We’ve all had the luxury of staying in a hotel. Granted, sometimes it’s less a luxury and more a nightmare, which is exactly what these Redditors experienced during their hotel stays. You name it and someone online has probably found it in their hotel room. Discoveries run the gamut from bodily fluids, to other fluids, to insects, oh boy! The things you can find in a strange hotel room. You’ll be glad to have missed stays at these places and if you think by not booking the cheapest place around you’ll avoid the unexpected, think again. The strange and disturbing doesn’t discriminate based off caste.
So next time you have to book a hotel do yourself a favor and read those reviews very thoroughly. If you’re lucky you just might avoid a situation that could scar you for life. In the meantime, please allow these stories to create a deep paranoia within you so that you distrust every bed except your own. Here are the strangest things people have found in their hotel rooms.
41. That’s What We Call a Bad Surprise
I went to a Motel 6 a few weeks ago. The room looked surprisingly nice. Nice bed, nice TV, clean bathroom and refrigerator. Generally pretty nice.
I woke up in the morning covered in ants. Head to toe. Hundreds. Bleargh.
40. Murder Must Have Taken Place
BLOOD... so much blood.
I worked at the hotel. The pillow was soaked solid. The mattress was covered. Because I worked in the scuzziest hotel in town, we shampooed the carpet and flipped the mattress and rented it out that night.
That means someone was sleeping on a mattress still damp with tons of blood. Yuck.
39. Tooth Fairy Must Have Left Something Behind
A tooth. A huge tooth just sitting on the windowsill. Had the longest root I had ever seen.
38. What an Unexpected Location
A couple years ago I stayed in a suite, and my girlfriend (now wife) found a large pair of worn/stained black lace panties. In a kitchen drawer.
37. Hidden Treasures
I used to travel around installing the satellite/N64 systems in hotels, and I'd always check the ceiling tiles for things. Regulars often request the same rooms every time, and leave stashes. I've found a lot of porn, the occasional bag of weed, and one time, a stained photograph of some girl with eighties hair, wearing jorts and a fanny-pack.
36. Oh Boy…
Four bullet holes and one freshly painted wall.
35. Not the Fungus You Would Expect to Find in a Hotel
In a so-so (but not super terrible) hotel in southern California, I noticed a wet, dark area in the corner of the hotel room near where the back of the bed meets the wall. There was a swampy, musty smell coming from the corner, like some kind of fungus was growing. In the corner was a small cluster of live mushrooms growing. Not like little newborn mushrooms, but big, white mushrooms and their mushroom babies too. A big happy mushroom family. Freaking mushrooms growing in the hotel room.
34. Sweet, Free Beer
I found a five-pack of beer behind the chair in my hotel room once.
Just thought I'd break up the shower of sadness with something upbeat and positive, here.
33. Now That Is Truly a Strange and Disturbing Find
A bag with a bloody tattoo gun and some white power literature in it hidden in the back of the TV stand duct taped behind the telephone books.
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32. Well This Felt Inevitable
A cat under the bed.
A dead cat.
It looked partially mummified.
Along with its kittens.
31. This is the House That Ants Built
We stopped at a hotel out in the country once and after getting into the room I went to take a leak. No big deal, but I did kind of notice the bathtub was black which I thought was a little unusual. So I mentioned it to my friend, "Check out the black bathtub."
He stuck his head in the bathroom and said, "the bathtub isn't black, but the million ants in it are." Got a full refund and drove to the next town!
30. I’m Not Usually an Advocate For Arson...But I Think You Know Where I’m Going With This
Miami Int. Airport has a few great selections nearby. I was really strapped for cash and only needed to stay one night, so I thought I would pick the cheapest one. Hell, they even had a shuttle to and from for overnighters like me, so how bad could it be?
I opened the door and the acrid stench of piss slapped me in the face. Not like, "Oh hey, I think someone took a piss in here and didn't clean it up." It was more like "Hide ya wife, hide ya kids."
I sat down to console myself and turned on the TV to drown out my fears; 85 percent Spanish channels. Okay not a problem, let me just adjust my seat, maybe I'll learn something. Nope. Feces mixed with lube scraped underneath the seat. I walked into the bathroom to wash off my hands. Soap? Who needs it! So I manage to get out the manual keys left-handed from my right pocket, open the door just looking in horror. I washed it off at the McDonald's across the street. I bought all three of my meals there and never spoke of that night again.
I go there every night in my dreams, that place where I lost a part of me, a part that I can never, ever get back.
29. I’m Just Surprised It Smelled Like Strawberries
I found a Harry Potter wand that smelled like strawberries behind the bed. Wasn't quite sure what to do.
28. Better Call Sherlock In On This One To Find the Culprit
Not the hotel room, but the lobby.
I was staying at a (fairly nice, actually) hotel in Berlin that had a communal computer in a corner in the lobby. I came back from the bars one night around 2 am, went to check my email before bed, and noticed that the keyboard had some new red dots on it. Then I looked down.
There was a gigantic pool of blood next to the chair where I was sitting, and a trail of blood leading away from the computer towards the stairs. The stairs had a red carpet, so once whoever it was got to the steps, it disappeared. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse.
27. Oh, That’s a Fun Thing to Learn
I found droplets of blood all over the ceiling in a hotel bathroom in Washington DC. I thought someone was murdered in the room until learning this often happens with IV drug use. Not that this was any better in my book.
26. Unwanted Moisture
I was exhausted and flopped down into bed. Little did I know that the mattress was saturated with baby oil. Probably from lovemaking. I was covered. I had to throw my pajamas away.
25. I Wouldn’t Have Double-Checked It Was Blood Either
I checked into a hotel in NYC (first trip to a big city) and there was a cup of blood with fingernails in it. This was before camera phones so I don't have any proof but it was definitely disgusting.
Full disclosure I don't know 100 percent that it was blood but it sure as hell seemed that way.
24. Is That You The Rock From Scorpion King?
I think it was 2007 when I went to Rome with my GF at the time. We got settled into the flat we rented and when it was time for bed, we crawled under the sheets only to discover a dead scorpion under the pillow.
So glad it was dead.
23. Oooh Secret Tunnels
An ex co-worker got his first job cleaning rooms in a migrant worker hotel. He discovered that the mirrors were moveable and two way. The crawl space between the rooms had lots of footprints and were littered with a startling amount of cigarette butts and whiskey bottles.
22. The Spider’s Nest Was the Final Straw
My husband and I were PCSing to a base overseas so we went through Seattle. Well, in our haste (our PCS was fraught with a multitude of issues), we forgot to schedule a hotel room (they made us leave early, so we had five days to kill). Unfortunately, there happened to be a convention and all of the hotels were booked up. So our taxi driver took us to this motel.
This motel is called Jet Motel by the Seatac Airport (in case anyone flies through there). We entered the lobby and were swamped by fake plants. The lady asked us to wait because our room was being "cleaned." Once finished, she charged us $55 for a room. Their elevator was covered with shag carpet. When we managed to squeeze ourselves and luggage into the elevator, the elevator kind of spasms making us nervous.
We arrived to our floor and found our room. The door has no deadbolt or chain, just a flimsy door key-lock that does not shut properly. We entered the room and saw the crappy, duct-taped furniture. The bathroom has mold on it and a cracked mirror. The curtains to the room were torn and shredded in multiple places. The TV did not operate. The bed and chair felt very grimy.
When we looked at the mattress we saw it was covered by cardboard and the sheets were dirty. Then I noticed the clammy, grimy carpet with blood stains on it. Pretty big blood stains. The final straw was on the window there was a large nest of spiders as big as a man's palm. We noped and left.
Fortunately, Seatac's USO is amazing and they found us a nice hotel to stay in. As we left, the lady asked us our reason. We said we found a better deal. Then she asked if the room was not clean enough, because it was just cleaned...
21. Where’s Child Services?
In the fifth grade, I won a trip to the Wisconsin Dells with others from elementary schools around the city. It was a weekend trip and was supposed to be fun. We stayed in the crappiest motel I have ever seen, the window in the bathroom was broken and a raccoon crawled inside. I was stuck in this motel with three other fifth graders I had never met and we looked under the mattresses of the beds to find old porn mags with used condoms and sex toys. Worst motel I've ever stayed in.
20. I’d Be Pissed
I was staying at a hotel in Minnesota and it had bed bugs. Freaking worst night of sleep ever.
19. The Ol’ Scale Behind the TV Trick
I was staying at a Motel 6 in Aurora, Col. when I reached behind the TV for what I thought was the clicker. It wasn't, it was a digital scale that was encrusted with cocaine. I slept on top of the sheets that night.
18. Knife Wins
I am torn between the skid marked sheets in a motel room in Alberta, or a giant steak knife I found sticking out of a wall in Costa Rica.
17. That’s Just Not Cool
I work at a hotel, the worst I have ever found was a guy three days after he killed himself.
16. Forever Checking My Bed Frames
A friend of mine used to work the front desk of a place and told me this: Once, a room had a smell complaint. They scrubbed it. Still smelled. Lifted the mattress off the frame and found a dead hooker.
The truck-driver who rented to room a few days prior was easy enough for the cops to find.
15. Good Call, Good Call
I was at a really crappy hotel in eastern Baltimore. I mean, really crappy. Stains and missing wallpaper, the whole nine yards. It was so crappy I didn't really feel safe, so I started to move the wardrobe over towards the door. There were a dozen and a half or so discarded needles underneath the wardrobe.
I didn't stay there that night.
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14. You Couldn’t Pay Me Enough to Deal With That
Some bad ones, worst one by far:
This woman comes back absolutely sloshed from a night of drinking. She proceeds to drop her room card, ID, bank card and credit card down the shaft of our elevator. Once I manage to stop the elevator and go down the shaft to retrieve her things, she goes up to her room to pass out.
The next day in the afternoon, we get a call asking for housekeeping, we tell the lady that housekeeping is gone for the day but we can certainly help her with whatever she needs. She answers "never mind I will do it myself." Her room is up on the fourth floor, which is relevant for what happens next. Our porter is doing her usual rounds and when she reaches the fourth floor, as soon as she gets off the elevator there is a terrible stench across the hall.
She walks through and eventually finds the source of the problem. This lady, the same from the night before, had managed to crap all over her bedsheets and instead of doing something normal like trying to clean it or at least notify the desk, she decided the best way to solve the problem was to leave the sheets just outside her room.
Somehow she had the balls to try and fight the costs we charged her for dry cleaning. Also, turns out she was in town because she was on trial for physically assaulting an officer, as such the charges were being covered by the freaking government.
She was white trash at its best, one other night (before the crap incident), she failed to answer her wake-up call so according to protocol, the porter had to go up and get her up (make sure she isn't dead is why it's done). When he keyed in, since she wasn't answering the knocks, he found her passed out on her bed, completely naked, no sheets.
13. Sounds Like a Pretty Cool Hat
I was staying in this HORRIBLE hotel in Miami for a couple days because it was cheap on Priceline. From the outside, the place was classy and old school Miami all the way. The first turn off was that they didn't have any parking and they couldn't suggest where to park for some reason. We ended up parking a couple of miles away.
We get in the room and it looks like a prison cell. The windows are tinted white and have bars on both sides because it's obviously not safe to be in this hotel and they need to protect people on the outside from its occupants. There's a crappy, dirty, scratchy comforter on a metal frame bed and a TV from the early '90s up in the corner of the room with not much space to walk around.
The bathroom had a permanently wet floor with a drain in the middle for quick clean up which didn't matter much because this place had never been cleaned. There was blood splattered on the wall in the bathroom along with boogers smashed into the grout and pubic hairs stuck around all willy nilly. You had to use the shower super quick or there was no hot water.
All of these things, I can handle. I was just there to keep my stuff and sleep. All night I could hear everyone in this hotel. The walls and doors were so thin yet there were multiple padlocks on all the doors. The icing on the frightening cake was when I woke up in the morning and turned my pillow over for a little fluff. I opened my eyes and there was a HUGE pool of blood on and under my pillow as if someone had been killed in the bed. It's as if the housekeeping turned it over and thought "There! All clean!" It scared the crap out of me.
The elevator had a cool little operator guy with a safari hat on, though.
12. That’ll Get Your Attention
HUMAN TEETH. My mother and I were staying at a hotel while driving from Northern to Southern California. We pulled out the bed from the couch and noticed the sheets were coming off on the bottom left corner of the bed. We decided to lift it up a bit to tuck the sheet back in and my fingers brushed up against something that felt like a loose bolt. I looked under and saw a tooth.
Lifted it up some more and found three more. Flipped my top. Called front desk. Got moved to another equally crappy room.
Double checked to make sure there were no teeth under that bed too.
11. I Believe Someone Misplaced This
So my family and I go down to Tampa, Fl. for Thanksgiving at my uncle's house. We get to the hotel which is moderately nice, no weird smells or anything like that. My mom for some reason lifts up the bed mattress and finds (I kid you not) a two-foot dildo with a suction cup on the bottom. We gave it to the front desk.
10. That’s a lot of Cigarette Butts
Went to Ohio a while back with my mom and sister. We checked into a Knights Inn I believe it was, and we started to unpack. My mom went to the bathroom, discovered a half full beer can, with about 15 cigarette butts in it. My sister found a roach in her bed. I think they gave us our money back. But we ended up staying somewhere else. My mom was afraid we would have to sleep in hazmat suits if we stayed.
9. There’s Something Gross Going on at the Columbus Knights Inn
I was staying in a Knights Inn in Columbus, Ohio. It was a really shady area, but the hotel was like 30 bucks a night, so I was like whatever...
Lock on the door didn’t work, but it was 3 am and I was tired so I propped a chair on the door and said screw it. The room seemed clean, and in good order... I checked under the mattress for bed bugs (Or at least the blood splatter from them, I read that somewhere on the internet). All seemed to be good.
Crawled in under the covers, and felt something with me. It was fabric, obviously, but still felt...eh. Crusty? (Foreboding, I know) So I throw off the blanket and the covers, and...a pair of women’s underwear, COMPLETELY covered in feces. Full grown panties, pretty big...
Needless to say, I was NOT happy. My bare legs had touched that. (And it had been a shitty eight hour drive) So I move the chair from the door, and go storming up to the office.
Indian guy behind the counter can tell I’m mad, and he seems a little scared. I tell him the story, and he looks at me like I'm crazy and says I’m lying. I get REALLY mad, and tell him to come look for him damn self. He refuses to come out from behind the glass counter (Probably thinks I'm about to murder him).
This is when I should probably take a deep breath, and calm down. Instead, I go back to the room. Pick the underwear up with a towel, bring it back, and just jam them into the credit card slot.
The Indian guy was NOT happy.
I ended up getting ten percent off for four days. and a new room. That’s it.
Never, going, back.
8. Eight Legged Freaks!
During a family vacation to the States, we stayed at this one hotel in Washington DC. At first, everything seemed like your standard hotel room. We unpacked and got comfortable, my parents went down to play some slots at the casino while my brother, sister and I ordered and watched Gladiator. During the middle of the movie we notice something crawling on the wall and see a fairly big spider on the wall, no biggie we kill it and continue back with the movie.
15 minutes later, my brother tries to get some water and sees another spider crawling on the table. We trap the spider with a glass cup but at this point we are freaked out. So we start checking the room more carefully and discover what seemed to be hundreds of spiders behind the curtain all around the window. At this point, I start getting goosebumps and that itchy feeling all over. We waited until our parents came back and called security, we were promptly moved to a better room for free.
Now that I think about this story... this may be the initial cause of my arachnophobia...
7. I’m Usually Happy When I Find Cookies
A cookie. It wasn't in my bed, but it was in the bed my friend was sleeping in. He complained for the remainder of the trip. We did get a free night out of it.
6. Ewwwww
I work at a nice hotel and the worst thing I heard about was when our housekeepers found human feces in the garbage can in the room. It made the whole room reek and we were unable to sell the room for a couple of days so we charged the lady’s credit card on file for "additional cleaning."
Best part is a couple weeks later when she was checking her expense report I guess she called us irate that we had overcharged her, I very calmly and politely informed her of the human feces and how we had charged for the additional cleaning. Awkward silence followed by an "Oh. Okay. Thank you!"
5. People Are Trash
I work at a hotel. It is disgusting.
We had an old couple staying for a while who seemed not quite all there. The woman would just wander around with no shoes on asking where her room was. Every day their sheets were almost entirely yellow and stinking.
One perfectly normal guy checked out one day, leaving his room covered in blood splashes and broken vodka bottles. The toilet was covered in blood and the seat was broken off to a sharp point. We spent a while looking for the other bit of the toilet seat and found it hidden under the bed.
A guy I checked in was with a woman he seemed to have only just met didn't have the money to pay for his room, so she had to pay for it (didn't look very impressed). In the middle of the night, he tried to complain and insist on his money back, brought the night receptionist into his room and he'd smeared what the receptionist thought was coffee granules all over his sheets (we know it wasn't there before). Some of it was almost certainly crap.
You just get crazy people in hotels. All the time for no reason.
A receptionist at another hotel told me about a time a guy had complained about the breakfast at the hotel because the Chinese man who was serving the breakfast was rude to him, there was not enough equipment on the trolley and the food was undercooked. At this particular hotel, there were no Chinese (or Asian for that matter) men working the breakfast, they didn't have a trolley and the guy in question did not actually eat breakfast in the hotel.
And just the other day, a women came down in the early hours to complain that her OWN dog was barking and keeping her awake.
4. Next Time I’m Double Checking Everything For Cameras
When I was staying at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas last year we discovered that the alarm clock in the room had a hidden camera in it. Me being the furious fellow that I am, ran to the front desk with clock in hand and demanded an explanation.
Apparently, the clock was not the hotel's standard and someone took the hotel's clock and replaced it with their own for their own voyeuristic escapades. I was still pretty pissed, but the week free stay voucher I got made me feel better.
I'm convinced it was someone who worked at the hotel, but I don't care enough to make a huge stink about it.
3. Fear Would Definitely Be a Factor in This Case
I majored in hotel management in college and the most infamous story of one of the crappier hotels in town is this:
During the winter this place would shut off the water to some of their rooms to save money and keep the pipes from freezing. When warmer weather came around a lovely couple were in town for a big event they were looking forward to. The city was packed because of the event so they had no choice but to stay at this place. So the hotel turned the water back on and when the wife went to take a shower she was greeted by a nice surprise. The pipes had become infested with roaches and came out from every open drain, Fear Factor style.
2. Imagine the Conversation With That Receptionist
I was in a fairly upscale hotel in Istanbul. I was a kid, so I explored around the room. I crawled below the vanity, and pulled out an orange strap-on, dildo attached. I ran out of the room with it in my hands screaming MOMMY IT'S A STUFFED ANIMAL BACKPACK! Because it was actually fuzzy.
1. What an Image
Used to work offshore on an oil rig. Had to come in to a seedy motel on the west end of New Orleans for a hurricane. Me and a buddy were sharing a double room because everything for 50 miles was booked up.
At around 2 am some guy kicks in our door yelling "Woman, where's my money at?" He flips on the lights to find two very large roughnecks looking at him with murderous intent.
Greasy Orleanian pimp bows out while apologizing profusely and shutting the door.
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