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3 hours ago
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I stay in hotels pretty often, and there’s a certain level of trust involved. You trust that the room has been cleaned, even though the housekeepers probably had about 12 minutes to make it look like no other human being has ever slept there. It doesn’t matter how clean or fancy the hotel is. You truly have no idea what happened in that room before you arrived. The possibilities are endless, and unfortunately, hotel housekeepers have seen most of them.
In this AskReddit thread, hotel workers shared the wildest things they’ve discovered while cleaning rooms. Some are funny, some are horrifying, and all of them will be lurking in the back of my mind during my next hotel stay.
I’ve said this before, but even after reading every one of these stories, I still prefer hotels to Airbnbs. At least hotels don’t leave me a chore list.
1. “I mean, when you work in housekeeping, things related to sex, drugs, and just general grossness quickly become far less strange, lol. But my favorite story is when I had to get a witness to open a room safe that had been left locked by a guest. Its contents? One Taco Bell bean burrito. The best guess is a particularly drunken guest mistook the safe for the microwave.”
2. “My friends’ family ran a little hotel at the beach. Nothing fancy, but it was oceanfront. My friend once went to a room to clean and found the ENTIRE place CLEAN. Not just wiped up and etc., the walls and ceilings had been scrubbed, the carpets looked like they had been shampooed, the tub/shower looked brand new (quite an accomplishment at the beach with super hard water and salt spray), the bed frame had been cleaned, the old beach furniture had been cleaned and repaired, the knobs and track on the sliding glass door had been polished, the railings on the deck had been thoroughly scrubbed, and the dirty linens were stripped and folded with a sign saying “dirty.” We were kind of curious if someone had been killed or what.”
3. “Not me but a former colleague who used to work as a hotel housekeeper. The strangest thing he ever found was a Polish guest who had left the mini fridge filled to the brim with sausages.”
4. “Almost tazed myself with a “tube of lipstick” that I found under the bed.”
— Naprisun
5. “My friend’s family owns a motel. He told me they once found an auto transmission in the bathtub of a room.”
— smorkoid
6. “In college I worked at a hotel, and sometimes I would help strip beds when it was busy. One time while helping, I pulled the sheets down to strip the bed, and the bed was covered in chicken wing bones, like covered. There was hot sauce all over the sheets too. It looked like some sort of gross crime scene.”
7. “Oh, I have two good ones. I worked as a hotel cleaner during undergrad. On my first day of work, someone left a hatchet in the bathtub. Also, someone completely decorated the room with framed family pictures… and left them all there. I think their stay was only two days. They set some up on the furniture… but also legit hung some on the walls.”
8. “One time, teenagers wanted a glitter bath. So they dumped glitter in the hot tub. Took months to clean! The glitter kept shooting from the jets, and we couldn’t figure out how to clean it all. It just kept coming! This was when we made $3.50/room about 10 years ago. One housekeeper found a half-full bottle of vodka and drained it. If she brought it home, her family would make her share, and she was the only worker in the house (extended family too). She was about 4’3” and just the wildest woman ever. She’s probably dead now. She had other problems. But d**n, could she clean!”
9. “I was working the laundry but got told lots of gossip from the cleaners. The best one was the hot tub being full of Jello, and based on other… context clues, everyone agreed that the people who rented the room were recording some kind of p*rn. It wasn’t the direct reason, but everyone was happy when they took all the hot tubs out of the rooms because they were a huge pain to clean.”
10. “Not a cleaner, but I was trying to put my medical marijuana in a hiding place at a VRBO. I found more weed in that exact spot…”
11. “On the positive side, some aussies left me a 12-pack of beer and 50 dollars as a tip. On the negative side, a room for two, which had been occupied by nine. And on the get some side, a room checked out for one night, and the next morning had about six or seven used condoms in the trash can.”
12. “Worked as a housekeeper for a hostel in one of the most expensive places in the country to sight-see and hike, so even wealthy people would stay with us (usually in the private rooms). We had a one-month holding period on anything we found and could claim it after one month if we couldn’t get ahold of those who were in that room. I found a LOT of designer/high-end clothes (Gucci, Arc’teryx, Kit and Ace, Patagonia) and expensive haircare and perfumes, as well as top-notch hiking gear/equipment. I would claim it after one month in the lost and found and either kept it or sold it on marketplace.”
13. “My uncle owned one of the nicest hotels in Southern Oregon. Dolly Parton stayed there in the late seventies. She left a small pearl-handled handgun under her pillow. He had it framed, and it hung in his office.”
14. “I worked room service at a mid-range hotel. One of the funniest things I remember seeing was during a champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries delivery for a honeymoon package. This one was requested for delivery before the guests arrived, and I could tell the second I walked into the room that I was not the first person to have been in there. Someone had tossed rose petals around the room and added some decorations for their magical night. The one that stood out, though: a 3’x3′ printout of the bride’s father with a massive, cheesy grin and a thumbs-up. It was taped to the ceiling directly above the bed. I initially found it strange that high school/college-aged boys will “hang out” in each other’s rooms completely naked.”
“They’ll answer the door, completely nude and 100% shamelessly, and carry on a conversation with me as if nothing was out of the ordinary. At first I thought they were doing it for a laugh to see if I would say anything, but the number of times it happened dismissed that thought. People are just strange.”
15. “A couple of years back I had a flight cancelled during a layover in Vegas because of a crew shortage. They put me up in a non-casino hotel on the strip for the night and had an early morning flight. They also gave me $55 for dinner, so I ordered room service. As I waited, I opened the curtains to check the view of the strip, and there on the windowsill was a pair of like cyborg-looking binoculars. I picked them up, and they were far heavier than they appeared. I looked through them, and the magnification was insane. Then I was messing around and found a button that turns on a kind of night vision. I looked around and realized I could look into people’s hotel rooms, even with reflective mirror glass. So I packed them in my suitcase, and now I have a great pair of ogler’s goggles. They’ve been in my closet ever since, but I swear one day I’ll find a legitimate use for them.”
16. “Housekeepers at a hotel I worked at found a large bag of drugs and roughly $20,000 in the fire escape. I probably would have found a medium-sized bag and $5000 had I been working that day…”
— Fclune
17. “My partner works housekeeping at a small resort and found a massive amount of booger sugar in the drawer while looking for the remote for the TV. It was apparently like $50k worth of it. I bet that group was upset that they’d left it behind.”
— jhumph88
18. “I worked in maintenance at a hotel, and while I’ve heard some crazy things that housekeeping has found, this experience was my own. The front desk paged me, and when I arrived, they told me this woman wanted to go look for her wedding ring she had in a room she had stayed in a few days prior. This was obviously suspicious, and we had a policy that guests couldn’t visit their room after they checked out and housecleaning had visited already. This lady tried to bribe the desk to let her go up, and when that didn’t work, she snuck upstairs and tried to bribe housekeeping, who also refused. When I was called was when she was trying to convince the desk a second time, and we settled on she couldn’t go up, but I’d go look. I get on the elevator, and a man and young boy, probably about 10 years old or so, get on with me. I don’t really think anything of it at the time until they follow me off the elevator and to the room.”
“At this point I spin around and tell them no one can enter the room with me nor be upstairs, and they need to go back downstairs. I wait for them to turn the corner and quickly enter the room and secure the door behind me.
I know that something is up at this point. I feel along the bottom of the curtains, and I don’t feel anything. I look around the rest of the room and don’t see anything. I said, “Screw it,” and checked the curtains again, and this time I felt something I missed last time. I found where this lady had cut a hole in the curtains and moved the object in that direction. A huge bag of white crystal plops into my hand. I called down to the desk and told them to call the cops because I just found a huge bag of drugs and told them that I’ll be staying in the room until the cops arrive in case the people are waiting for me somewhere. The cops arrived, and I handed over the baggie, and the cop tells me that it contains over $1800 worth of meth. The people split right after I sent what I assume is the dad and son back downstairs. Who brings their kid with them to retrieve drugs?”
— Light340
19. “It was my first job, first week, at an older hotel in my small town. There were three of us total that cleaned the rooms, and one day we’re all called to drop what we’re doing and head to the biggest suite so we get there, and the manager is super upset but doesn’t speak; she just points to the ceiling and waits. We look up, and dangling from an exposed pipe are just dozens of used condoms hung over the pipe like washing left to dry. There are rubbish bins in the rooms, of course. So this was certainly a choice. Anyway, the reason they were found is because a couple booked that room for their honeymoon and were understandably horrified upon finding that. When I asked my colleagues about it, they just said they didn’t have an item on the checklist that accounted for the one room with exposed piping, so it just never occurred to them to look. So who knows how long those things were up there?”
20. “I’d already given my two weeks, so I didn’t care at this point. Had a business traveler staying in a king. That means bathroom linens were three of each (three towels, three hand towels, and three washcloths). Dude stayed for a week. Every day for the first three days, I’d find all three hand towels in or by the bed. He had used them as c*m rags. So being a smarta**, I started leaving him six hand towels. Three in the bathroom and three on the nightstand. Yes, he used all three of the nightstand ones every night for the remainder of his stay.”
21. “Not me, but my best friend works in housekeeping at a hotel chain. I’ve heard some nightmare stories, but there are two that really stand out. The first was after a furry convention came through town, and there was an absurd amount of sex toys left behind. It’s pretty common to come across them from time to time, but this almost had to be purposeful. The second was a massive unflushable s**t. She refused to dispose of it and left the task to her manager. She described it as inhuman and the size of a football. It took a spatula and a knife from their kitchen to make it manageable enough to flush.”
22. “I do maintenance. Had a group of part-time housekeepers that are mentally handicapped working with their job coach go into a suite with an adjoining door. There were three construction workers staying, two and their supervisor. On the one side with a pull-out couch and DVD player, they found a full-size blow-up doll, empty small bottles of lube, used condoms, several beer bottles, and a stack of p*rn on DVD. The doll was on the pull-out couch, and everything else was all over the bed.”
23. “Found human poo in the kettle once. The worst part was it was a ‘celebrity’ (c****y UK reality show) doing a guest appearance at a local club. He and his mates filled the rooms’ iPads with d**k pics too. The hotel got rid of the iPads shortly after that.”
— Geknock
24. “Three empty bottles of wine, about two dozen cherry pits scattered all over the floor and under the furniture, and red-colored puke all over the bedspread. There was only one guy staying in the room.”
25. “Friend worked at a 5-star hotel and found a turd in the closet.”
26. “Most surprising, I think (and honestly the least gross), was a massive st under the toilet mat in a vacation home. I’ve cleaned a lot of human st off of/out of various areas, but that was a new one. Grossest is a toss-up between what looked like arterial spray from the ceiling above a toilet and a mystery patch of carpet that gave me corpse fluid vibes. Both of those were at a super sketchy motel I lasted maybe a month working at. My final straw was after two of our housekeepers had to leave early to go start the process for testing after being stabbed by used needles under the beds. I ALWAYS look before I reach under any furniture now.”
— tastyburro–
27. “I cleaned rooms in a popular East Coast resort town during the summer while in college. Found one room with writing all over the walls. It creeped me out big time, so I got out of there FAST and didn’t stick around to read it. Just remember it was blue ink and everywhere.”
— c234567
28. “Not a hotel cleaner myself, but there was a teacher at my high school who was known for talking about her life in class instead of actually teaching. One time she came to my class, and students who’d had her before prompted her to talk about her time working at a hotel in the UK. When she was in her 20s, she went to work as a cleaner in the UK, and near the end of her working experience, she walked into a room to clean, saw a sign on the door but ignored it since she couldn’t understand English, and walked in. She saw a man sitting on a chair, dead. She was so shocked and stayed frozen for a minute until the police arrived. She really liked talking about that experience, and I’m sure everyone in school knew about it.”
29. “I worked for a high-end hotel: A pineapple with a rather small hole inside, put in the middle of a bed. Sheets looked sticky and gross, so I put the gloves on and didn’t ask questions. A non-venimous and non-biting dead snake on a bed, with white jeez on its tail and face. Poor guy…Not always in the room, but some rare and unauthorized animals that managed to escape from “owners” and they could not find them. One day, a lady comes to the counter, and she says she cannot find her cat. She tells us to not worry about the size because it is a Maine coon. GTF*, we found it was a lion cub. A LION CUB! How do rich people think the average Joe is stupid?”
— Nightwyl
30. “I study at a hotel school that operates its own hotel. We have first-year students doing the physical work and second-year students acting as managers/supervisors with instructors above them. Once there was a guy who booked a room for a week. He paid for everything in advance, and because this was a simple hotel with no extra amenities, etc., he didn’t have to leave a credit card. This man had explicitly requested for nobody to enter the room for the duration of his stay, as he valued his privacy. No problem. He was always very nice to the students and, in general, a pleasant gentleman. After he left, they inspected the room for cleaning. And, oh boy, that was a scene. The room was covered in j**z and feces. I’m talking on the ceiling, all over the bed and drapes, and in the bathroom; it was everywhere! Unfortunately, he came under false identity.”
“Turns out, he pulled that stunt in other small hotels too. He was never caught. The students who were working that week all got maximum grades for their… efforts…? s**tty situation through and through.”
31. “Someone I know worked night security and told me the crew stumbled upon a hotel room where an obvious orgy had occurred. Probably not uncommon, but the cherry on top was the bedframe, which was turned upside down with st-stained sandwich bags on the bedposts. Gives me a whole new level of appreciation for those who have to clean up (after) the stbags.”
32. “A severed arm all the way up to the shoulder on ice, meticulously preserved, in the bathtub. I worked the front desk, and I can still hear the sheer horror in that housekeeper’s voice from when she called down to tell us.”
Nate is a writer and stand-up comedian living in Chicago. He enjoys finding the internet’s funniest corners so you don’t have to.
English (US)