22 Hotel Workers Describe The Creepiest Things They've Seen

"I've come to realize (through my two years as a night auditor) that the things that shake you the most are not the weird noises you hear or the overwhelming feelings of loneliness at 3 AM. The stuff that really gets to you simply being things that your guests do. 

"There have been a few good incidents that have shaken me a bit over my tenure. An intoxicated man waving his gun around at 3 AM, a woman having a schizophrenic breakdown in a room and having a violent dispute with herself, and a man wandering the halls talking to himself for hours on end.  

"For the sake of the thread though, I can remember one that struck me as extremely odd. One night a few hours after I had arrived for my shift, a guest kept coming down and aimlessly wandering around the lobby and breakfast area. He was doing extremely odd things like talking to himself and sitting down at a breakfast table only to stand up and switch chairs at the same table every 2-3 minutes. Every time I asked him if he needed help, he would jerk a little and mumble that he didn't need anything.  

"Well a few hours or so after he finally went to his room, he came back down and said he had turned the heater on and it made him short of breath, and needed me to call an ambulance. So even though I was confused, I obliged. About a minute later, the hotels fire alarms started to go off. The whole time the firemen were going up and down from his room, they kept asking if he had anyone with him or if he was alone, and I kept telling them that he was in fact alone and had no other guests in the room with him. 

"After the firemen left and everything was back to 'normal,' I went to look in the man's room. He had rearranged all of the furniture, put the TV in the bathroom, and had put his trashcan in the middle of the room and set it on fire. The thing that troubled me wasnt the fact hat the man intentionally set his room on fire, and could have possibly burned the hotel down, it was the fact that, even though he was alone, he had small children's clothes spread around the room."

"Worked in a motel when I was 17-18 years-old. I was at the front desk not working when the housekeeping guy called me to check something out in a room that was being cleaned. I go up there and the housekeeping guy is standing in the middle of the room, pointing up to the ceiling. 

"There was a set of bare foot prints on the ceiling, which is at least teen feet high. Bare. Not shoes or slippers, and only in the middle and no where else. There's no way he jumped that high upside down and left no prints on the walls either.  

"Also he left a single bullet on the bed."

"Excuse me for not being an amazing storyteller, but this is definitely a true story. Not me specifically, but my mother used to work at a hotel in Washington D.C. back in the 90s as a housekeeper/maid. She needed money because she was a refugee from Vietnam. Even though she didn't know much English at the time, she knew enough to get by at her job and all the other staff and hotel guests loved her because of how sweet she was. Because of this, anytime high profile guests (such as the Backstreet Boys) would stay at the hotel, the manager always sent my mom to clean the room since she was good at it.  

"Anyway, one day, a guest came. We'll refer to him as Mr. M because I don't know his real name. He checked in to their most expensive suite. As usual, the manager told my mom to take care of his room. As she got there, there was a 'do not disturb' sign, so she told the manager she would come back later. What was weird was that no one was ever allowed in his room. The man stayed there for over a month, and not one time did he let a staff come in to clean. However, he paid a lot and he gave a warm welcome every time he passed a staff member/housekeeper, so no one payed him any attention. Then one day, people didn't see him anymore, so they assumed he checked out, even though the receptionist had no account of this. Since it had been so long since the room was cleaned and the 'Do not disturb' sign wasn't on the door anymore, the manager told my mom to go check it out and try to clean up what she could. As she got to the floor and unlocked the door to the room, a disturbing smell hit her. She couldn't figure out what it was, but she continued to survey the room, which was disgustingly messy. Her words were that, 'it looked like someone had thrown a rave,' even though no other guests seemed to have ever gone into the room besides Mr. M. It had looked like Mr. M had deserted the place without telling anyone. My mom was still shocked by the smell, so she tried to track it down. As she followed the smell, she could tell it was coming from the hotel room closet. When she opened the closet, there was nothing but a cardboard box on the ground from which the smell was resonatin. My mother's first instinct was to open the box to see what it was and clean/throw it out. When she opened the box, what she saw scarred her to this day. It was the rotting/decomposing head of a young woman, chopped off. My mother immediately screamed and got out of there, where she fainted in the elevator. Once she woke up, cops were everywhere and the hotel was like a CSI scene. The manager told her that Mr. M wasn't his real name and he used a fake credit card to check in. The head of the woman was identified to be like a call girl/prostitute-type person. I don't know much more or any nitty gritty details, but i'm sure one can look it up on the internet for more information. Needless to say, my mom quit that day."

"Hotel bartender here. Started a few months ago at a more upscale place. It was a quiet evening and a distraught-looking guy came to the bar and ordered a shot and a beer. I was catching some fucked-up vibes. 

"To lighten the mood, I tried to drum up some light hearted conversation. He tried to talk but couldn't. So I asked him if everything was alright. 

"He said no. I asked, 'What's wrong. Anything I can do to help? How about a plate of some food. On the house, buddy.'

"He declines, proceeded to tell me the escort he hired slit her wrists and is dead in his room's bathtub.  

"I jumped back and was like, holy shit I'm calling 911. After calling 911, I ran back to the bar to find the man slumped on the bar not moving. I run over to check on him, and his pulse is weak and he is pale and cold.
 

"After, the police and medics arrive and cleaned up the mess. Dead hooker and dead depressed business man. There was the man's suicide note found in the room by another guest a few days later (yup a few days) that said he wanted to feel a woman's touch one more time before overdosing on something that killed him at my bar. 

"Fucked up. I got a week off work to deal with it, and was shocked when I came back to find everything normal, like nothing happened."

"Worked as a chef for a Hilton. Remember speaking with one of the managers of a different downtown hotel, very high end, and he told me this story:  

"Manager was on his way out of the hotel after working one evening and saw a homeless guy a ways out sleeping on the lawn. He decided to walk back in and tell the front desk employees to try and get him off property.  

"Came back in for work the next morning and saw the same homeless guy still sleeping on the lawn, so he ran in to chew out the front desk manager about how the employees didn't do as he asked. They both walked out to get the bum to leave and they found the bum was wearing a nice suit coat. 

"Turns out it was a wealthy business man who had jumped off the 12th story balcony and had just been dead there all night and half the day. Turns out no one saw him fall. 

"Sad story actually."

"I worked at a Holiday Inn years ago and only can recall a few weird cases. 

 
"One was that every now and then we would get complaints that a young girl was screaming in the pool area. When checking it out, you would find that nobody was around. . . . Management reported that a young girl drowned in the pool years earlier.  

"One night, I was working the front desk and received a call from a room complaining that the room above them was stomping around and being noisy. Nobody was checked into that room and nobody was there when I checked it out. . . . Guess a wife killed her husband in the room. Also, after the murder the room was turned into storage, and despite it being empty, the front desk would get random calls from that room.  

"I'm sure all of it is explainable but shit was weird to me"

"I used to work in a hotel in Southern California, doing security. Every night we would get a print out of what rooms were vacant. It was my job to go through all the rooms, ensure all lights are off and all windows are secure. I went into a room and found all the lights on, typical of housekeeping after they clean. I started turning the lights off from the left side of the room, around to the windows and up to the bathroom. The bathroom has French style doors that open outward toward the room. The doors themselves have only hinges and two handles to pull them open, no other devices attached. The doors are also the very light-weight slatted wood. 

"Anyway I opened the left door out all the way so I could reach around it and turn the light off in the bathroom. After turning the light off I realized it was freezing in the room, which is not uncommon being housekeeping liked it cold when they worked on a room. I reached up for the thermostat and when my hand was within four inches of it, the left bathroom door I just opened slammed shut. Terrified, I ran out of the room immediately. While pulling the door shut behind me the door deadbolt pushed itself out of the lock and it slammed into the door frame. I was petrified when I had to reach inside the door to disengaged it. I stood there for a minute or two with my eyes watering, wondering WTF just happened. I decided to go back in and look to be sure of what happened. I went in and looked at the door, it was shut. I moved it around to see if it would close on it's own, which it wouldn't. I tried throwing the door to slam it and the door is so light weight it caught a lot of air and wouldn't even shut all the way after throwing it closed. As far as I could see it, there isn't any explanation for what happened. I stopped going into that room."

"I used to work in my aunt and uncle's hotel in a Scottish village about twelve years ago, and the freakiest shit that happened to me was one night when I was sleeping in the staff quarters and heard a banging noise from along the corridor. This was about 3 AM after most of the staff had gone to bed. I got up to go and tell whoever was coming in late to shut the fuck up so I could go back to sleep, but the corridor was empty. Well lit I have to add, this is key.

 
"So I walk down the end of the corridor to see if it's folk coming up the stairs drunk or whatever. I look down to see a figure stomping up the stairs. The only way I can describe it is as though a shadow of a person that was solid. There were no features on the face or clothes on its body. Imagine someone in a black morph suit walking along but you could see things through them.  

"I turned and ran back to my room and shut the door. I could still hear the stomping for some time, and I don't think I got a wink of sleep at all that night. I didn't leave my room until the sun was shining through my window. I asked a few of the other staff if they heard the banging the night before, but nobody else had, and like fuck was I gonna mention seeing shadow men coming up the stairs at 3 AM."