a 20-year-old) showed up to his room and they arrested him.”
Room 204
“My uncle owned a couple motels in Leesburg, FL and I spent summers and weekends doing maintenance from them when I was in high school (about 30 years ago).
One morning a housekeeper ran toward the office in tears, saw me mixing paint in the utility room, and begged me to go back to room 204 with her. She could barely speak because she was crying so hard, and as I’m walking with her I was getting amped up that I might have to deal with some dude who either tried to put his hands on her or had flashed her or stood in the room stroking himself, something along those lines (had happened a few times already, this is Florida we’re talking about).
I had to use my key because she refused to go near the door. I opened it and saw a woman lying on the bed closest to the door, arm slung over the side, with what looked like string hanging to the floor. I tugged on the curtain a little to get some more light in the room and saw that she’d slit her wrist and bled to death. The ‘string’ was like when you let multiple candles burn all the way down and it forms a cone underneath (stoners and hippies will know what I’m describing). It wasn’t all the way from her wrist to the floor, but it was like a weird blood pyramid and a big crusty pool around it.
I was 16 and had seen a total of two dead bodies in my life, both at funerals. I had weird nightmares for a few weeks after seeing that. Way more traumatizing than the usual crack pipes, adult toys, and piles of feces that sometimes made appearances.”
“I Couldn’t Do Anything”
“Back in my high school days circa ’98-’02, I worked housekeeping for a hotel where we had lots of musical guests who played a nearby concert venue. Most of the stuff we found was pretty tame. Until one year after Oz Fest. I was sent to clean the suite and rooms that a certain shock rocker was using. What we found has stayed with me for years. There were a lot of bondage items, that in itself wasn’t bad. No, the bad part was the blood on the bonds, the walls, sheets, TV, it was just everywhere.
There was also coke residue everywhere. Chains with locks around the toilet. We were torn, wondering should we call the cops? That’s how much blood there was. In the end, my managers vetoed that idea, recently that rocker has had some serious accusations made against him. It makes me sick knowing I seen evidence of stuff when I was younger and couldn’t do anything. At the time he was very popular and is from the state I live in. I’m not sure the police would have done anything but it’s caused me to lose sleep ever since.”
What A Way To Go
“I used to work in a casino that had a hotel. I didn’t clean rooms but fixed the tech in them. I had been in the current hotel for more than 10 years and some of the stuff I had seen I would need paragraphs and a lot of work to describe. Las Vegas hotels are extremely nuts here and pretty much every shift I would see stuff most people would rather not.
However, one incident at a California casino was one of the most memorable, but not for a good reason. I’m not even sure why my coworker and I were even in that room, but it was a suite with just a living room and bedroom. One occupant. She was in the hospital already, but by description, she was fairly overweight. I can never do this justice, but she had been in there close to two weeks and I swear every single spare space in that suite, including the bathroom had a drink bottle of some kind. Literally hundreds, mostly cans of stuff like IPA’s. Evidently, she was doing a ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ thing – drinking herself to death intentionally, but by mostly drinking brewskis. It was so surreal.”
Lesson Learned
“At the time, I worked for a fairly small vacation rental company in a popular resort town. We managed about 45 properties at the time and it was customary for inspections to be performed on the home in between guests to look for damage, lost and found items, etc.
During a turnover on one of my properties, one of our inspectors was checking a bedroom and took a look under the bed. Under the bed, he found a few books, the insides of which were hollowed out, and tucked inside were envelopes of cash, all 100 bucks in bills. He promptly took it to the kitchen counter to get a better look and all in all, there was 22k in cash. As this isn’t the kind of lost and found item you are ever really prepared to find, he called our manager. The manager came, met him at the house, and saw the cash all laid out on the table. Since we have a record of all of our guests who stay with us, we pulled their contact info and gave them a call to explain what we had found and inquire if it was left behind by them.
The guests confirmed it did belong to them but by this time, the guests had already made the full trip home and were roughly eight hours away, but they were turning around and would meet my colleagues at the property to retrieve their cash. Sure enough, roughly eight hours later a vehicle pulled into the driveway of the property with two individuals, a man, and a woman. They both got out of the vehicle and met with my manager in the driveway. They were both rough-looking, and covered head to toe in tattoos. Since they were dealing with large amounts of cash and it was well past sundown, they agreed that the woman would come inside to retrieve the cash while the man waited in the car. She came inside, verified her identity against our guest records, we took a photo of her driver’s license and sent her on her way with the cash.
This happened a few years ago and I worked for that company for a couple of years after this incident and nothing ever really came of it beyond that. We didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but we all assumed they used our property for some sort of illicit deal or something of that nature. They rented a three-bedroom home for the weekend, two guests, used one bed. We do have several large casinos in our area, but given the way the cash was concealed, we didn’t think it was casino winnings. Plus, that’s the money they forgot, there had to have been more and a lot of it. In retrospect, we all agree we probably should have contacted authorities, but nothing ever came of it, so we took it as a lesson learned.”
But Why?
“When I worked in New Zealand, some guy rented one of the penthouses and painted the entire thing black over the course of three days. Tried to do the ceilings and everything. He sprinkled gold glitter on top in some of the rooms.
As part of the check-out process we had to check the room before refunding his deposit, and when he realized we were checking it he pretended he was going to the bathroom and full-on sprinted out of the hotel. Management ended up pressing charges for the damage but it was the funniest thing I have ever seen. The best part was it was actually a really good paint job!”
He Wasn’t Very Smart
“I worked at a hotel. I worked at the front desk. This was something crazy to leave behind, but one of our guests wound up setting up a crank lab in one of our rooms. He had been staying for over a week and had never removed the Do Not Disturb sign from his room.
One afternoon he went out and the manager was curious what was going on since no housekeeping had been in his room for over a week, which was sort of odd. She walked in, found everything set up, and called the police. They came out with a few vans and begin hauling everything out of the room via the window (ground floor room).
The reason this made me think of what he left behind is that the guy who rented the room actually wound up calling the hotel while I was working the front desk later that evening. I guess he had driven by and saw the police vehicles outside his room so he knew not to come back. He called because he wanted to come by to pick up his clothes that he had left behind. I informed him that he was more than welcome to come back to get his possessions from the police that were still in his room.
Sadly for my entertainment, he did not.”
I Lost My Appetite
” I worked at a nice little motel in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in North Carolina. I went in to clean a jacuzzi suite and the place was a mess. There was trash, takeout boxes, empty bottles, and cans. Every surface was covered in some sort of sticky substance and for some reason, they’d dumped out what looked like an entire family-sized bag of Lay’s potato chips all over the carpet, looked like they’d walked all over them, smashed some deep into the fibers.
I was vacuuming and shaking my head wondering why someone would do this when I had to stop and pick some coins up off of the floor. So I got a real close look at these ‘potato chips.’
They were not chips. They were skin flakes. They were flakes of skin. Some of them were the size of a whole potato chip, like one of the really huge ones, but they were flakes of skin. Skin flakes, freaking skin flakes.
I can’t even look at a chip anymore unless it’s ridged or ruffles.”
Maybe They Just Wanted A Snack?
“I use to work the nightshift at the front desk of a hotel many, many years ago. One night two very professional gorgeous young ladies came in to rent a room around midnight. Business blazers, skirts, high heels, very sharply dressed professionals. They paid cash (wasn’t uncommon back then) and that was it.
A little later, they called the front desk saying they couldn’t get the movies to work. I explained that since they paid cash instead of by credit card they would have to come down and pay for the movie in advance. They were not impressed. A few minutes later, these two ladies stepped out of the elevator and walked over to the front desk in some absolutely amazing lingerie and high heels, and asked to pay for a movie. Teenage me almost busted a nut right there. I took their cash and ask what movie they wanted released. Both of their eyes got real wide, ‘We have to tell you which movie?’
‘I have to release a specific movie to your room,’ I responded back.
They gave me eye rolls and giggles. They asked for a special adult movie, and I didn’t see them for the rest of the night. I was short-shifted so I left work at 8:00 am and was back by 4:00 pm. I was back at the front desk when the head cleaning lady came to the front desk. An older Russian lady whose English wasn’t very good. ‘Who in room 305?’ she asked.
I started typing it into the computer when I remembered that this was the business ladies’ room. I told her they paid cash and that they had already checked out. She was mad. She wanted to charge them extra for the cleaning (which was unusual). So I asked why.
‘Orange jello! In the tub, in the bed on the walls. Orange jello everywhere!’ she exclaimed.
These ladies made a whole tub full of orange jello and had a lot of fun with it all over the room. So the strangest thing I have ever seen left in a hotel room was orange jello.”
