Travelers Share The Weirdest Things They Discovered In Their Hotel Rooms


Travelers Share The Weirdest Things They Discovered In Their Hotel Rooms


A hotel is your home away from home. It should be a sanctuary -- a place to rest and recharge on your travels without having to worry about anything. Unfortunately, when you stay in a hotel room, you're sharing it with every person who has ever stayed in that hotel room. And some of those people leave some pretty weird stuff behind.

These travelers recently took to the internet to share the weirdest things they ever discovered in their hotel rooms. Sweet dreams!

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45. Unsanitary Napkin

I was staying at a Marriott in Roseville, CA for work. I checked in late, and went straight to bed. The next morning, I took a shower, and grabbed one of the carefully folded towels on the rack above the toilet.

As it unfolded, a used sanitary napkin (as my mom calls them) came tumbling out and onto the floor. Clearly, it had been placed there on purpose.

Upon sharing what I had discovered with the front desk staff, and then the manager, I was awarded a free night's stay.
God only knows where housekeeping put my toothbrush for ratting them out. I assume it was the housekeeping staff....but who knows?

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44. Roach Motel

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.

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43. Hotel Transylvania

Blood, so much blood.

I worked at the hotel. The pillow was soaked straight through. 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.

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42. Glow In The Dark

Well, I got a blacklight for Christmas once, when I was travelling. So, naturally when I got back to my hotel room, I plugged it in. Why, oh why, oh why did I do it?

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41. You'll Never Sleep Alone

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 of them.

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40. Striking Oil

I was exhausted and flopped down into the bed as soon as I got to my room. Little did I know that the mattress was saturated with baby oil. Probably from people hooking up -- hard to imagine what else it could have been. I was covered in the stuff. I had to throw my pajamas away.

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39. What Possible Explanation Could There Be?

As an ex-housekeeper, I've seen it all. One of the worst things I found was a bathtub filled a quarter of the way with earthworms.

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38. Pretty Fungi

In a so-so (but not super crappy) hotel in Southern California, I noticed a wet, dark area in the corner of the my 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. When I pulled the bed out, I found a small cluster of live mushrooms growing in the corner. Not like little newborn mushrooms, but big, white mushrooms and their mushroom babies too. A big happy mushroom family. There was a whole farmer's market in my room.

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37. Pooper Trooper

Miami International Airport has a few great hotels nearby. I was really strapped for cash and only needed to stay one night, so I thought I would pick the cheapest one. Heck, 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 pee slapped me in the face. Not like, "Oh hey, I think someone took a pee 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% Spanish channels. Okay, not a problem, let me just adjust my chair, maybe I'll learn something. Nope. I covered my hand in poop which someone apparently smeared 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 picket, 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.

Every night I go back to that room in my dreams, that place where I lost a part of me, a part that I can never, ever get back.

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36. I Am My Own Housekeeping

I have some bad stories since I used to work at an absolutely terrible hotel.

This woman comes back absolutely out of it 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 4th floor, which is relevant for what happens next.

Our porter is doing her usual rounds and when she reaches the 4th 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 poop all over her bed sheets. 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 nerve 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 physical assaulting an officer, as such the charges were being covered by the freaking government.

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35. Reverse Tooth Fairy

I found a tooth in my hotel room. A huge tooth just sitting on the windowsill. Had the longest root I had ever seen.

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34. Not A Great Job

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. It was really sad.

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 knew checked in with a woman he seemed to have only just met. He 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. He 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 poop.

You just get crazy people in hotels. All the time for no reason.

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33. How Does It Get Up There?

I found droplets of blood all over the ceiling in a hotel bathroom in Washington D.C. I thought someone was murdered in the room until learning this often happens with certain kinds of IV substance abuse. Not that that was any better in my book.

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32. Wait, There Are Requirements?

I was doing a training class in Alexandria, Louisiana. When we stopped at the front desk before leaving our meeting room, there was a sign that said something like "Our hotel temporarily cannot be called a Holiday Inn because we failed to meet the requirements set by the chain." The sign was over 6 months old. The lobby bathroom was missing a divider between two urinals. I named it the love seat.

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31. Happy Prom, Guys

A small bloodstain on the sheet, and open tube of baby oil on the nightstand next to a corsage.

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30. Great City, Though

I stayed at the worst hotel in Savannah, Georgia once. I know this because "The worst hotel in Savannah, GA" was carved into the nightstand.

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29. Yikes

In a hotel room, I found 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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28. A Stowaway

I think it was 2007 when I went to Rome with my girlfriend 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.

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27. That's Truly Alarming

A former coworker 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 number of cigarette butts and bottles.

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26. Strange Bedfellows

It's quite unsettling when you get back to your room after a night on the town, tired and ready to crash into bed, only to find an elderly couple already asleep there.

We'd been booked into the same room by accident. Since it was the early hours of the morning, instead of rousing everyone and making a scene, they kindly let me -- a complete stranger to them -- sleep on the chaise lounge thing at the foot of the bed. Technically, the room was mine since I'd checked in first.

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25. Best Not To Wonder Where That Came From...

I once found $1,500 USD under a hotel bed in San Salvador, El Salvador. This was back in the early nineties when I was living on $10-$15 per day while traveling through Central America.

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24. That Blows

There was this one guy who stayed at our hotel at least one night every week and he always requested the same room. We thought he was maybe doing something illegal in there, so we searched the room after he checked out one day. Turns out he was hiding a blow-up doll under the mattresses. We threw it away and he only came back once after that.

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23. Magical

I found a Harry Potter wand that smelled like strawberries behind the bed. Wasn't quite sure what to do.

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22. Don't Follow That Trail

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 a.m., went to check my e-mail 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 worst.

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21. The Innocence Of Youth

We were staying in a fairly upscale hotel in Istanbul. At the time, I was a kid, so I explored around the room. I crawled below the vanity, and pulled out an orange strap with an.... adult toy 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.

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20. There's A Story Here...

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% that it was blood but it sure seemed that way.

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19. Never Assume

I was staying at a motel 6 in Aurora, Colorado. I reached behind the TV for what I assumed was the clicker. It wasn't; it was a digital scale that was encrusted with illegal substances. I slept on top of the sheets that night.

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18. Chicken

I was staying in Nepal, on the Annapurna base camp trail.

Somehow, there was a live rooster in my room in the morning. If you didn't grow up on a farm (I did not), you may not realize that they don't just crow the one time. And in an enclosed space? That's a lot of decibels.

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17. A Bath Of A Different Color

We stopped at a hotel out in the country once and after getting into the room I went to take a leak. I did kind of notice the bath tub was black which I thought was a little unusual. So I mentioned it to my friend: "Check out the black bath tub." 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.

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16. As Bad As It Gets

My husband and I were transfering to a military base overseas so we went through Seattle. In our haste, 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 our luggage into the elevator, the elevator kind of spasms making us nervous.

We arrived to our floor and found our room. The door had no deadbolt or chain, just a flimsy key-lock that did not shut properly.

We entered the room and saw the crappy duct-taped furniture. The bathroom was full of mold and had 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 is covered by cardboard and the sheets were dirty. Then I noticed the clammy, grimy carpet. There were blood stains on the carpet. 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 got out of there, double-time.

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15. That Bites

My mother and I were staying at a hotel while driving from Northern California to Southern. 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 3 more. I freaked out. We called the front desk. Got moved to another equally creepy room. Double-checked to make sure there were no teeth under that bed too.

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14. Furry Friends

In the 5th 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 worst motel I have ever seen. The window in the bathroom was broken, and a raccoon crawled into our bathroom. I was stuck in this motel with three other 5th graders I had never met. We found dirty magazines under the mattress too.

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13. Did You Think They Would Forget?!

I work at a nice hotel. 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. We were unable to occupy it for a couple of days, so we charged the lady's credit card on file for "additional cleaning."

The best part was a couple weeks later when she called us. I guess she was checking her expense report because she was irate that we had over-charged her. I very calmly and politely informed her of the human feces and how we had charged for the additional cleaning. There was an awkward silence followed by: "Oh. Okay. Thank you!"

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12. Depends What You Like To Eat

A couple years ago, I stayed in a suite, and my girlfriend (now wife) found a large pair of worn and stained black lace underwear. In a kitchen drawer.

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11. Six Or Half A Dozen

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.

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10. Maybe A Diabetic?

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 shitty 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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9. Cold-Blooded

I found a footlong lizard hiding behind my bag one morning. It took off and was probably more scared than I was, but man: welcome to Thailand.

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8. I'm A Coooool Boss

I found an adult toy vending machine in a hallway once. Pretty strange because my boss had checked me into the hotel. I wish he had gone with something a little classier.

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7. Interesting Design

There was a window in the cupboard of my hotel room last week -- but the view was just into the alleyway.

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6. Awwwww

In Florida, evidently a stray cat snuck in the room as we were leaving to hit the bars and act like idiots. We woke up in the morning to a cat and five kittens in the closet. We were there for a week so we let them stay.

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5. Arachnophobia

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. In the middle of the movie, we notice a fairly big spider on the wall. 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 get 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.

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4. Keeping Up With The Indiana Joneses

I was traveling with some friends and I always make it a point to check all the cubbies and drawers and closets in the places we're staying, just in case.

Well, in this particular hostel I found a large wooden box, maybe 36"x6"x3", nailed shut. It had some weird customs stickers on it, one from Sudan if I remember correctly (this was almost 20 years ago).

We sat around said box and discussed what to do. One friend said, "It's got anthrax in it!" Another friend said, "I dunno..." I always travel with a tool kit, so I was like, "Screw this! I'm busting this thing open! It's Indiana Jones time!" We were all Indy fans and had a great time exploring ruins and ancient stuff that whole summer.

Anyway, inside the box there were two swords -- a Sudanese Kaskara with some cool tooling and markings and a really neat smaller sword that we haven't been able to place yet. Both were very sharp. That was a cool summer.

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3. I'll Be Watching You

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. Since that's gross and super suspicious, I immediately ran down to the front desk with the clock in my hand and demanded an explanation.

Apparently the clock was not the hotel's standard issue. Someone had taken the hotel's clock and replaced it with their own for their voyeuristic purposes. I was still pretty mad, but the week-long free stay voucher I got made me feel better.

I'm convinced it was someone who worked at the hotel, but I didn't care enough to make a huge stink about it.

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2. Secret Cellar

There was this one really old-looking small hotel I had to stay in because of work many years ago in France. Just like in a TV show, I found a hidden room beneath the circular rug in the middle of the room. The door to it was old but perfectly inline with the floorboards. It didn't squeak at all, so I would would have never noticed it if it hadn't for my habit always checking under hotel rugs. (That practice stemmed from this one time when I stepped on a hotel rug and a bunch of spiders gushed out from all sides.)

It turns out this hidden room wasn't as big as I thought it was. I mean, it was still big enough for me to walk about 5-6 steps in either direction. I turned my phone flashlight on and realized it was a wine cellar. And a really old one at that.

I brushed all the webs off the bottles and saw that there were some dating back to the late 1800's while the rest were mainly from the early 1900's.

I told the owner and she and her husband followed me to the room. She seemed honestly surprised. Apparently the building had been owned by her family for generations, and she had only converted it into a 'hotel' for a short while to raise funds.

They said the bottles in there were worth tons of money and that since I found it I should have say in how it's split. I just took one and left them the rest. The woman asked for my contact details and kept in touch for a little while after that.

I got a call around 10-12 years later saying that the woman had passed away peacefully one year after her husband. She had left me the house in her will. I cried, man.

Right now I'm still working on renovating the house, making sure it won't collapse in on itself. Although I live in Australia, I still visit France and stay in the house every year.

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1. UnBelizeable

In Belize, there are lizards that like to let go of the ceiling and fall on your pillow in the middle of the night while you are sleeping! They are pretty cute though.

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