For most of us, staying in a hotel is a treat, a time to wind down, relax and enjoy the free shampoo. But it seems not everyone feels the same.
On Reddit, people who work in hotels have been sharing the most disturbing things they’ve found in rooms, from the bizarre to the downright disgusting.
Be warned: you’ll never look at hotels in the same way again.
“When I worked at a hotel, the maids went in one morning to discover.....(drum roll).... NOTHING! As in, the room had been totally stripped. The art, the furniture, the bed, all of them were gone. The hairdryer had been ripped out of the wall, anything that wasn’t nailed down was taken. There was no TV, no coffee pot, no table lamps.
“At first we couldn’t figure out how they accomplished this, but security footage revealed a pickup was backed up to the side of the building, the room window locks were removed, and all of the goods were thrown from the second story window.
“The most ridiculous thing about all of this was that the lady who had rented the room had done so under her real name and with her real credit card. I don’t know what she expected to happen. After we contacted her, she attempted to return the busted stuff that hadn’t fared well on the 30 foot drop to the concrete below. She ended up getting arrested instead.”
“The bath full of skin....this old guy had stayed in the room, obviously used the bath and managed to shed like 90% of his leathery skin in it. It had dried on to the sides and base of the tub and took me so long to scrub off. It wasn’t creepy or anything, but was definitely the most disturbing thing I had to deal with.”
“There was one room a guy stayed in for over a month that no one ever got to clean because he always had the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door. When he finally left.... the horror.
“The smell was so bad. He never asked for new linens and odor gets trapped easily in the sheets. This guy also chewed tobacco and spit it all over the bathroom, like the tub, sink, floor. There were 20 cups and bottles of used chew. Dried urine and poo on and around the toilet. A nest of old towels because he would get new ones, but not give us the old ones, which smelled awful. There was mould growing all over the bathroom. He also sat in the desk chair so much that the wheels tore through the carpet.”
- byebirdy
“I was a hotel maid for about two years, there is one story that I will remember for the rest of my life. This family had been staying in the hotel for about a month. Apparently their house burnt down and they had nowhere else to stay. They were all very rude. The dad would stare and make comments about the maids, the wife would yell at us for seducing her husband, and the twenty-something-year-old son threw regular temper tantrums if we didn’t give him enough soap. They left to go visit some friends one day and we decided to deep clean the son’s room. We entered the room and right away noticed a horrible smell. I should mention that he never let us into his room while he was there.
“Anyway, we got about our business, making the bed and replacing towels. When it came to cleaning the kitchen area, the smell got worse. We opened the microwave only to find he had put his own shit inside the microwave! I’m pretty sure he turned it on a few times as well. After throwing up for a good couple minutes, we opened the fridge to find shit on the bottom shelf and jars of leeches filling the rest of the shelves. We have never ran out of a room so fast in our lives. We told the hotel owner and he actually kicked them out of the hotel and charged them a ton of money.”
“A collection of whips hidden under the mattress. I assume they were rather disappointed on their next visit...”
“Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to hang a used condom on the inside of the light shade.”
“I worked as a housekeeper for about two years at a rather nice boutique hotel, so nothing terrible ever seemed to happen until this one weekend. There was a big group of students from Japan staying in the hotel in several rooms and it wasn’t until the Sunday they left that we found some weird stuff. First off, all the housekeepers working kept finding the exact same brand of purple condoms/wrappers in their rooms, and I mean multiples of them and we kinda laughed it off until we got to one of the double rooms. There had been five guests booked in (including cot) and when we opened the door we were appalled. There were over 10 used condoms, of that same purple brand, littering the room. There was McDonald’s loose in all the drawers, the coffee pot had milk in it and was on the floor... there was underwear left all over the place and the TV had a frog stuffed toy taped to it. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever witnessed. It was very clear some creepy, crazy, giant orgy happened and we were the poor suckers that had to clean it up. But hey... they left a hefty tip!”
- geskke
“I was front deck and not cleaning staff, but I heard their stories and saw some bad rooms. One time there was a disturbing amount of toenail clippings. There were hundreds on the floor - much more than you’d expect from one person or even multiple people. It looked like someone had a ziplock bag full of toenail clippings that they dumped out in the bathroom. The two guests in the room had only stayed for a weekend.”
“When I was managing a small hotel in the Lake District, the Bulgarian housekeeper came down stairs and said the lamp in room 8 has gone, so I provided a light bulb, she looked at me as if I were [stupid] and said ‘come with me’, took me to the room and sure enough, the lamp was missing.”
“What appeared to be the body hair of at least three large humans, which pretty much filled the bathroom. The room had been booked by just one man, though I don’t know what he looked like. He might have been a bear.”
“Not a maid, but I worked as a hotel front desk clerk in college. I got a call one day from someone who had checked out hours before. They said they’d forgotten their loaded handgun in the hotel room, and wanted to know if they could get their granddaughter to come pick it up since they were already four plus hours away. I go up to check and, sure enough, in the back of the wardrobe on the top level, they’d left their revolver. Our maids were pretty shitty so it didn’t surprise me that they’d looked it over.
“So I took the gun back downstairs and called the police to get them to come get it. I didn’t want to be responsible for the firearm. The granddaughter showed up right as the police officer had left the building with the gun, and got pretty feisty with me about why I’d called the cops instead of just giving it to her. She had two young children following her, screaming, and a baby in a carrier on her arm.
“I told her to go ask the police officer for it back. Unsurprisingly, they wouldn’t give it to her and she left after huffing and puffing. Never heard from the people or their granddaughter again.”