Hotel Workers Come Clean About The Strangest Things They’ve Ever Seen Guests Do

When a guest checked into a small, airport adjacent establishment, he paid in cash and only stayed for five hours. After he left, staff entered his room to discover the bed cut in half. In addition, all the sheets, towels, blankets and curtains were torn in two. But that’s nothing compared to the mess he left all over the bathroom, forcing staff to turn the room into a storage facility.

When one hotel guest asked to stay in the exact same room for a night or more every week, staff grew suspicious. They had a feeling he might be dealing drugs. So one day. after he checked out, they searched the room. What they found was an inflatable doll that the man had hidden under the mattress. Then, when he realized it had been disposed of, he never came back again.

A man checked into a hotel pushing a trolley loaded with a VCR and multiple boxes. Within an hour guests complained of lewd noises emanating from his room. But when calls to the in-room phone and knocks on the door went unanswered, the police were notified. They found porn playing on the T.V. with stacks of adult paraphernalia all around, but the man had seemingly disappeared. Returning to the suite the next day, there was no sign he ever went back.

One hotel guest earned the nickname “Pie Guy” among staff. He never pre-booked a room, but always paid in cash when he arrived, including the $100 deposit. After he left, housekeeping would find the bathroom and tub filled with the remnants of a number of pies. And not cheap ones either. He rightly figured he wouldn’t get his deposit back, and after he was blacklisted, simply checked in under false names.

When a hotel guest heard someone knock on the door, they saw a man through the peephole carrying some towels. However, there was nothing about him identifiable as a member of staff, so the guest called out that they were good for linen, assuming he’d simply got the wrong room. The following day, however, the guest saw the same man - and his family - checking out of the hotel.

When a respectable businessman stayed at one hotel, he had a bizarre ritual before heading out to work. He would lay out a couple of dozen nude selfies on the bed. Management only learned of his strange habit when a fire drill required an evacuation of the establishment. Seemingly a regular guest there, housekeeping never once mentioned his strange routine.

When hotel staff delivered room service, they found the guest dressed as a bunny when she opened the door. Asking her server to stay put, she retreated to the far end of the room, hopped back and took the plate just as a rabbit might. She thanked the employee, hopped to set the plate down and hopped back to the door to close it.

This story takes place, not at a hotel, but at a similar setup in a religious retreat. This establishment provided accommodation for around 200 people, and an adorable old couple checked in for a three-day stay. But when they left, staff found an unexpected surprise waiting for them. As the nameless Redditor described, “After they checked out, we discovered that one of them had taken a dump in the drawer of one of the nightstands.”

When a guest asked staff for late access to the hotel gym, it might have been easy to assume she wanted a nighttime workout. That was at 11 p.m. But when they went to lock up four hours later, they found her bedded down on a treadmill. As the storyteller explained, “We ended up giving her our last room, after she had a fight with her husband and was refusing to sleep with him.”

When one couple was asked the purpose of their hotel stay, they flatly replied, “We are here to conceive our child in the name of Jesus Christ.” But that was nothing compared to what cleaners found on the wall of their room the next day. When housekeeping smelled something odd, they spotted a crucifix smeared on the wall with what seemed to be rose oil. An awkward phone call followed informing the couple they would be charged for cleaning.

When a guest made a complaint at 4 a.m., they might have looked like they had seen a ghost. In fact, what they saw were the words “I’m watching you” scrawled on the wall of their room in glow-in-the-dark pigment. Although, clearly, a previous tenant had a twisted idea of what’s funny, the guest nevertheless was permitted to switch rooms.

One couple complained about a parking ticket they received despite following the hotel’s instructions closely. They had collected their valid permit as verified by staff. So the receptionist asked if it was displayed in their window as instructed. As they described, “He said of course. He put it in the window as soon as he got upstairs to the room. That’s when we realized he’d put it in the bedroom window and not the car window.” As a result, the pair were liable for the fine.

Hotel guests will often liberate the occasional pen, towel, bathrobe or even pillow from their rooms. More brazen patrons, however, will go for anything that isn’t nailed down. As Redditor comUndon described, “Went into the atrium to find a group of guests walking out the door with one of our couches. [When they saw] us, they reversed direction and told us that they had caught somebody stealing it and they were putting it back.”

Televisions, too, can fall victim to petty theft in hotel rooms, as many Redditors attested. Some revealed how hotels bolt them to tables to stop them disappearing, but the appliances nevertheless still vanished mysteriously into the night. One hotel worker, though, described how he took a mirror down only to reveal it had been disguising a huge hole in the wall, stuffed with stolen items.

When one hotel worker was asked for a bizarre cleaning request, he went to check it out. He walked in and saw housekeeping gesturing toward the ceiling in the center of the room. When he looked up, he saw a pair of bare footprints more than ten feet above. Even stranger, it seemed there was no obvious path toward them. As the worker described, “There’s no way he jumped that high, upside down, and left no prints on the walls either. Also, he left a single bullet on the bed.”

Some guests, it seems, are just paranoid. As hiiipowerxo described on Reddit, “[An] older lady thought her room was bugged by the C.I.A. She kept asking me if I could find a way to remove her mirror in her room because she heard noises coming from behind it. Wanted to know who the people staying in the rooms above and below her were and where they worked. She also freaked out when someone called at the front desk and kept asking me who it was.”

In a scenario that was more The Hangover than Columbo, Redditor bluepaul recalled what he once saw as a hotel cleaner. As he described, “A goat dressed like Abraham Lincoln. There’s no more story here, at least none that I know. […] Went to clean a guest’s room, dreading it since they’d been there for a stag do, found the goat. Don’t know how it got there, or how it was removed, but it made a good story for a while.”

Redditor BurgleBoy told a story to rival the parking ticket couple in terms of lacking common sense. When he was working in a hotel, one guest made an innocent mix up when fixing a meal. As he recalled, “I had a guy who said his microwave didn’t work. I went up to the room and he locked a plate of food in the safe.”

On Reddit, a user described a time they worked at a dorm that operated as a hotel in the summer. They explained how lots of guests checked in to attend expositions and conferences. One year, an assembly of bankers threw a massive party on their balcony. The rager featured a dance floor, disco ball and colored lights that they supplied themselves. After twice being shut down by staff, onlookers felt that, into their 30s, the revelers were perhaps too old for such shenanigans.

When Redditor nebelhund broke up a fight in a hotel room, he received a $300 tip from the guy who went at him for getting involved. The guy was staying with his girlfriend to whom he’d intended to propose. However, that went awry when the couple went out drinking. Having left the hotel in search of more booze, he returned to find her in bed with a man they’d met earlier that night. The guy settled his debt but left his now ex-partner far from home, without a plane ticket back.

Redditor nsfpenguins spent a day in awe of a group of guests admiring the most basic of hotel functions. The establishment in question was in Mexico and the guests were from a particularly poor part of the country. They marveled at riding the elevator and how the key card opened the door. They even tried to set up a Facebook group in homage to their findings. Turns out they were there to illegally cross the border into the U.S.

When housekeeping ran in screaming that they found a dead person, Buzzfeed user niaht instantly called 911. The cleaner had found what appeared to be the room’s inhabitant with a cord wrapped around their neck. But when police investigated, they had some good news. In a very convincingly staged murder scene, officers realized it was a prank when they pulled the sheets back to reveal the “body” was fake. “Our housekeeper was traumatized,” niaht said.

On Reddit, rwebster4293 recalled an elderly couple who stayed at a Virginia hotel they worked at. They described nothing but romance as the pair went for a cozy meal and drinks before retiring to their room. But the next morning, hotel staff saw a message on their door saying, “Do not enter, call the police.” As it happened, one of the couple had a terminal illness and they chose to depart together instead of having the disease tear them apart.

One guest complained about the water in her toilet bowl bubbling. When she alerted the front desk, staff reassured her it was due to the water pipes having been flushed. The guest, however, was persistent and shortly after showed up at the front desk brandishing a glass filled with toilet water. Of course, any effervescence had since dispersed, much to the bewilderment of the guest and exasperation of staff.

The life of hotel housekeeping can sometimes be a miserable one. As Redditor SakeBomberman described, “A lady used to lurk the halls of a hotel and sneak into rooms that were being cleaned. She would then proceed to take a dump in the bed and remake the sheets.” Furthermore, it seemed to be something the culprit was proud of. The storyteller added, “She would phone the front desk and say, ‘I took a dump in one of your rooms,’ then hang up.”

When Redditor poodle234 knocked on the door of a hotel room, she might, as a maid, have expected to change the guests’ sheets. But she needn’t have bothered either knocking or bringing clean linen. The couple had already brought their own and dressed the bed up in their favorite Twilight-themed cover. More shocking was that the couple, who she described as an “older woman [with] a much younger man,” wanted her to come in.

Most hotels don’t allow pets to accompany guests in their rooms. Although, given some of the stories told here, it’s hard to think of a good reason why not. So when a former hotel worker ranted about “Mr. Puppyman” on Reddit they had a lot to get off their chest.It seem that the guest in question asked staff to watch his puppies. All 100 of them. The poster was grateful to no longer work at that particular establishment.

It’s not just housekeepers and receptionists who see bizarre goings on. For instance, someone who worked as a hotel lifeguard described how a guest once “stacked all the chairs from the pool area in the pool while I was out getting towels.” He also recalled another time when he spotted a porcupine wandering around the lobby.

Redditor pinktoady described how he received multiple complaints about a noisy cat while working at a hotel. But what were they to do about a nuisance stray? Nevertheless, the objections were relayed to the manager, who received enough of them to find out what was going on. As it happened, the establishment had recently undergone maintenance and inadvertently trapped the animal in the ceiling. In the end, the offending structure had to be destroyed to rescue it. It’s not clear who was less impressed: management or the kitty.

Another Reddit contributor, Subs4life described how an incredibly drunk cowboy stayed at the hotel he was working at one Halloween. His getup wasn’t a costume and, as is the wont of some drunks, he was looking to start a fight. He succeeded, first with the ATM he’d just withdrawn money from. And when he’d broken that, the guest started on the elevator buttons as he went to his room. As Subs4life recalled, “It wasn’t that weird but the security tapes were hilarious. This guy could barely stand.”

Redditor Yossarian007 told her story as a customer. They said, “After checking out of a hotel, my friends and I realized that we forgot some groceries in our room. I ran back to [get them] and found the cleaning ladies sitting on the bed, watching TV with our open bag of chips and sodas. Not a wild story, but a comical experience. After a brief moment of shock from everyone involved, I told them to enjoy the snacks and walked out.”

When a man in his 40s checked into a hotel in south Florida, he earned access, through the building’s side doors, straight to the parking lot. A worker spotted him unloading from a van more luggage than necessary for a two-day stay. Nevertheless, the gentleman never caused any trouble. But when staff accessed his room after checkout they found his room stuffed to the rafters with plastic flamingos. So full was it, staff were baffled as to how he even managed to moved around. But that astonishment only grew when security footage showed he never actually vacated the room.

A woman who bought a $5,000 stay at one hotel did very unusual things while there. Each morning she placed her shoes on the sidewalk out front before returning to her room. But that wasn’t all. She also had a habit of making structures out of food. One was a pyramid made out out of hamburgers from a gas station. Another appeared to be cube constructed using cracker sandwiches with cheese. When staff called her to remove the strange sculptures placed either side of the reception door, she hurriedly moved them outside her room.

Staying on a food theme, Redditor ShaneMcDeath recalled some odd happenings at his establishment. He recalled, “As the owner of a bed and breakfast place for the last eight 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…”

Whether this piece of equipment was accidentally left behind or it was a sick joke, one anonymous hotel housekeeper was shaken by an alarming discovery. She came across what appeared to be an abandoned baby left in a room. When she carefully took it to management, she finally realized it was fake. But it was made all the more convincing by the realistic noises coming from it. It turns out, though, that the establishment had recently hosted guests for a science or medical convention. The housekeeper told the Huffington Post, “It scared me so much because it seemed so real.”

Rock stars can have a reputation for trashing hotel rooms. However, a band once stayed at a luxury hotel and caused no such grievances. But when housekeeping entered the room after their stay, they found all the furniture fixed to the ceiling in the same layout as it had been on the floor. Management, however, didn’t find the incident as funny as the storyteller did.

It’s customary for guests to leave a tip for housekeeping when vacating a room. But as one hotel worker described to Buzzfeed, “We had one guest who checked in without a reservation, and while she seemed nice at first, she became increasingly erratic. We ended up removing her from the hotel. She was VERY compliant and pleasant during her removal. But when the housekeeping supervisor went to turn the room over, we found a box labeled ‘your tip.’”And it only gets worse from here. Inside the box was “a large pile of human feces.”

When a hotel room started developing a distinctly fishy smell, staff couldn’t work out where it was coming from. Deodorizer wouldn’t mask it, nor would a daily airing remove it. The source was finally identified as a lamp. It seems that a guest had broken the base of the light, inserted the fish and glued the fragments back together. The prankster actually made the storyteller laugh with his originality.

It perhaps goes without saying that many hotel stories are just too explicit and debauched to list here. Some, though, just paint an amusing picture. Night staff in particular are privy to entertaining incidents. Like one anonymous contributor who said, “Once, a stoned guy walked into the lobby at midnight, picked up a decorative rock, walked around the perimeter of the lobby, and then put the rock back.”

One hotel worker witnessed the most ingenious of thievery. Every week someone would come and empty the contents of the water jug on to the floor of the weight room. They would then take the receptacle and claim the recycling money on it. Despite the pool of water it must have left on the floor, staff took several months to identify the culprit.