40+ Hotel Workers Unveil the Most Shocking Discoveries Behind Closed Doors

Hotel workers are the silent observers of a world often unseen by guests. From peculiar room remnants to encounters with the most interesting characters, they’ve unraveled tales that pull back the curtain on the unknown side of hotels.

Whether it’s the bellhop or the front desk worker, all hotel employees know the hidden side of hospitality. When some of these employees got a chance to share their strange experiences on Reddit, they didn’t hesitate to speak the truth.

Some people shared what they found while cleaning rooms after the guests left, while others shared how they handled their guests’ strange requests. Fasten your seatbelts as we explore the hospitality industry’s bizarre, shocking, and sometimes humorous revelations.

Comments have been edited for clarity and grammar.

u/Letsbeguin: I was cleaning rooms one summer when I entered the bathroom of guests who had checked out. I noticed rolled-up towels on the floor, but that was not uncommon.

When I started picking them up, I found a pile of feces under them. Feeling an overpowering stench, I opened the shower curtain and found at least ten piles in the shower, mixed with urine.

Meanwhile, the toilet looked clean. It looked like the guests hadn’t even used it. Needless to say, that was my last day at work.

u/TheWastelandWizard: It was a family retreat/kids’ birthday party. The adults were having fun while the kids were in the presidential suite, creating a mess.

They had a fully stocked ice cream bar and allowed the kids to do whatever they wanted with it. The kids took advantage of this and left crushed M&Ms on the carpet, chocolate footprints on the walls, whipped cream everywhere, and fruit punch spilled on the bed.

We charged them about $7,000 in damages, which they took to court because they thought the cleanup would be included in the hotel services. They also smashed glass all over our dog hiking trail, which I had to clean up.

u/BurgleBoy: I had a guy who said his microwave didn’t work. When I went to his room, I saw that he had locked a plate of food in the safe.

u/mrsheikh: I have a friend who owns a small motel just off a highway. I used to hang out with him and chat late at night.

One night, he got a call that one of the guests had heard a loud crash in the room next door. When he checked the computer, he saw that the room was unoccupied.

My friend and I went to check the room. We knocked, but no one answered. Then, my friend opened the door, and we found a car in the room.

The cat had knocked over a lamp and smashed it, which caused the loud crash. Upon seeing us in the room, the cat came to us, and we took it back to the office.

My friend looked at the records to determine how the cat ended up in the room. It turned out the person who last stayed in the room left the cat.

When we called him, he had checked out three days earlier and was already on the other side of the country. He said he wasn’t coming back for the cat.

My friend took ownership of the cat; now, she is the motel cat. She walks around the property and takes care of mice or critters. She even has her picture on the wall as one of the “employees.”

Why did the maid service not see her while cleaning the room? We think the vacuum might have scared the cat, forcing her to hide somewhere in the room. Nevertheless, leaving their cat in the motel room was a wrong move by the guests.

u/jordan_mcafee: A bachelorette party came through, and after they left the next night, we had a new rule that charged a $400 glitter fee.

You couldn’t see the floor that night because there was so much glitter. It has been a few years since that night, but you can still find specks of glitter throughout the hotel’s carpet.

u/ShaneMcDeath: 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 was alive in some sense. It looked like it had been written on and off over several years.

u/Love-Dizzy: While cleaning a hotel room, I found one of those black fuzzy caterpillars in a room. I carried it outside carefully so as not to lose it.

When I put it down on the sidewalk, it didn’t move. Hoping it was still alive, I picked it up and looked closely, only to realize it was someone’s fake eyelash.

u/MentalBrutality: A woman with mysophobia (fear of germs) stayed with us. She never let the cleaners into the room as she preferred to clean it herself.

She left the room one day and removed the ‘do not disturb’ sign. Soon after the maid went inside, she called the reception and said the room had a strong chemical odor. She found bags of urine and feces in the drawers.

u/Additional-Car2163: While working at a luxury hotel, I once got a call to remove a snail from a guest’s room as it was “coming after them” and that they were “afraid for their young child.”

u/saalsa_shark: Ducklings are the weirdest thing I have discovered in a guest’s room. The guest said the mother had died, so she had started looking after the ducklings herself.

We found them in the lodge bathroom. After that, they were kept in someone’s office till the right people came to collect them.

u/scarlett_pimpernel: Three guys in one room left ALL the windows open and lights on overnight during summer.

I have never seen so many different types of bugs flying around the room. It was terrifying. We ran in spraying bug killer as if our lives depended on it, then ran out and left the room for an hour.

We returned to the floor and realized it was almost black with dead bugs. I can still hear the crunching noise as we walked over them.

u/husbandofsmartache: A man was having his house deloused and deep-cleaned and wound up staying at the local Marriott I worked for.

He was there for 30 days or so and never once let housekeeping inside his room. The cleaning staff finally entered his room after he left.

They were horrified by the stench of the place and the utter wreck he had left behind. Every piece of furniture was severely damaged, the floors stained and greasy, the linens too far gone for further use, and rotten food everywhere.

It took a week to get the room back in rotation. No wonder it took a month to get that man’s house cleaned and free of vermin.

u/aNathan113: Pizza was the worst thing I found in a guest’s room. It was not just like leftovers, but an entire pizza. There was not a single slice of it in the box.

The first red flag we found was the slice of pizza smeared all over the TV. Then, we saw two slices side by side like they had worn them for slippers and dragged their feet across the floor.

We also found one slice in the dresser, one in the nightstand, one in the sheets, and one in the bathroom sink.

We cleaned the room and put all the pizza in the box. The whole time, I wondered why someone would do this. Was the pizza not good?

While I was doing the final checks in the room, it still smelled like pizza. Curious, I flicked the lamp on to search for the last slice. I finally found it, shadowed in the lampshade.

This individual had smeared the last slice on the inside of the lampshade. That was the final piece of the puzzle (or pizzazule). This person bought an entire pizza just to hide it in his hotel room.

u/serenityvoiid: I worked at a hotel during one summer break, but it wasn’t the best one. It had 50 rooms and only two people at the reception.

We usually used to get super busy, so it was challenging to keep up with everyone. One day, we had a couple book a room for a week. The strange part was that they had too much luggage. My colleague and I were shocked at how many suitcases they had brought.

It turned out they were here to steal everything from the room. They even stole the windows by taking them out. Needless to say, my colleague and I got fired that day.

u/Lachshmock: Not me, but one of my friends worked as a temp cleaner at an Ibis in Sydney (a cheapish hotel brand in Australia).

It was not really disgusting or weird, but one of the guests staying at the hotel had covered the bathroom floor and mirrors with mayonnaise.

u/[deleted]: I worked at the front desk at a hotel, where I found something strange in the hallway. A little league baseball team was staying the night, and a guest complained to my manager about bats flying around.

My manager assumed the baseball team was just being rowdy and headed up to tell them to calm down.

It turned out the complaint wasn’t about baseball bats. A normal flying bat was hanging out in the hallway.

u/shyrochyn: My buddy worked at a hotel and shared this crazy story: a guest requested a room full of balloons for a surprise party.

The staff spent all night blowing up balloons, only for the guest to check out without even seeing the room!

u/trousercobra: I don’t think I’ve found anything besides many drink bottles. Most people clean up well before they leave.

However, a friend of a friend is a housekeeper, and they once found a banana on the floor covered with human waste. Yeah.

u/truly_trying: The worst thing I found after a guest left was a USB drive with two versions of their obituary that they had written for themself.

u/EyesWideStupid: I worked at a luxury hotel, and a fairly big-name band stayed with us. There were no noise complaints, and they seemed to be perfect tenants.

We went to clean their room after they left, and we saw that EVERY SINGLE PIECE of furniture was nailed to the ceiling in roughly the same configuration that it was in on the floor. I found it to be quite amusing, but the management didn’t.

u/slpofrsn: The worst to clean up, not because it was gross, but because it was annoying and time-consuming, was popcorn.

When I was working at a hotel, a baseball team booked several rooms. They had caramel popcorn balls and threw them all over the room.

When we cleaned the rooms, we found pieces of the balls stuck on the walls, the furniture, and the carpet. It was almost impossible to vacuum the carpet.

u/llcucf80: I used to work at a hotel and have a few stories to share. Once, some guests used towels to wipe and rubbed them on the walls. Then, they laughed when the housekeeping entered their rooms to clean the mess.

Another time, a young woman stuck her used feminine hygiene product on the bathroom wall, and it cemented itself there. It had to be pried off.

Some guests left three-week-old, expired milk in the fridge, but they only stayed at our hotel for three days. It means the milk had expired two and a half weeks when they checked in. Who lugs around rotten milk?

u/54rtrt: I once called some guests to see why they hadn’t checked out with the front desk, but I didn’t get a response.

I went to the room (a two-bedroom suite, and they had two suites booked), and when I entered, there was no one there.

The room had garbage everywhere and a pizza slice stuck to the ceiling (which I’m assuming was made purposefully as a joke?), but one thing stuck out. The fridge was missing.

I looked around but couldn’t find it. I thought, “Did the guests steal it?” The moment I entered the other bedroom suite, which was as well trashed but not as bad as the previous one, and went into one of the bedrooms, I finally saw it. The fridge was there.

They had moved the fridge from one suite to another and put it next to the bed. At least they didn’t steal the refrigerator, so that’s nice. We still charged them for the trashed room, though.

u/TyrionSwaggister: My family is in the hotel business. One day, a particular room started stinking for no apparent reason.

We checked everywhere multiple times, looking for the source of the scent, but no dice. We sprayed everything in the room numerous times with deodorizer to no avail.

We also left the room open daily for months, but it didn’t work. Finally, we somehow tracked the smell to the table lamp.

We were dumbfounded, asking ourselves how it could be emanating from there. The guy had broken the thing, put a fish in it, and glued it back together. My brother and I laughed and applauded the guy’s ingenuity. He got us good, and I’m not even mad at him.

u/IamJenFox: When I worked at a hotel, the housekeeping called me because they were too scared to clean a room.

I went upstairs and saw that the curtains were closed, the mirrors were covered with fabric, and a bunch of candles and symbols/odd tokens were placed all around the room. The whole setup was strange, but hey, each to their own.

u/WoodBog: This is more weird than bad. One day, I forgot that a guest had decided to extend his stay. As a result, when a maid went to clean his room, she called me up, saying she couldn’t enter the room. I went up and unlocked it for her.

Upon opening the door, we peered into the room, and she immediately yelled and hollered about how she wouldn’t step inside that room and quickly just left the scene.

The guest, a sweet and somewhat nerdy kid in his twenties, a computer programmer, had what I can only describe as an immense amount of voodoo items in this room, including this strange statue of a raven, a large tome, candles, and other items.

I felt terrible for invading his privacy when I realized he had asked to extend his stay. His door always had the “do not disturb” sign, and I had assumed he forgot to remove it before leaving, as many guests do.

u/muklan: Once, my parents found two four-foot-tall Minnie and Mickey Mouse piggy banks filled with quarters in a hotel room.

u/MerylSquirrel: Once, I lived with my grandparents at their guesthouse for a while, and I also used to help them out. This story has always stuck with me.

During that time, a couple was staying at the guesthouse. They had been there for a week and were due to leave that morning.

They called Grandma to the desk, and she thought they would check out, but no. The woman dropped a live mouse down on the desk.

The woman was furious and ranted about how they had heard things crawling around all week, that their stuff had been nibbled, and that the hotel was crawling with mice. Long story short, she wanted their money back for the whole week.

Grandma was upset but was also suspicious because she kept the guesthouse spotless. My grandad came to the guesthouse and stalled them while grandma took the spare key and went into their room to inspect it.

She found a torn box in their bin, which had the logo of a local pet shop. Grandma immediately recognized it and called them to ask if the guests had bought a mouse from them. It turned out the pet shop had sold a mouse to the couple a day earlier.

She returned and told my grandfather, who told the couple they weren’t getting a refund. He also told them he would call the police if they didn’t leave the guest house in five minutes.

They kept saying they’d sue us, but we never heard from them again. Moreover, my grandfather rang all the guest houses they were friendly with and gave them the couple’s names and a warning.

Meanwhile, it was my job to catch the mouse. He recovered and ended up moving in with my cousin’s mice and living to a ripe old age.

u/motherofxmen: The worst thing I found in a room was broccoli. It was everywhere. In the bed, the tub, the toilet, and drawers. It was also stuck in the carpet.

u/33nippels: I used to work at a very well-known hotel chain. I mainly worked at the bar, but housekeeping was short-staffed, so I helped for one day.

The worst thing I saw was the manager telling us not to change the bedsheets to save time. This was my first day working in housekeeping, and I can imagine the other stuff they did that I wasn’t privy to.

u/thebaddudu: One guest had clogged the toilet after using it, while another vomited all over the room, on the bed, and even on the ceiling. We had to put the room as out of order.

u/randylikecandy: After finishing high school, I began working in a hotel in Miami Beach. I was young, fresh out of high school. I worked as a bellhop there.

One day, we got a call to move a guest out of his room. I went up to the room and knocked on the door. When I opened it, I noticed that the guest had spray-painted the entire room gold.

He said it was 24-karat gold, and he wanted his room to look that way because he had stayed in hotels in Saudi Arabia that had solid gold. He wanted to make his room look like that.

He had spray-painted the bedsheets, light bulbs, and bathroom. Everything in that room was gold. Upon learning about this, the management moved him into a hotel down the beach and didn’t tell them.

u/[deleted]: I cleaned the room of a very professional-looking female social worker. She was staying for a few days and didn’t want any service.

When she left, there wasn’t a clean surface in that room except maybe the trashcan. There was garbage at least a foot deep, EVERYWHERE.

Cheetos stains were all over the sheets, and vomit decorated the bathroom with skid marks throughout the vomit. It was apparent she had slithered her way out of the room.

u/sbouvette: I was working at a small boutique place and just starting my day shift around 6:30 a.m. when something strange happened.

A woman came to the desk, visibly shaken. She said, “I can’t find my husband. He’s not in the room, and all his clothes are still there. He’s a sleepwalker, and I’m worried he has wandered into another room.”

At this point, I started to chuckle a bit to myself but quickly stopped with the thought of a screaming woman finding a naked stranger in her room. My first thought was to check the CCTV footage.

We headed up to the first floor. Our CCTV was in the back of our linen storage, and I brought the woman with me. I’m not even sure why I did, probably because she wanted to come.

Soon, as I got the door open and the lights on, there was her naked husband sleeping spread across our bundled duvet covers, with one covering half of his body.

She woke him up, and he had no idea where he was. She wrapped him up and took him back to bed.

They checked out later, and the guy was bashful. I told him not to worry about it as he gave me a great story to share. I also told him I would tell anyone who would listen. And I plan to!

u/Vypernorad: I worked the night shift and was the only employee in the entire hotel from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. One day, around 3 a.m., I got a few calls about a fight in an upstairs hallway.

I immediately went upstairs to see what was going on. When I got there, I saw two guys having a full-on brawl. I’m 6’2″ and very broad-shouldered, but these men were taller and bulkier.

As I approached them, a third guy, just as large as the other two, came out of a room, yelling, “Get off him.” I stopped a ways away and just shouted at them.

They all stopped immediately and looked at me. I was getting ready to run for it when they all just deflated. They hung their heads, and one mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

They looked like toddlers who had just gotten caught stealing cookies. I told them they would have to leave immediately, or I would call the police, and they all just nodded.

They followed me onto the elevator, apologizing and pouting while I escorted them out. I have never seen a situation go from 100 to 0 so fast.

u/dillicious: My first job was as a houseman at a hotel. I was 14 and had a basic maintenance job. I was the guy that would plunge the toilet. I had to clean up human waste and male contraceptives. The worst guests were hockey teams.

First things first, it was my very first day. My very first job. My first task was to vacuum the pool area. As I started, a team of 16-17-year-olds came in. They were part of a volleyball team.

They made me extremely nervous because every one of them was hot. I kept vacuuming and was angry because there was no suction, so I looked like an idiot.

The hose had disconnected itself from the power head the whole time and was latched to my pants by my ankle. I did that for at least 20 minutes before realizing it.

They kept giggling with me, thinking they had impressed me, but no, I was vacuuming my ankle the whole time.

Another time, a guy called from one of the executive suites saying his TV didn’t work, so I went up there and pulled back the giant unit that held the TV, and behind it was a bunch of adult magazines.

I also found out that, while the hotel was five stories high, there was another set of stairs to the roof. There was a nice landing at the top of those stairs, so I’d grab a blanket and pillow from the storage room and nap until my radio went off.

u/Starkeye311: I saw a guy in a very upscale hotel (> $1500/night) who had to use the bathroom. He made his way to the bellstand to ask where the toilet was.

After the man went downstairs, the bellman smelled something and saw human waste on the floor in front of his stand.

While walking downstairs, the man left a trail of feces behind him. He wore long pants, and everything just tumbled out of the leg hole every few feet.

The man made it to the bathroom and smeared human waste all over the walls of the stall. He left the mess and his pants for housekeeping to clean up.

Once presented with the bill for cleaning the next day, he threatened to write a bad review since he was a hotel critic. We blacklisted him, and he never got his pants back.

u/HadToDelete: Once, we hosted a reptile expo in one of our regency ballrooms over the weekend. I stumbled across an almost paralyzed crested gecko the day after they left.

I started panicking because I knew nothing about reptiles. However, I figured it was easy to catch because it was cold.

I used the heat lamp in our kitchen to warm it up and held it until we got a hold of the correct pet shop that was missing the gecko.

The shop owners said they wouldn’t make a five-hour trip for one gecko and said we could keep it. So, that’s the story of how my front desk manager got a free crested gecko.

u/[deleted]: I worked the front desk for the Motel 6 in Harbor City, CA. It was a sketchy area, and we would get all sorts of interesting people, especially around the first of the month when the local transients’ relief checks came in, and they could afford a bed and a shower.

We were accustomed to the tramps’ presence, especially after they set up a camp in the drainage canal behind the property.

One of the crazier ones came in and rented a room. I gave the man the key, and he asked if he could take some brochures (we have a big rack of them in the front office showing all the local attractions for tourists). I told him sure, take whatever you want.

This guy spent three minutes carefully taking one of each brochure (there must have been 100 different ones) and organizing them carefully.

He became excited and told me his sister was coming to pull him off the streets, give him a real home, and take him to see the world. That’s why he needed all the brochures.

I asked the night clerk about it when he came to relieve me. Apparently, this guy asks for brochures every month when he rents a room.

The night clerk explained, “Well, they don’t have ESPN or anything else down in that homeless camp. They are probably bored, and brochures are better than nothing.”

u/ghostofoutkast: I worked as a bellhop at a major hotel chain in my late teens. Late at night on my shifts, I often walked the floors in search of my stray bell carts as some people moved their luggage on their own. I usually did this with my friend, who was a security guard.

So late one night, my friend and I were walking on one of the hotel’s top floors. We were talking while heading toward the corner, and we saw someone dart out from the ice machine at the far end of the hall.

My friend immediately ran after him, and I followed close behind. As we approached the dead end of the hall, we noticed someone hiding behind the recess of the wall into the last set of rooms on the floor.

Suddenly, a guy stepped out, and we saw the strangest get-up I’d ever seen on a man. He was wearing a short, see-through nightgown, complete with fishnet stockings, high heels, and makeup. He immediately apologized and ran to his room three doors down.

How was he able to run so fast in high heels? I have no clue. It makes me wonder if he had practiced that before.

u/ProperGentlemanDolan: I work the night shift at a Holiday Inn Express, and once, this older man came through who was really rude. It was no big deal; it happens all the time.

The guy went into his room but didn’t know how to use a thermostat, so he called the front desk and yelled at me for having a complicated thermostat (the thermostat had a total of three buttons: two for changing the temperature up/down, and one for changing from A/C to heat).

I went to his room and showed him how to use the thermostat while he muttered and grumbled. Then, I returned to the front desk.

Around 15 minutes later, I got a call from the guy again. This time, he was furious because he didn’t know how to operate the remote. I told him I’d be right there (fortunately, his room was about three seconds from the front desk).

He handed me the remote. I pressed the big red POWER button, and the television came on. He grumbled angrily about something, and I went back to the front desk.

I didn’t hear from the guy again until around 4:30 a.m. He came to the front desk and quietly asked if I’d tie his shoes for him.

If this guy were a day under 50, I’d have assumed the guy was being unreasonable. I would have refused to tie his shoelaces, but I said sure and hopped over the desk and tied his shoes for him.

He then explained that he had a stroke or something relatively recently, and it made it extremely difficult for him to tie his shoes, and we went on to talk for probably twenty minutes. He was an alright guy, but he got flustered really quickly. Also, he was totally bewildered by buttons.

These revelations from Redditors unveil an unseen world within the hospitality industry, a realm unknown to ordinary guests. Behind the scenes, hotel workers navigate unpredictable and unexpected situations, striving to ensure every guest enjoys a seamless and comfortable stay.

We’re curious – have you ever encountered something unusual during your hotel stays? Share your strange experiences with us in the comments section.