Strange, right? Content has been edited for clarity.
He Wanted To Be Called “Wizard”
“I worked in a small bed and breakfast/ bar. It’s in a pretty seasonal part of England and there are only three full-time members of staff. Basically, this leads to a lot of time in the off-season where I sit on my butt behind the bar with more chance of winning the lottery than seeing a customer or guest.
On just one such quiet night, a middle-aged, bearded gentleman walked into the bar, and little did I know at the time, straight into my nightmares. I’ll refer to him as the ‘Wizard,’ as that was what he immediately informed me he was. Not in a jokey way either, he truly and honestly believed he had magical powers.
Pretty strange, but hey, the dude wants a room, what does it bother me if he fancies himself a Gandalf.
However, very quickly after checking him in and serving him a glass, did I realize that this man was not just delusional but also terrifying. Throughout the course of the evening, he came out with such extraordinarily insane things that he began to deeply worry me. You know that feeling you get sometimes, where innately and without question somebody scares you? Yeah, this guy gave me that.
Eventually, I had enough and closed the bar, then kicked the guy up to his room. I didn’t even clean the place, I closed, locked up, and left a note saying categorically not to give this guy a room the next night. Except, of course, my colleague disregarded the note and gave him a room. I thought, ‘Brilliant. I would be done with that guy.’
I came in for my shift, checked the reservations, and flipped out. There was nothing I could do though, the wizard had the key, paid his cash, and was free to torment me yet again. This time I wanted someone with me if only to witness how strange this dude was. I called my cousin and friend and offered them cheap drinks all night, just to sit with me, just to bear witness to this creepy dude. Lo and behold, an hour passed, and in he walked, carrying the aforementioned stuffed tiger, assorted bags, and the aura of a criminal.
‘I’ve got you a present,’ he said, smiling a smile that will forever be imprinted on my mind.
He then proceeded to pull out the largest adult toy I ever did see and slammed it down to the bar and grinned. He took a pause. Then there was silence amongst everyone at the bar.
My cousin and friend were just staring, slack-jawed at it, caught between horror and hilarity. No way. I kicked the guy out of the bar, told him to leave in the morning and never come back, and called my boss and explained everything, and promised that if he was there tomorrow, then I sure would not be. My boss, credit to him, agreed and came down to the bar to sit with me until closing time. That was the last of the wizard or so I thought.
The next day I get awoken by a call to get down to the bed and breakfast straight away, there was something I needed to see. The housekeepers had gone to clean the room and found the scene of utter desecration; the adult toy was cupped to the side table, the sink was full of blood, and the stuffed tiger was cut up. We had to pay them both triple to clean what could be cleaned, throw away the mattress, sheets, and everything else which was no longer fit for human/animal/corporeal-being contact, and charge it all to that guy’s card.”
A No Pet Policy
“So there it was, the summer of ’01. I’d just applied and gotten a job working for a local motel in a one-horse town in Hill Billy, United States of America.
The motel was full of displaced people and wandering troupes of roofers drifting from town to town to offer their cheap inferior wares. Construction workers were everywhere.
Well, one day, I was counting the men coming in and I realized that there were only fourteen men but they had fifteen two-bed bedrooms. After talking with the maids, I learned that one of the rooms had a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the knob. The maid service wasn’t allowed in the room as long as that was on the door. It’d been on the door for two weeks. Out of curiosity, I went by the room and placed my ear against the door. No sound in there. I figured they were stowing their gear in that room, but I knocked, violating the motel’s policy concerning the ‘Do not disturb’ policy and I heard chickens.
When the workers returned that evening, I stopped their boss and told him that one of the maids had heard the sound of chickens coming from the room with the ‘Do not disturb’ sign. I reminded him about the motel’s policy concerning no pets.
He said he’d check it out and get back to me after he took a shower. Well, the shift progressed and the guy never came down. I went to lunch and when I came back, I decided to go see the guy before he had a chance to go to bed and ask him about the chicken noises.
But the rooms were empty. They had waited until I went to lunch and then checked out and left. Now, I was just dying to know what the heck had made them decide to leave in such haste. I grabbed the master key of the locks and headed up to the fifteenth room with the ‘Do not disturb’ sign. Knocked, then opened the door. The room was covered in chicken turds. There were blankets over the windows, feathers, and chicken turds on everything. It was on the curtains, the blankets, floor, bed, bathroom sink, and television. You name it, it was covered in a turd.
After the motel sued the man, it came out that sometimes the laborers would accept part of their pay from the farms they were reroofing in the form of fighting roosters. Fearful that someone would steal their roosters from their trucks, they rented a fifteenth room and covered the windows to keep it dark so the roosters wouldn’t crow. They left them in there while they went to work. I don’t know how many roosters they had, but there must have been a lot because they were only there for two weeks and that room was a mess.”
A Wannabe Hasslehoff
“One day, while working in a Myrtle Beach at ‘Luxury “Resort’, a scantily clad woman with a thick Russian accent asked if I could vacuum a lamp in her room. She was a six-foot, thin, gorgeous, blonde woman and we chatted on the way back to her room. As we entered the room she told me her name was Olga.
I asked if she was from Russia to which she said yes. So naturally, I responded, ‘Меня зовут,’ (which translates to ‘my name is’) then told her my name.
Now, the rooms are two-bedroom, one bath with a kitchenette and a living room.
I was standing in the living room and as soon as I uttered those words, like some poorly written Wayans Bros. flick, she immediately yelled out, ‘Girls! He speaks Russian!’
Almost instantly, one of the bedroom doors opened and outpoured five of the most gorgeous women I have seen in my entire life. All of whom were around 20 years old, and most of whom were topless. They started shouting a slurry of Russian, which I didn’t understand as I stood there with a smile on my face, completely unsure what to do. So eventually I shout a couple of ‘Spatseba!’s (which translates to ‘Thank you’) and hightailed it into the other bedroom; the one which the girls had not just exited, and mostly shut the door behind me.
As I was standing there, figuring out how to mediate the situation, or even what the heck kind of a situation I just found myself in, I heard a deep gravelly Russian man who I was previously unaware of, asking me ‘Do you like my girls?’
I turned around, and there he was, on a bed, laying like Hasslehoff, a 50-year-old man in nothing but an open silk robe and a speedo with a grin on his face. So I turned around, and as it became clear that I was either A. in the middle of the most beautiful family alive’s vacation or B. infiltrating a high-end ladies’ service.
I looked at him and I said, ‘Your girls are quite beautiful. I have forgotten my vacuum cleaner; I’ll be right back.’
Then I opened the door.
There were five girls standing there expectantly and I said, ‘It’s hard for me to speak Russian when surrounded by such beauty. I apologize, and I’ll be right back after I get a vacuum.’
One of the older women translated for me, and I left a tad shell shocked. Later, I asked one of the large Jamaican women I was working with about the situation, so she cleaned that room for me later in the day.”
“The Volcano Goddess Of Hawaii”
“A straight-up crazy bag lady came to stay at a retreat center I worked at. She told us to call her ‘Pele, the volcano goddess of Hawaii.’ She spent a week with us, refusing to interact with anyone, except when harassing our staff.
Fast forward to the day we cleared out her room. She had left the ‘Do not disturb’ sign up all week, so we hadn’t been able to service it. The stench was palpable. Right by the door was the towel set, untouched, indicating she hadn’t showered once. Then there was the bed, which was soaked through in menstrual blood. It was everywhere, seriously.
Someone had to help her off the premises (it was a good mile or two from the rooms to the front of the property) with her four giant bags of clothes and helped her get in a taxi. We thought we were rid of her, but oh, were we wrong.
The next day, my shift manager went to go clean the communal bathrooms in one of the guest buildings, and one was in use, so he figured he’d come back later. Came back after lunch, still locked. Came back towards the end of the day, decided to get the key to open it. Inside was Pele, squatting in the bathtub. It was clear that she’d been using the floor as a toilet, yet somehow the actual toilet was still a mess, literally.
She started screaming, ‘YOU CAN’T WALK IN ON SOMEONE WHEN THEY’RE IN THE BATHROOM! I’M USING THE BATHROOM! GO AWAY! YOU’RE A PRICK!’
To which my shift leader responded, ‘You can’t live here! You’re not a paying guest, you need to leave the property right now.’
She yelled back, ‘I’M USING THE BATHROOM, YOU PRICK!’
This exchange went on for a good 20 minutes, but finally, we were able to get security to get her off the premises for good. Oh, and she never paid for her stay.’
They Heard Chants Coming From Her Room
“There was a woman in town speaking at one of those empowerment conferences for abused and battered women. The night after she checked in, she called the desk and told me that she wanted to go home. Thinking she was homesick, I started asking her where she was from and if she would get to go home after this trip. She replied by telling me she did not want to go home in a body bag. I had ‘taken one for the team’ earlier in the day, so as soon as she said that I passed the phone to my manager, who invited her to come downstairs and talk.
When she got downstairs, she told us the second floor was haunted and she couldn’t stay. We moved her to the first floor, right around the corner from the front desk. Everything was fine until I checked someone in across the hall. As soon as they checked in, they asked to switch rooms because they could hear screams coming from the crazy lady’s room. I walked to her room, and it was like she was chanting in another language. I pulled my phone out to record her, but it sounded like she was getting closer, so I ran back to the front desk.
I tried calling her, but she didn’t answer. Shortly after that, she showed up at the desk with her luggage, still chanting. Then she lunged across the desk and told me the demons were going to conquer my soul and that I would be welcomed into the inferno.
Then she walked out very calmly, got into her car, and drove away. I went to her room and found strips of cloth covered in scented oil and a candle.”
Missing Towels
“I did housekeeping for a summer and it was pretty much all bad. 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.
I thought, ‘How is a four-star hotel with over four hundred rooms low on towels?’
Well, I got my list of rooms to clean and went on my way. I got three or four rooms in then I got to room 237. Room 237 still haunts me.
So I knocked, ‘House Keeping!’
There was nothing, so that was the sign that I was 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 there was 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 that point, I was expecting a body or something terrible. Poked in my head and what do ya know? There had to be all the missing towels my supervisor was freaking out about, about 50 square foot room, about four feet high covering the entire floor with 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 whatever, 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.”
She Only Asked For Soap And An Apple
“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, and no general cleaning. But every day she would come down to the front desk and ask for four bars of regular soap and an apple. That was 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 authorize the room.
She left the room out of the 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 splattered 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 was happening.”
“I Opened The Door And Was Almost Knocked Out”
“During my senior year of high school, I helped clean the local EconoLodge on the weekends. The place was kind of dumpy but it wasn’t bad. I lived in a small-ish city so not much happened there.
One Sunday, I arrived at the last room on my shift. I opened the door and was almost knocked out by the stench of stale brew and pee. When I got into the room I nearly fell over laughing. They had glued pennies to every surface. On the mirrors, the walls, the windows, the table and chairs, the headboards, the shower walls, the shower door, the sink, the bathroom floor, the toilet. You name it, it had pennies on it.
There were also at least 100 bottles, but oddly enough, no boxes for them.
It wasn’t really a very nice place to work at, the hours were kind of crummy and the staff wasn’t very nice so this was kind of the last straw. I called the front office to let them know about the room, then just turned around and walked out, and went home.”
They Left A Note Behind
“I worked at a low-budget hotel in western Pennsylvania. Like two weeks ago, we had a guest who was getting kicked out for not paying their bill (they had stayed with us for a few months but started slacking on paying what was due).
Well checkout time comes, they haven’t checked out with the office. We went to knock on the door, no reply. We went inside and found them (two ladies in their 50s) dead from an overdose. They had apparently been dead for around 12 hours.
The coroner came and we found out that he needed help moving the bodies, so I and a few of my coworkers had to lift these two bigger dead ladies and transport them out of the room, down the stairwell, and into the coroner’s vehicle. Sure, they were in body bags at that point, but still, it was so surreal because nobody saw this coming. We all loved them, they just couldn’t pay their bill anymore and killed themselves. They left behind a ‘note of self-destruction’ and everything.”
Dead Husband
“I was cleaning a room and found some photos stuck in the mirror. They were photos of a man. I took them down and put them on my cart to put in the lost and found. I continued cleaning. The room was trashed. There were tons of empty rubber wrappers around the room and boxes of other adult content.
I cleaned the gross room and went about my business. Somewhere along the line, the pictures must have accidentally gone in my trash. A while later, my supervisor called me to the office and asked if I found any photos in that one specific room because the lady called freaking out because they were photos of her husband, who died.
I got sentimental. But why would you be having your sexcapades in a hotel with photos of your dead husband pinned into all the mirrors to watch? I had to go dumpster diving to find the trash bag and get the photos for the lady.”
He Booked The Same Room For Only Three Hours
“When I started working at this hotel it was under bad management. So things like proper cleanings didn’t happen, and why guests would often check in to the same room every week.
One guy came in every week or two, used the same room for three or four hours, and would leave. We didn’t do hourly rates, so he always paid the full price of the room. No one ever accompanied him, no one asked for his room while he was there. The next day maids would find nothing unusual.
After a new manager came in, the hotel got its first thorough cleaning in way too long. So we were going through and moving beds and credenzas, checking ceiling tiles, etc. We got to the same room he was been using. Under the bed, we found a massive amount of movies and magazines of adult content. Everything was sticky and obviously used. The maids used double gloves to dispose of everything.”
Where Was The Smell Coming From?
“My family was in the hotel business. One day a particular room just started to stink very badly for no apparent reason. We checked everywhere and multiple times looking for the source of the scent, no dice. We sprayed everything in the room numerous times with deodorizer to the point of empty bottles. Then we 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. Whoever was the previous guests had broken the table lamp, 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.”
After Party
“At an after-party for a recording industry awards night, I was instructed to serve drinks in the main suite. After a few hours, I was given a platter with tons of coke lined up on it and told to go around the room offering it to people. Many family and kid-oriented celebrities didn’t hesitate to use it.
One lady who stayed for a few days kept extended her stay on a daily basis and when serving breakfast to her in the morning, she routinely asked not to open the curtains. There was a strange smell in the room which got worse the longer she stayed.
It turned out the poor woman had had a miscarriage and kept cradling the fetus in the bed for a week.”