Hotels staff deal with all sorts of interesting people who come to them for a lot of different reasons. Unfortunately, these people aren't always respectful. In fact, some of the guests are so disrespectful hazmat teams need to be called to clean up in their wake. The hotel employees in the following stories share their worst guest experiences.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
She’s Not His Biggest Fan

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“I worked for a Best Western for about four years. One night a woman showed up in a huge rush. The town I worked in was bustling and we only had one room left at $189.99 a night. Normally people make a huge deal out of this price, and it takes a while to sell the last room. Anyway, this woman showed up and immediately took the room no questions asked. I noticed something strange about her but quickly forgot about it. About an hour later she showed up at the front desk asking for another key for her room. I asked her to show an I.D. (which is company policy and I had to do every time I created a new key). She responded, ‘I was just in here, just give me my freaking key.’ I told her that I had to take an I.D. etc. She suddenly freaked out, trembling with rage, and started screaming at me, ‘GIVE ME THE KEY NOW!’ I explained again that I needed an I.D. She jumped up on the counter on her knees and told me she would break my nose if I didn’t give her the key. I backed up and told her to get off the counter, or I would call the cops. She then got off of the counter, pulled out her I.D. and threw it at me. After looking at it, I created a new key and handed it to her. On her way out the door, she began mumbling under her breath and again called me names. At this point, I was over it and warned her that if I had any more troubles, I would call the police. She then turned around, looked me in the eyes and pointed her hand at my face like a weapon, fake pulled the trigger and said, ‘I’ll call the cops,’ in the creepiest way ever.
So she goes back to her room, and I was left at the front desk confused as all get out. After talking to my coworkers I decided to have her evicted and called the police. They showed up and went down to her room. About 10 minutes later the police came to the front desk, saying that she was crazy, locked herself in her room, and swore, ‘She had a sword and another weapon, and anyone who came into the room was dead.’
Fast forward an hour and every cop in the town was at my hotel trying to get this woman out, every time they would open the door, she would swing a machete out at the police. They finally tackled her into the tv stand and cuffed her.
After all this, they said she had been planning on killing me with the machete or the CROSSBOW they found in her room, and she was happy they showed up to stop her.”
Like A Sailor On Shore Leave

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“I was working the front desk at a Holiday Inn, and a group of six sailors on Shore Leave checked in for the night. Usually, these kinds of groups are rowdy, so I told them, ‘Look, guys, I know what’s up with these Shore Leave groups, so I put you in a room far from the other guests, but you still have to keep it down.’ They assured me very respectfully that they would be good that night.
About an hour later, the room called down and asked us to punch up a card for a woman who would be arriving. Shortly after, a tall, leggy woman in a trench coat walked up, requested a key, thanked me politely, and entered the elevator.
Another hour later, the woman called down and asked for six razors and six towels. There is no noise in the background whatsoever.
Another hour hence, the woman in the trench coat leaves, and it was then I noticed her shiny black dominatrix boots. Judging from the housekeeping report the next day, she/they tied each other up, shaved their nether regions, and left a big mess in the sink. ‘Very good’ indeed.”
This Isn’t Good

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“A father and son got into a fistfight. I guess you could say they caught me. The son was an offensive lineman for the college team and was pushing 300 pounds. The dad was close to 350. They came off the elevator into the lobby covered in blood. The son had a broken nose and was in his underwear. The dad kept saying, ‘This isn’t good!’ Not to me or to the guests, but to himself I think.
I was at the front desk, alone, with a full house (150 rooms). I called out, ‘You want the cops?’
It was obvious the dad did. He just repeated, ‘This isn’t good!’
Then the son realized I was there and came to the desk. He looked at me crazy the way a pro wrestler would and said, ‘I’m gonna kill this guy (his dad) today, and if you call the cops I’ll kill you too.’ There were about 30 people across the lobby, who were now transfixed on the situation. I was like this lunatic clicked-over, acting more on instinct than properly formed thoughts. I went to the back to call the cops. The dude proceeds to destroy our breakfast area. He started launching tables and chairs across the lobby. Luckily, the police station was just down the street. The cops told him to freeze; he was like forget that, then they dropped him with like a ten-second stream of pepper spray. There was blood everywhere, like puddles of blood. I cleaned it while filing a police report and checking in new guests. They were pretty confused. All the managers rushed there to assess the damage. Apparently what happened was the son awoke from a nap in a code-red ‘roid rage, punched his mom and tried to kill his dad. The room it started in was covered in more blood than the lobby because he punched the microwave. He obliterated the room, the hallway to the elevator, and the lobby. We had the dad’s credit on file, which paid about $4,500 in damages. He also had to pay for all the guest’s rooms who witnessed this and wanted their money back. The kid got kicked out of school and like six months in jail.”
Room 103

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“I worked in a hotel for five years, and my first year there, I saw 90 percent of the crazy I would ever encounter in that place.
First, I was working the morning shift and was knocking on guest doors to make sure everyone had checked out. I got to one room, knocked, got no answer, so I walked in and was immediately assaulted by a horrendous smell. It was like nothing I had ever experience before in my life: a sick, cloying smell, so thick it felt like tangible wetness in the air that settled on your skin and tongue. I gag just thinking about it now. It didn’t take long to find the source of the smell. With my face half buried in my sleeve, I walked in expecting to find a dead body. However, I did not; instead, I found what looked like a body, only liquified, on the bed. Apparently, someone had given birth (to Cthulhu) in one of our rooms. I immediately backed out of the room and called my GM. In the end, we had to call the police for damages to property, and because we half expected to find a fetus stuck in the plumbing somewhere. The room was sealed off, and we had to get a company to come in with their Hazmat suits to clean it up. This was room 103.
Second, I got a call one night from a guest in a room; she wanted to be connected to the police department emergency line. I obliged and made a note in my logbook, hoping whatever it was (probably domestic violence), it wouldn’t be too much of a fuss. Sadly, this was not the case. Not five minutes after I connected the guest, a firetruck, several police cars, and an ambulance arrived. After all the hubbub in the hallway, the guest was finally wheeled out on a stretcher, and 30 minutes later, the police left. I went to see the room, after what I had been told by the police, I just wanted to SEE it. Call it morbid curiosity. Apparently, the woman had tried to commit suicide. She filled the bath, slit her wrists, and waited to die. But, halfway through, she got scared, freaked out, ran around the room trying to staunch her wounds, and (from the look of the room) apparently wiped her bloody wrists all over everything within reach. It looked like a murder scene straight from a movie. The bathtub was full to overflowing with blood-red water; there were blood smears all over the bed, blankets, walls, tv, blood pools on the carpet. It amazed me how much blood this woman lost. Once again, had to get Hazmat crew in, room was sealed off for a while. I never found out if she survived. Again, room 103.
For the rest of my employment at that hotel, I always put the guests who were rude right from the get-go into room 103. I know what has happened in that room. I’ve seen the horror that those walls have witnessed. And even though the guests won’t ever know these things, it is satisfying enough for me to know it, know they are snuggling down in a bed that was the scene of both a suicide and a particularly gruesome and disgusting birth. “
An Epic Tale Of Two Families

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“I have had the benefit and misfortune of working at a small hotel in the lovely state of California. As long as you don’t live in Modesto or Landers or some terrible desert wasteland you probably have a few of our hotels in your town. Most likely the guys behind the front desk are just like us. Everyone gets the patented ‘front desk’ smile when they come in, and leaves thinking we are happy worker bees. But soylent green is people, you should know better. Underneath that is a guy working with some of the most bizarre people on this Earth. This is the first of many stories of our journies through the minds of our guests.
One fine Saturday I was working in the late afternoon, trolling the internet and wishing that I was somewhere else. The first sign of trouble, like a Fel voice on the wind, was the 300 foot long RV that pulled up into our parking lot and parked horizontally across 15 parking spots. Have you ever seen a diagram where they compare whales or giant squid to rows of busses end to end? Well if I were an artist I would draw a picture like that to express the gargantuan nature of the RV. It had gold rims. It was a giant squid schoolbus RV monster with gold rims. Also, a horse painted on the side. A giant horse. I don’t know if it was a disguise to fool people on the road or an homage to the horse God Poseidon (yes he’s also the God of horses), but this was a giant gold rimmed horse monster.
It proceeded to clown car out about 25 Armenians, all resplendent in their gold chains, greasy hair and woolen v necks out of its innards like a sow giving birth. One of them, who I will call Horse Lord for his presumed ownership of the RV, approached me before the rest of the group. ‘I have four reservations, here is my credit card and I.D. Also I would like to pay for all of them as a present to the other man’s family. We are two different families traveling here for a wedding, and my son is marrying his daughter. Would it be possible to pay for the rooms now and not tell them the price or show them receipts?’ Now, this is all standard to anyone that’s worked at a hotel, and I did as the man requested and booked him in and had him sign everything. This story would seem like a drawn-out tale of a colony living in an RV ship, but here is where things got interesting. The father of the other family approached the front desk about five minutes later. I will call him V King as he had the daughter. Surprisingly he explained that he wanted to pay for it as a gift to Horse Lord and his family, and didn’t want them to see any receipts. When I informed him the rooms were taken care of, things kicked off.
Have you ever seen hyenas fight? That was mild compared to this. Suddenly 25 Armenians were screaming in foreign tongues in the lobby trying to establish dominance or proof of nobility or something. Horse Lord and V King were both trying to out gesture each other in an old-fashioned dance-off, throwing their arms up and out like someone possessed by the holy spirit. Meanwhile, while this clan blood war was being waged, both of them were rapid-fire yelling at me to A) Take their card and not their ancient opponent’s. B) Have never taken their card or not taken their mortal foes card. C) Put shag carpet in my house and buy a Mercedes.
The level of anger and distress exhibited by this group was something magnificent in its display of a total lack of human etiquette. Luckily for me, no one was in the hotel lobby, and I thought I could calm them down and get them to figure things out. This was not the first time I came to realize I am an idiot.
Fast forward to an hour later. The volcano of Armenian hate is still going strong. Both families have divided into opposite sides of the lobby, and are still yelling the same argument. My efforts to tell them to figure things out have fallen on deaf ears. Terrified that their yelling will use up all of earth’s oxygen and kill life as we know it, I decide to act. I tell them that if they want to change things they can talk to my manager, who isn’t here, tomorrow morning. I bluff, saying the system has already accepted Horse Lord’s card and he signed for the rooms, and that’s how things will stay unless V King can convince Horse Lord and my manger otherwise. They grumble for another 10 minutes and then go to their rooms. I believe that I have won, but the game is not over. An hour later V King sneaks back into the lobby wearing, I kid you not, all black. Its 6 p.m. and well lit, to this day I have no idea if he thought wearing black, would allow his idea to sneak past my defenses. He unfurls a wad of cash and demands I allow him to pay cash for the rooms right now, behind the back of Horse Lord. I get him to go back to his room by stonewalling him, pretending to be both blind and deaf to his angry cries.
Horse Lord smells the blood in the air, on a family trip to the hot tub I hear him say he will grab the towels. Fully clothed in a suit, he slinks into the lobby to make sure that V King has not succeeded. He questions me intently, wanting to see if V King has tricked him. More stonewalling is made, my hair goes grey, and I lose partial feeling in the left side of my face. Horse Lord finally retires. I have won, and I have another five hours on my shift.
Perhaps most importantly, in closing this story, is to point out that they reserved four rooms, yet SLEPT IN THE GIANT SPACESHIP HORSE RV. I can only theorize that they needed to recharge and slave over their false God long through the night, or that my actions caused a wedding to break up and a 25-man blood feud to develop.
I like to think both are true.”
Keeping Housekeeping Busy

“At a hotel, I used to work at (I still work at hotels) we got a lot of business traffic, as in we had a lot of people who stayed on business. We had a regular who we’ll call ‘Carl.’ Carl was a super nice guy, but kept to himself and stayed with us about four days out of the week. One day while my boss was working, guests in the room directly below him complained of a major water leak. We went upstairs into Carl’s room to see if there was a problem. There was.
He had somehow completely shattered the toilet. He was inebriated out of his mind and had adult mags all over the room. He was by himself, and the toilet was shattered. They couldn’t explain it. The water leaking was massive, and we had to move all guests below him out of the way and do massive repairs on the hotel from the amount of water damage that occurred. The next morning when he came in to pay the damages off and properly check out of the room (he was staying overnight at the police station) was a very awkward one.
Another time, a group of six doctors and lawyers, three of them guys and three of them women, who all knew each other since high school and were in town for a reunion, got kicked out of the hotel for being too loud and scaring other guests. The inebriation that ensued was hilarious.
A man used our public guest computer to look up illegal stuff involving kids and then leave. We got him arrested, but we think he didn’t stay in jail because he wasn’t looking at the stuff at the time of his arrest.
We also busted a 20 something-year-old guy and the party he was holding in his room because it was filled with 16-year-olds who were on illegal substances and trashing the room. Everybody got lined up in the lobby (this was like 2 a.m., nobody else was up since it’s on a quiet edge of town) while their parents were called and took them home one by one. The man was berated the entire time they stood there.”
Never A Dull Moment

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“We had a group of high schoolers who rented a room to throw a party. The police were called, and they vacated the room. Later that night we found a kid from the party with his hands and feet tied with a phone cord, hopping down the hallway to try to get home.
We also had two kids who got bored, bought rubbers, squirted lotion in them, and draped them over every guest-room doorknob in the hallway, as a surprise for the guests coming back to their room.
As well, a swinger group that rented out a couple of floors and left the usual assortment of toys and bondage gear in all the rooms. One of the housekeepers was convinced they were Amish because of the whip she found ‘for their horse.’
In addition, we had a group of modern-day gypsies that stayed with the hotel for 30 days, and then stopped paying and refused to leave because they were now residents (and they were right).
One night, there was a noise complaint of a party in a hallway, and we went up to find a party going on in the hallway, complete with a band.
That same night, we went into the atrium to find a group of guests walking out the door with one of our couches, and then when they saw us, they reversed direction and told us that they had caught somebody stealing it and they were putting it back.
There are probably more I can’t think of right now.”
Busted

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“I delivered room service to a corporate guest staying in a room with one bed in it. When I knocked on the door, a mid-50s to 60-year-old man answered the door and let me in. When I walked into the room, there was another similarly aged man, at least shirtless and under the covers on the bed, and I could tell that he was as alarmed to see me as I was to see him. The guy not in the bed was cool as a cucumber, but everyone was aware of the situation. So I had to do my job and open the bottle and pour these gents a couple of glasses, and trying not to stare at anything I started looking around the room and noticed that the guy in the bed had a wedding ring going on. Now I live in Canada, so two old men spending the night in a room together and being married to each other is realistic and a-okay, but the guy in the bed looked so rattled, and I got the feeling at least one of those men were married to a woman. Awkward stuff.”
A BIG Misunderstanding

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“I’ve been in hotels for more years than I care to think about and one incident always sticks out. I was working the third shift surfing the net and just killing time when I get a phone call from the coach of a girls sports team. The girls were around 14 years old, I’d guess.
Now groups of kids with multiple rooms usually prop their doors open (bad idea), so they can visit amongst each other throughout the night. Well apparently this one room hadn’t bothered to close their door yet, and some guy had walked into their room, entered the bathroom that a girl was in and then ran off down the hall to the stairwell when the girls saw him and started screaming.
So the coach was furious that some child assaulter was running around the hotel and I was a little shocked myself but ran down to the hallway to see if I could catch this guy. As I hit the stairwell, the first thing I saw on the landing in front of the first set of stairs was a pair of hairy man legs with footed pajamas bunched up around his ankles. Uh Oh! I look up farther as I come up this guy was in his 40s or 50s wearing a matching Mickey Mouse pajama top – obviously intellectually disabled. He was just kind of huddled in the landing of the stairwell terrified and rightly so for before I could figure out much besides that the guy had the mind of a 4-year-old, the coach and a few of the chaperones come into the stairwell from upstairs. Now I’ve never seen a lynching but I’m pretty sure that’s what I prevented with some fast talking (cops were already en route) because the coach went nuts when he saw this naked old guy with his flag flying out (he assumed that’s how he went into the room, so I can’t blame him). I had to restrain him until I could convince the other chaperones to talk him down from beating this guy. After that, I got him to back off a flight of stairs and got to work figuring out wth happened. The stranger like I mentioned was on a 4-year-old thinking level, and it took me about 3 minutes to get his first name and some possible names of anyone who was with him.
This guy’s name was Charlie, and that’s all he knew besides that he was looking for a bathroom and didn’t find one until he saw the girl’s room. When they started screaming he peed himself in fright and ran away to the stairwell, where he then managed to pull down his PJs because they were wet and cold. He wouldn’t pull them up either and I wasn’t going to do it for him so I got him a blanket and took him to the lobby where the team’s leaders stared hate at him from the glass windows overlooking the lobby. About the time the police got there I had pieced together who his caretaker was and that she had a room there. She came to the lobby right about the time the cops had figured out that he didn’t expose himself to the girls so they released him to her custody.”
That Was Unexpected

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“A few years ago I dated a girl that worked the night shift at a Hampton Inn. Her shift started at 11 pm and went through to 7 am. One night she asked me to stay with her on a shift, and later we could stay in an empty room. Sounded good.
About 2 a.m. comes around, and she’s at the front putting in the wake-up calls for the guests, and I’m sitting in the back office, just behind the front desk in a chair, leaned back, about to fall asleep. There’s a hallway down to my left that opens up to the outside, and another door that leads into the laundry room.
I hear a jingle, and the door opens, I’m confused because everyone should be asleep. In walks a guy in a ski-mask and boots, and a dark camo jacket. I pivot slowly in my chair, still leaned back, and raise my eyebrows at him like you are unexpected.
The guy sees me, pauses dead still for a second, like freeze-frame, and then walks right back out the door. I get up and immediately walk to the door and open it to see where he goes, he’s gone.
My girlfriend gets done with the wake-up calls and comes back; I’m sitting down again, heart rate slightly higher than it was before.
I said, ‘Uhm, a guy in a ski mask and camo just came through that door, I think you should call the police.’
Naturally, she starts losing it. Cops came, never found the guy, turns out that lock was broken, and I guess he anticipated her being alone all night.”