Everyone has a creepy, scary, or terrifying hotel story to share with their friends, but if you ask the hotel workers who cover night shifts you’ll likely hear stories beyond your wildest imagination. From a human head in the closet to door slamming on its own. As proof, consider reading these tales from Hotel workers around the world.
There was no one in the room upstairs
From user u/BLUE_PIG: “I don’t work in a hotel, but my job requires me to travel a lot. The most unexplainable experience for me happened during my stay in a hotel I frequent. After a long day, I tried to get some sleep as I had to get up early the next morning, but for some reason, I would hear this noise from the room above me. It sounded like someone dragging a table or chair across the floor as if they were rearranging their room.
At first, I thought nothing of it, but this continued every few minutes for about 2 hours. I finally got fed up and called the front desk, they sent Security to check it out, turns out there’s nobody in the room above. The noise continued after and I had no choice but to switch to another room.”
Why is the lift so full of people?
From former user: “Once I got into a lift from the top floor to head down. The lift stopped on the 4th floor, the door opened, saw people outside standing still, making no attempt to come in despite me being alone inside and there was room for them. The automatic lift door then closed and before it was completely shut, I heard someone outside said: “Why is the lift so full of people?”.
Head in the Closet
From user /u/voteforbetti31: “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 DC back in the 90s as a housekeeper/maid since 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.
Anyways, one day, a guest came, who will we refer to him as Mr. M because I don’t know his real name, and checked in to their most expensive suite. As usual, the manager told my mom to go 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 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 paid 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. Anyways, 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 resonating. At the moment of being a housekeeper, 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 scared 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 as a call girl/prostitute type person. I don’t know much more and 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.”
A lot of Screaming and Random Phone Calls
From a former user: 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 at 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.”
Funeral Workers Reveal The Strangest and Mysterious Cases they’ve Witnessed
Ghost encounter — But she was a real headless lady
From the user /u/Army_of_Wombles: “Not inexplicable, but scary at the time! Worked as a waiter in an old hotel in Scotland that was reputedly haunted. The restaurant, and the part with the bedrooms, were separate buildings and all ground-floor (this is important). One afternoon we were expecting two elderly sisters to check in for a few nights – friends of the owner and regular guests, though being a new-ish member of staff I’d not met them yet. Well, one of the other waiters mentioned that they’d arrived, and would I go put a bottle of claret in their room while they were being helped out of the car?
No worries – picked a bottle, opened it, got two glasses and a tray, and nipped out the back of the restaurant, across the courtyard, past the two old ladies getting out of their car, and into the main building. Turned into the corridor leading to the bedrooms. Now, at this point I knew there was nobody else in the building – no other guests and only the owner and a couple of waiters were around between lunch and dinner service. I’d also been told the stories about the hotel ‘ghost’ – apparently an old woman in grey who’d hanged herself when it was a coaching inn. I was therefore perturbed to see a headless figure, in faded Victorian dress, shuffling away from me down the corridor in complete silence.
W. T. F?
To my credit, I didn’t actually drop the tray, but I did eventually emit a noise resembling a Harrier jump jet winding up, causing the figure to turn around…
One of the two old ladies, suffering from severe osteoporosis that caused her head to be below her shoulders, had been let in the side door ahead of me so she didn’t have to walk so far…felt like an idiot. I told her I’d tripped with the tray but saved it, not sure she believed me. I mistook degenerative bone disease for a spooky ghost, consequently startled an old lady.”
Was he alone?
From user /u/Loco_Mojo: “I’ve come to realize (through my 2 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 didnt 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 hotel’s 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 go look in the man’s room. He had rearranged all of the furniture and 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 wasn’t the fact that 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.”
What would that word be?
From a former user: “I had a guy walk up to me with bags for shoes and a hospital gown. Introduced himself as “Nothing, Absolutely Nothing” and that he needed a computer to spread the word of His return and coming retribution. Luckily my Loss Prevention guy was nearby.
Had to take a week off to work to deal
From user /u/ArtyTheAntelope: “Hotel bartender here. I 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 well 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 rooms 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 mans 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 over dosing 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 everything was like nothing happened.”
Footprints on the Ceiling
From user /u/Fluxywild: “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 footprints on the ceiling, which is at least 10 feet high. Bare. No shoes or slippers, and only in the middle and nowhere 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.”
Everyone thought he was a homeless guy until…
From user /u/thedoormatt9: I 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 businessman 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.
Might be a Prank but Still Spooky
From user u/frabbo: “Not happened to me but my cousin worked in a pretty popular hotel in New York City. There was a particular room that was always unoccupied and the hotel workers would use it to take naps. My cousin threw her coat on a chair that was facing the window and took a nap in the bed. She said she felt the weight of someone getting into the bed and she immediately sat up. There was no one in sight, but her coat was now on the bed and the chair that had been facing the window was now facing the bed.”
Michael and His Thongs
From user /u/Kog0ruhn: “I’m an assistant manager at a fairly nice hotel in a little tourist town.
Then, we ended up with a string of weird things started happening. 47 Mile Man. Drunk guy who cut his throat on the pool door. Back alley abortion. Major drug bust. The weird cult-minded people who got mad at me for calling their cat fat. The angry Russian man with the vicious dog and the “keeper” nobody ever acknowledged.
Then the story about the thongs.
There was a guy named Michael, a childhood friend of one of the housekeepers back when I was a housekeeper myself. He was kind of sketchy, flirty, kept following us around every now and then. Occasionally he’d rent a room using his friend’s employee discount and would just stay for an extended period of time.
This was one of those times.
He was staying around for a week or so, and I was the person assigned to do his stayover. I went to go knock on his door, but before my fist could even connect, I just hear this godawful howling and cursing from the other side. Just a string of “fuck you”s from here to the end of time, stuff about how much he hated whoever he was talking to, crap about how it wasn’t their job to judge him. Loud enough that people are filing out of their rooms to see what the ruckus is, and I’m just standing there with my hand outstretched staring wide-eyed at the door.
Then silence.
I called the manager at the front and said I was scared to knock on the door, because the guy was batshit. He told me to forget it, but if he started yelling again to call down to the desk and he’d take care of it.
Fine, okay.
Then, he started yelling again. I call the manager. He sends up the guy’s friend–a dude named Will–from his break to go talk to him. Will goes in and vanishes for forty-five minutes, then comes back out and calmly informs me it’s no big deal. Michael was just talking to his mom. Also, he needs sheets.
And this went on for a while. Antics include him drunkenly kicking a garbage bag down the hallway and leaving a trail of soggy Corn Pops in his wake, outright running from the desk attendant when she asked what his girlfriend’s name was (apparently, he didn’t know who she was), and bringing in these dudes who basically stalked the head housekeeper in hopes of finding out if she was DTF (she wasn’t). We were all more than a little thankful when he left.
Except we had to clean his room. Or rather, Kristy–the housekeeper who’d been around the longest–had to clean his room. I watched her walk in, then I watched her walk out with this bewildered and horrified look on her face. She was always a little dramatic, so I just asked what was going on.
“They’re everywhere.”
“What is?”
“Thongs.“
Lo and behold, the room was trashed. Blood and shit were smeared across the walls like he was trying to paint a mural with human filth, garbage bags practically exploded over the room, the bathtub and sink as black as night. But, more baffling, there were thongs.
And indeed, they were everywhere. Strewn about like confetti, unused and freshly clean. They were stuffed under the bed, hanging out of drawers, rammed behind the furniture, tied around the pipes. They were heaped in corners, they were laid out in trails, they were crammed in the sink, they were practically coming out of our ears.
Just… women’s thongs.
Michael ended up fleeing altogether without paying the bill, so we never had the opportunity to ask him why the fucking hell he had so many thongs. Or whose blood was on the wall. Or why he’d decided to make a rainbow of shit in the bathroom. We’ve not heard from him since, and then his friend just went AWOL and stopped showing up to work.
I swear, though. Kristy seemed to get this look in her eyes whenever anyone mentioned underwear after that. Like it was a trigger word. Probably didn’t help she found a displaced thong tucked away neatly on her cart a week later. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody so bloodthirsty in my life”
Not Unexplainable but pretty scary
From user /u/CDC_: “I worked at a hotel in Florida, a fairly upscale hotel. One day after a particularly bad string of thunderstorms, I went to go clean the pool. They had an actual pool guy they called from time to time, but only when the pool was really bad. When I first looked at the pool I brought the manager outside and told him I felt like it was out of my scope. The pool was covered in debris. Leaves, plants, mulch, dirt, etc…
He told me he thought I could handle it, though, so I was like, whatever, guess I’m scooping this fucking thing out with a net all day. So I start scooping, probably had been scooping for an hour or so, this 10/10 knockout girl comes to the pool in her string bikini and asks if its swimmable. I kind of look at her like she’s retarded and ask her if she really wants to swim in that, she just kind of shrugged and decided to lie down in a sun chair till I finished scooping the pool out. Which is fine by me, great scenery while I work.
We started making small talk and finally, she said she just wanted to dip her legs in. She does so and after about 10-15 seconds I notice some weird looking things swimming around in the pool, and they’re coming RIGHT FOR HER FEET. I scream “YO GET UP… GET OUT… GET OUT NOW.” She looks at me like I’m crazy, but gets out. I point and she looks down and about… oh.. 10-12 of THESE FUCKERS are now gathering near the wall where she was soaking her feet. She freaked out and ran off, and I assume went back to her room and had a nervous breakdown.
I went and got the manager, told him to either call the pool guy, or do it himself, because I wasn’t working with these monsters.
He actually opened one of the pool filters and came across about 15 or so MORE of them in the filter. It was a sight you don’t really unsee.”
Pentagram beneath the carpet
From a Former user“One of the hotels I work at was changing their room layouts, and when they moved a bed, they found a red pentagram painted (I hope) on the carpet beneath it. Nobody could figure out how long it could’ve been there. Not too crazy, really, b[u]t a little weird.”
Every creepy thing isn’t dangerous
From user u/bobfootm: “Police and detectives were called in for a horrible crime scene in a suite of a hotel for which I was Front Office Manager. There appeared to dried blood all over the suite; on the bed, the floor, the walls, lamps. Forensics fairly quickly determined that it was all chocolate.”
Not so responsible
From user u/JumpingBean12: “My cousin worked through college by cleaning rooms. One day, he walked into a room and there was blood all over the bed and all over the bed. He called for management. Some women had a miscarriage in the room and left it that way.
Savannah, one of the most haunted places in the USA
From user, u/neonchinchilla: “I worked at a BnB in Savannah, GA for a while when I wasn’t in school. It was downtown so the building was a really old house that had been converted and updated a bit.
It had 4 floors including the “garden level” (slightly below street level but the effective 1st floor is the 2nd) and not surprisingly the higher up in the house you got the nicer the rooms.
As with most of Savannah, most of the buildings are supposedly f***ing haunted as s*it. Like filled to the brim, ghostbuster backpack level full of ghosts just all over the place. This BnB wasn’t the worst for stories, there was an old condemned house not far away that the parents starved their daughter in the top bedroom that was pretty creepy but I don’t think any murder went down in ours.
I do remember on the top floor landing if it was really quiet you could hear what sounded like children running around and sometimes you’d hear whispers.
I remember a woman I knew worked in another BnB and she claims she opened the dumbwaiter and there was a human torso standing in there. She shut it and it was gone when she reopened.”
Now that you’ve read about Scariest thing hotel worker ever experienced, you might also like True stories of abductions by the victims, and The creepiest 911 calls.
