When you sit down and think about the sheer number of people who go through any given hotel room, it might make you recoil a bit in disgust. While there are rigorous cleanliness standards for this sort of thing, anyone who has worked at a hotel knows that the most wild assortment of things can happen.
Someone asked housekeepers of hotels and casinos to share the most bizarre things they have ever seen. From suspicious, reclusive guests to strange finds after someone leaves, netizens share their best examples. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote your favorites, and share your own stories below.
#1
My mom worked at a hotel, she walked into a weird but cool/sad situation.
The hotel had a local alley cat, orange tabby we called Tom. Tom would let himself in to anyroom and stay the night. But one time no one would let him in. So he found a truck with an open window and climbed in. Next day, guy checks out and drives 100 miles to another town, and discovers the cat behind the seat just laying there purring. The guy drove 100 miles back to return the cat. Cat lived like a king for another 2 years until someone finally adopted it and gave it a permanent home. Tom wasn't into that, and tried to make it back to the hotel 3 miles away. Half way back he stopped at the city pool, kids got him wet and he freaked out, ran into traffic and got hit. People who knew the cat pitched in cash, cat got the surgery, survived....and then 2 months later he f****n crossed town again and made it to the hotel, checked into a room, curled up on a bed, and passed away. Broke my mom's heart, she quit a week after that cause she was the last one to pet the cat and couldn't bare changing the room he passed in. She said Everytime she went in there, she swore when her back was turned to the bed, she could hear him purring like he always did as he followed her from room to room.Not me, but my friend from Ukraine worked at a crappy casino hotel in Wendover, Nevada, because they would sponsor his work visa. He wasn't a housekeeper but would have to do maintenance in rooms. He said one day he went to a room where the people had already checked out and there was a chicken in the room. Like a live chicken. Just chilling there.
Maybe the story is funnier when he tells it with his accent.
*Why eez cheeken in room?*I worked for a hotel chain in Colorado and one day my coworker and I went to strip a bed and the bed was full of oranges. The dresser oranges. Side table, cans of mandarin oranges. Not exactly shocking or disgusting, but it was weird.I worked as a Concierge for an upscale hotel so, naturally, because there wasn't a line for my desk, I fielded complaints regularly. One day a woman, very nice and patient (rare) calmly explained to me that her five year old opened the door to their bathroom and there was a housekeeper pooping in there. The housekeeper and the boy screamed so loudly that I had already gotten noise complaints from the adjacent rooms. Needless to say, that family got a free night and an upgrade.We had a hotel room one time and checked in around 3-4 ish (can't remember what hotel it was). When we walked in one of the housekeepers was asleep in the chair, apparently had taken a rest and checked out, for who knows how long. We woke her up when we came in the room. She was very apologetic and took her cart and stuff with her right away. We never said anything to the staff or saw her again, the room was all clean and set up so nothing to complain about.In the 80s my aunt was a maid in the at a hotel, but was on holiday when this happened. She was Polish, didn’t really speak English, and she just made enough money to travel with her husband and friends to Vegas for a vacation. As the night went on in the casino, she decided to go to bed. As she took the elevator, it stopped one floor up and two huge black dudes in suits walked in (I mean, like ceiling high) and a short black man came in with them, smiling at my aunt. They pushed the Penthouse Button. As my aunt was, well, scared of black people back then, especially the two huge dudes and a grinning stranger, she started panicking, talking to them in Polish not to hurt her and giving them her watch. The men were obviously really confused, but the short one couldn’t stop laughing. As the elevator stopped on her floor, she ran to her room, glancing back at the elevator. She noticed the men were checking which room she was in.
Of course, she panicked, didn’t sleep all night, kept talking to her husband how she almost got kidnapped or whatever, but nothing happened all night.
In the morning, someone knocked on the door. As they opened, a hotel employee said they got a gift from someone.
It was a huge bouquet of roses. In each rose was a 100$ bill. And a card saying:
“To the crazy lady from the elevator. Thanks for the watch- Eddie Murphy”
True story.Hotel worker.
Had an American guy come into our hotel, meant to be staying for 3 days. Went into his room and never left the room in over 2 weeks (he kept phoning down to extend his stay).
The strange thing was, he had the same routine every day. Around 8am, he would order 8 bottles of beer and 20 cigarettes to be sent up to his room. He’d sign the cheque off to his room for the beers but had to pay cash for the cigarettes as they came from the hotel shop, which wasn’t owned by the hotel therefore wasn’t able to charge to the room. The cigarettes came to around £11, and he would always give us a £20 note and told us to keep the change.
Lunchtime rolls around, and again, 8 bottles of beer, and 20 cigarettes.
Come dinner time, again, another 8 beers, but 40 cigarettes this time (assuming to keep a stock of when the shop closed at night time).
This happened every day he was staying with us. No one ever saw him leave the hotel, so assumed he had a stack of £20 notes to pay for his cigarettes. He also instructed housekeeping not to clean his room.
When he eventually left, the maid was greeted with hundreds of empty beer bottles, the bin was half full with cigarette ends and ash, and the room was left remarkably clean, albeit smelling awful.
We tried to research the guy, but could only find he was part of an American broadcasting company (it was a long time ago and can’t remember), so assumed he was over here to lie low.
He checked out, paid off his bill (didn’t even bother to check the bill), into a taxi and never to be seen again.I was working thru a temp agency for motel 6. So one of the other workers had a room to clean. The occupants were supposed to be gone. So the worker goes into the room and there's a man tied up in the bed with some type of bdsm outfit on. He was gagged also. She didnt even help him lol she just called the cops. He was fine, it was a kink of his but the other person just left him tied up and took all his things.This is related but not exactly the question. When my wife and I were looking at wedding venues, one we went to was a hotel. The event manager wanted to take us up and show us the "honeymoon" suite.
She opened the door, and there were two, old men (like 60s-70s), shirtless drinking vodka in the room. She was so extremely embarrassed and apologetic. She was very sweet too, but you could tell she was so mad at whoever screwed that up for her.
We didn't choose the place (wasn't why), but I hadn't thought about that in awhile, and figured someone else may get a kick out of it.I walked in on a couple sleeping on the bathroom floor of a hotel room in the hotel I work for. The bed was untouched and everything was normal with that one exception.I was at random party taking place in a suite and I go into the bathroom and see a guy in the bathtub with an entire rotisserie chicken. He looks up at me and sticks out a greasy finger as he finishes chewing and then says, "Don't mind me."My mother was once a housekeeper at a harrahs casino hotel. She opened up a room and a terrible smell hit her. Apparently a handicapped man staying at the hotel was waiting for his help to show up but they never did and his s**t had overflowed its container and his phone was dead and he couldn't move. she went to go find help and left that day and never came backI used to work on a military base as a house keeper. I was there for about a month and a half.
One time someone checked out early so I had a room added to my list. Knocked, went in and there was blood everywhere. I immediately called down to the the front, I need help now. I was new, I was not prepared for this. Blood. Blood everywhere. It had soaked down through the duvet, layers of sheets to the mattress. There were bloody hand prints everywhere. On the mirrors, on the head boards, on the back of doors, showers, carpet, the kitchenette, in every crack and crevasse of the bathroom, on the shower head... EVERYWHERE. Someone had decided to have a finger painting session during that time of the month with their boyfriend.
Turns out some brass' daughter had got a room while visiting dear ol' dad and had her tinder date over. Daughter had enough foresight to tell her parents that she was on her period and may have bled through the bedding, but she was scared and didn't know what to do. When we said her date was accountable too, she claimed that she 100% didn't have someone else in the room with her. It was $1800 to clean up that mess and replace everything and dad was loosing his mind over it, yelling, and screaming the whole time. They kept saying there was no way that it should cost so much. Calling us liars. After sitting in and listening, calmly, after being screamed at, my boss slid over the pictures to him. From that point on you could hear a pin drop. He got out his checkbook, wrote the check, and quietly left.
Edit: Thank you for the gold kind stranger! And a typo.My grandfather used to work at a posh resort where many celebrities checked in.
He told us that Bill Cosby always trashed the room and left behind a huge mess with no tip for the housekeepers.
This was back when Cosby was viewed as "America's Dad."
Now it doesn't seem strange at all.Oh oh pick me!
So I was doing one of my first few overnight desk shifts at a hotel it had been a fairly quiet night until this point. I go into the server room behind the desk and there's water POURING from the ceiling. Like literally just pouring out over all of the computers. So I call my on duty security guard and my management team who tells me to have my security guard go to every room above the server room until they figured out where the water was coming from. He finally figured it out around 4-6 floors up..
So he gets to the room and sees water spilling out from under the door so he knocks, no answer, repeats this a couple times (deadbolt was locked so the master key was useless) he FINALLY gets in (maintenance came up with the deadbolt key thing) and this dude is laying on the bed Stark naked spread eagle (and this was a BIG dude) and there's a lady of the night also naked passed out in the shower with it on full blast and her a*s over the drain.
She flooded 5-6 floors of rooms (1 room per floor) all the way down to the server roomOH I GOT one. I was a night auditor though.
This one starts out benign enough, my NA shift starts, and I have a small line. It's Saturday and we're near a couple of casinos, not unusual. A very polite man checks in, and rents a top level suite for him and his wife. I get him in and start checking in the next couple. Being distracted, I barely noticed the previous couple come back in, only that the wife was partially obscured by the luggage cart and I remember thinking to myself, "that's an ugly woman." The night is quiet and I leave. I come in the next night to hear what unfolded after I left. The couple never came back down to check out, and have not been seen since. When housekeeping entered the room they immediately alert the FDM. Every surface of the room is covered in lube, the bed, the couch, the jacuzzi, even the minifridge is covered in bottles and bottle of lube and baby oil. We know for sure it's lube, because a dozen bottles are left in the tub. But wait, there's more! In addition to the lube, there is a rather large horse dildo left behind with thick black scuff marks, and cracked down the center. My FDM, in her infinite wisdom, decides that they must have been junkies and this dildo is where they are hiding their needles. She decides to pick it up to open it "safety" reasons, but when she does, all that falls out is a rather impressive motor that has been burned out.
The icing on this cake comes when they review the security tape. The "wife" is clearly a man in a wig. It's a big burly dude wearing a cheap wig.I’ve answered similarly before, but here’s a brief summary of my favorites — 10+ years in hotels.
- Duffle bag with $10k in cash. The security guard who found it returned it.
- Once we had a guest that was the focus of a counterfeit investigation. How did we know this? The agents who were investigating rented a room near theirs and TOLD US. Why tf they thought that would be a good idea when hotel workers are gossipy little shits I don’t know. Somehow it must have worked because the arrests were made a few days later.
- Worked in a hotel that allowed pets with a small deposit, so the number of animals was unreal. The dogs/cats were fine but what got my goat was the folk that tried to avoid paying the fee and pretended they didn’t have an animal. Okay, whatever, you don’t like spending money any more than the next dude, but the problems arose when we needed to get into the room (maintenance, cleaning) and had ZERO idea to expect an animal. Almost everyone who worked there had a story of being bitten by a dog at some point.
- On the further subject of unexpected denizens from the kingdom Animalia, we also encountered: bears (young cub), alligator (3 ft plus, in the tub), a capuchin monkey (mean as F**K), a box of chicks (apparently this is how they are mailed?! In a f*****g cardboard box. Omg, the NOISE), etc. These were actually ALL from one particular guest who worked in the TV industry. The worst part about it was that cleaning his room was a crapshoot; he’d swear blind he wouldn’t have animals in the room, and then BOOM ALLIGATOR. So of course the poor housekeeper WTF’s out of there, and then dude would get home at 10-11pm and scream at us about his room not being cleaned. We’d explain that we don’t clean rooms with loose wildlife, and he would categorically deny that there were ANY animals in his room. Point blank, over and over, even if we had pics. It was f*****g bizarre.
- Also disturbing was the trend of people abandoning animals. Dogs, cats, and once a goddam blue macaw. Like, wtf dude?
- Getting away from animals, it was also pretty common to find guns. I was working in operations in this hotel around the time of Sandy Hook, and we found several. Our working theory was that people felt unsafe and started carrying, but they weren’t used to it and inclined to forget them. We generally would give it a few hours, then turn them into the cops if no one called to reclaim it. Once we found a gun that was so damn old it was basically rust and dirt. That one freaked us out badly enough that instead of waiting for the officer that worked our overnight security to swing by that evening, we called to have someone pick it up. None of us knew much about firearms, our fear was that if it even HAD bullets, there was the risk that it could .. I honestly don’t know. Do guns explode? Lol, I have no idea but I also don’t know why anyone would have carried it around. I doubt it could have fired.
- Depending on the hotel, sex toys are so common we don’t think about them, just trash them.
- Honorable mentions: fake IDs (not for underage drinking, dude was older), all kinds of drug paraphernalia, unexpected dead people, oh, and the cat hoarder that had 14 cats in a small 300sq ft room .. with no litterboxes. (hotel had to hire a biohazard team to take the room apart when that guest was evicted. They did it in full hazmat suits.)I will NEVER forget this one room I had to clean as a housekeeper...it was one of my first jobs, I was 16. We were given 30min max per room and I walked in and immediately radioed my manager letting her know I would need longer. The stench smacked me in the face immediately...B.O. and meat. The tan carpet and all of the sheets were stained with deep red bbq sauce and there were over 40 rib bones EVERYWHERE. There was a tripod left on its side in the corner of the room and handcuffs on the floor lamp, which they obviously lost the key to, because they tried to break the base of the lamp to get them off. I almost cried trying to get the damn bbq sauce out of the carpet...the manager sent two women up to help me when she saw what I was dealing with. I only assume a cheaply made food porn was filmed the night before.A couple came to this luxury dude ranch I worked at and spent over $5000 to stay there only to not come out of their room the entire time. Went in to clean the room when they left and saw incredibly expensive unopened alcohol and boxes of sex toys around the room. On the bed they left a note that said enjoy.....um what? We threw out the toys (who the f**k would use a used sex toy left by an unknown person?) and got hammered that night.I can answer this one!
Worked at a huge water park resort. I was doing a late shift at a time of year when the resort was almost empty. So, tired of knocking on all the doors, I just barged into the rooms.
(To clarify, I always knocked. But I was getting tired after 20 or so rooms without a guest.)
Come this room in the 4th floor. I walk in and there's an old, heavy guy feasting on a bucket of fried chicken. Lights off, in front of the TV.
He stared at me for a couple of seconds and I apologized before he could say anything. Left the room immediately.
I later found out that room was supposed to be vacant. I have no idea where he came from, why he was there or how he got there.Someone I know worked housekeeping at a casino. He walked in on a guy smearing s**t over the walls with his bare hands. He was pissed that he lost money and thought he was justified to do it. Housekeeping called security, he was charged and banned.I used to work in reservations in a big chain hotel in London. Housekeeping once told us there was one regular guest who used to ALWAYS leave a single whole in-tact raw egg in the bed when they checked out. Nobody ever figured out why or where on earth they got that single raw egg in the middle of central London (grocery stores aren't frequent in the area and they certainly don't sell eggs one by one).
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Edit: My first silver! Thank you very much!
Edit 2: I didn't say it's a mission impossible to get eggs in London. There's a bit of overreaction here. But the type of guest/hotel/area combination, the whole situation was particularly peculiar.Wasnt a housekeeper, but worked as front desk for night shift (2300 - 0700) in a small (20 rooms) hotel + restaurant. We have a regular customer who used to arrive at 3-4 am, always ringed before arriving cause he demanded help from the staff for his luggage and asked everyone to call him "Doctor". One night he asked me to take out the TV out of his room, I offered him a TV-less room but he insisted on just removing the TV. On another time, he arrived alone (as usual) and stayed for 3 or 4 nights. Last night he filed a complaint about someone from the staff sneaking into his room, drugging him, and sleeping with his wife (dude implied there had been sexual intercourse). The weird part is that he arrived alone, and that night it was the only customer in the whole place. It was only him, the guy working as handyman who was in the restaurant at the time and me. No one saw him go in or out with anyone, when he left his room (alone) at 4am I entered to see if everything was in order, he had put the sheets in the tub and were soaking wet, he ripped the pillow cases and tried to flush them in the toilet, there was a lot of red yarn in the floor. No signs of no one else. It bugged me to this day cause I dont know if he was psychotic or what. Other time one of the housekeeping ladies called me cause there was a bed that looked as if Jack the ripper had killed someone and were covered in blood, really strange.One time I walked into a room and it was completely covered in red stains. Absolutely everywhere you could see. On the beds, the carpets, the floors, the walls, all over the bathroom. And even a bit on the ceiling. No idea how they managed to do that. At first I thought it may be blood, but then I noticed it reeked of alcohol. They spilled red wine absolutely everywhere. The room had to be shut down and they had to bring up the shampoo machines. I think they may have had to repaint too.
Bonus story: That very same day I walked into a room that was very heavily smoked in. The smell was so extremely bad, that I couldn't breathe at all. My manager said that it takes at least five people chainsmoking for at least twelve hours straight to make a room smell as bad as that one did. That also required a machine. And they had to replace the mattresses and curtains. Smoking was not allowed anywhere in the hotel.I don’t know about them, but I was working on a job in a shady part of Yakima WA called Yakima. We were working 12-14 hour days. I just left my gun in the drawer and I’m not a cluttery person so I just empty my pockets into the nightstand drawer every night. One day I left my gun, a roll of duct tape, some big zip ties and a knife in the drawer. When I came back, room was clean and the drawer was organized nicer. After that, the housekeeping lady would scuttle away upon my visage.In the late 90's I had a roommate who managed a hotel in Manhattan. He came home one night and told me they found a 3 foot Nitrous tank in one of the rooms. They *disposed* of it personally. These days they would probably call the bomb squad.Had a teacher who was the manager of a Marriott in Germany for a while. She has wild stories.
- Once found an anaconda in the bathroom, wrapped around the shower curtain pole.
- Pulled naked devil worshippers out of the pool at 3 AM when the pool closed and they refused to get out. They weren’t even guests.
- Saw the janitor with a wheelbarrow, a hose, and a shovel. He went somewhere, went to lunch and came back. After his lunch she followed him and asked what was up, he didn’t speak good german and just said “Cleaning up African lady leg.” Turned out some lady had jumped from the top floor of one side of the building (Hotel was kind of like an L shape, one side higher then the other) hit the emergency ladder on the way down and had her leg torn off before becoming mush on the roof of the other side of the building. He had shoveled most of her into the wheelbarrow at this point, was just working on getting her leg unstuck from the ladder.I was a house keeper at a dive of a hotel in Chico, CA in the late 90's. A week or so before a local homeless woman had stuck her arm in a tiger's cage (a circus that was traveling through town) and got mauled. That weekend I was cleaning rooms and knocked on the door of a room paid for by a local charity organization. It turned out the guest was in the middle of sexy time. Quickly realizing it wasn't a good time to clean the room I said I would come back later. To my dismay the woman opened the door and asked me to join her and her friend, I declined. She then reached out and grabbed me by the arm and tried to drag me in. Her arm was covered in bandages and lacerations. It was the woman who had been tiger mauled! I yanked my arm free and ran away, I'll never forget what her shredded bandaged hand looked like.I stayed at a hotel that hosted a Magic The Gathering tournament (was visiting Atlantic City, only realized what it was as I played magic a decade ago). In the morning as I was leaving a housekeeper had a room opening and cleaning; he stops me and says “wtf is this? Is it worth money?” I look in and someone has filled the bathtub nearly to the brim with lands/commons.Cleaned a room that contained both a deck of Uno cards and a knock-off deck of Ono cards
