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!
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?
44. Roach Motel
43. Hotel Transylvania
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?
41. You'll Never Sleep Alone
40. Striking Oil
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.
38. Pretty Fungi
37. Pooper Trooper
36. I Am My Own Housekeeping
35. Reverse Tooth Fairy
34. Not A Great Job
33. How Does It Get Up There?
32. Wait, There Are Requirements?
31. Happy Prom, Guys
30. Great City, Though
29. Yikes
28. A Stowaway
27. That's Truly Alarming
26. Strange Bedfellows
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.
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.
23. Magical
I found a Harry Potter wand that smelled like strawberries behind the bed. Wasn't quite sure what to do.
22. Don't Follow That Trail
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.
20. There's A Story Here...
19. Never Assume
18. Chicken
I was staying in Nepal, on the Annapurna base camp trail.
17. A Bath Of A Different Color
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.
15. That Bites
14. Furry Friends
13. Did You Think They Would Forget?!
12. Depends What You Like To Eat
11. Six Or Half A Dozen
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.
9. Cold-Blooded
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.
7. Interesting Design
6. Awwwww
5. Arachnophobia
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.
3. I'll Be Watching You
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.
1. UnBelizeable