Chuck E. Cheese is perhaps the most well-known indoor children’s entertainment in North America. The gaming areas, the playful rat, and delicious food all in one place is every kid’s dream. However, every happy place does have its … well, weird and horrifying side. Here are some of the most terrifying Chuck E. Cheese stories as told by both employees and customers.
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
Working as a night watch officer, I had an experience where these sounds were coming from the arcade area, and I was sure someone was breaking in, the life sized robotic Chucky Cheese was moving around on the floor staring at the security camera…. 3 Days later, I quit the job and have never even went near one of those places again… Even if there is a huge shopping mall with Chuck E Cheese in the lot. Nope not going to that mall, looks like I’m driving to the one next state over.
[deletd]
I work there now as a gameroom technician and in the kitchen, but whenever its really busy I’ll just go wherever they’re short on hands. This one night I had gotten complaints from the guests about the male bathroom having a smell. I’m used to kids goofing around and defecating in urinals so I expected it would be that at worst. No. This was the first time I had died. There was poop on the floor, on the toilet seat, behind the toilet, on the walls. AND ON THE CEILING. I’ll never understand what happened and I don’t want to.
Anibalosityyy
Where do I start… I guess the best one was a customer who had lost touch with reality and fallen in love with the animatronic Helen (the bird) that was on our stage. He brought her an engagement ring at one point, and was banned from the establishment.
There was also the time my friend was in the mouse suit, forgot to strap the head on, and had it fall off in front of a birthday party of children. There was a lot of screaming and crying involved.
Pickwick5
This one time I was working security at Chuck’s. Apparently some employees thought it would be funny to dress up as the mascots and run around within view of the security cameras. It happened in the evening, and since there went weren’t many people there, it was as absolutely terrifying.
TheWorstG8mer
I was 5 years old and was at a classmates birthday party, I was just getting over being sick, so I was happy to be able to be at a fine establishment like Chuck E. Cheeses. I eat pizza and have a good time with my friends. At the end of the night, when we’re being rounded up by our parents, two other kids and I are still running around. I’m chasing a friend and I stop to catch my breath and I cough, but I don’t need to cough, I need to throw up. I do, then I wipe the sick off of my jacket and continue to chase my friend, I get sick as I’m running, just a wild crazy trail of throw up every where. My dad ends up getting a hold me, and takes me to clean up in the restroom. When we go back out to ground zero, it’s just a mess. And there is one lonely employee, with a broom and sawdust. “Aw my god!” Is all he could say at the mess I had made. Poor guy, I would have quit after that.
VinosD
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Worked there for 9 months, started as the game attendant and ended up in the kitchen. I’ve seen some serious stuff…
Cleaning the bathrooms one night. I’m in the women’s bathroom and find a piece of poop LITERALLY the size of a Pringles can in the bowl, unable to be flushed, like this thing was disgusting. I had to break it with a toilet brush for it to go down.
Sewage lines backed up in the boys bathroom, 2 inches of nasty water we had to clean with mops and napkins.
A little girl decided she would go to the top of the slide and take a dump, AS SHE SLID DOWN THE SLIDE. 6’2” me had to climb up and clean a poop skid mark all the way down this slide.
Redhead_exterminator
My mother worked in the character suits (Chuck E. Cheese, Mr. Munch and Pasqually) as a teenager for her first job:
– When working as Chuck, children would routinely jump up and grab on to the costume’s nose and hang there, forcing her to support all their body weight on her neck and shoulders. You couldn’t just shove the kid either, as that was against policy, so other staff ended up walking with her to keep kids in line.
– She made an appearance at an event related to Gasparilla as Chuck. Being Florida, it was blazing hot and humid. The crowd, who were all drunk, decided to help Chuck stay hydrated by pouring beer into the mouth of the suit, which did little more than pour beer on the head of my short mother.
SpenceTheChef
Two in fact:
I worked there in 2003. I was 15.
First, I was in the costume and this kid keeps going “you’re not the real Chuckie! You’re not the real Chuckie!” He gets so involved in proving to the world that there’s a person in there that he starts trying to pull off the costume. I try to just ignore the kid so I walk over to the game area. All of sudden, the kid punches the head of the costume and the rat’s nose flies right off. I immediately covered up the missing nose, got a coworker to find it, and changed out of the costume. It was pretty great when my manager told me I personally had to kick the kid out of the place.
Second, I was sent up to clean the crawlspace one night with a bottle of pledge and a rag. When I got up there there was no less than two full poops and 3 piles of vomit. I quit that evening.
Wudaokau
I worked at CEC for 2 years. Absolutely loved it. The common thing I got was, “how do you deal with all those bratty kids?” The answer is simple: the kids are NOT the problem. It’s the adults.
So I started during the end of the summer. When 4th quarter came around, our busiest time of year, I volunteered to cover a friend’s shift. It was my first weekend in the 4th quarter as a birthday party host. We are at full capacity with a wait. It’s fucking packed. At cake time, CEC hosts will do a song and dance. During this delightful performance I see a rather large woman punch another woman in the face. All of a sudden, the entire balcony is involved in this fight. Someone jumps ontop of the balcony ledge and does a fucking wrestling move on someone else (all adults). Of course there are kids around though, because it’s fucking cake time! Some of the people on the floor next to the balcony are getting hit but most everyone was able to walk away. Unfortunately, a little baby newborn ended up getting hit with something.
We only had one manager on duty and he called the cops quickly. It ended up taking several cops to break shit up. Everyone’s meals were comped. And ever since that incident 8 yrs ago, CEC hired county sheriffs to stand around as security from Thursday to Sunday every week.
cainelady
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I worked at Chuck E. Cheeses and one day I was asked to go “wake up Chuckie” for a birthday party (this meant I had to go put on the suit and take some pictures and dance). So I go to put on the suit and I come out to the party and the kids are so excited to see me. I did my little dance and the groups of kids wanted a picture with Chuckie. I had a cold and I wasn’t really feeling well, and the inside of that Chuckie suit is hot. So, I passed out mid picture and dropped to the floor. When I came to ALL the kids were crying hysterically and yelling “Chuckie’s dead!!!!” My coworker dragged me by my shoulders into the back room. I ruined 3 birthday parties that day.
wowicangetsexualtoo
So I worked at Chuck E. Cheese for about a year when I was about 16 or 17. One of my favorite things to do while employed there was to toss a few tokens in the urinal while taking a piss. Now, as a grown man, the amount of piss soaked cash would have to be pretty high to have me go reaching into a public urinal for it. But kids are super gross, so every time I went back to the restroom the tokens had “mysteriously” vanished.
It was pretty terrible working there and the kids were a nightmare but I always took a little bit of solace in the fact that somewhere, out there, among the video games and ball pits, there was some greasy little kid eating pizza with piss token hands.
Paulemeow
I worked as a “showgirl” and occasionally had to wear the chuck suit. One day we were short staffed and I didn’t have another staff member to walk me around. I got jumped on by several kids but one rowdy one punched me in the face and it cut the skin that connects my lip to my gums. It has never healed. I was bleeding bad in the chuck suit and ran back to the closet to change out of it. I think I pushed the kid, too, but I can’t remember it hurt so bad. I quit that day.
cattlebro
When I was a teenager in the 90s, I worked at a Chuck E Cheese.
We had a “Days of Thunder” arcade game that was a large wooden booth built like a race car. I caught two teenagers having sex in it. Drunk people puked all over the place multiple times. People of all ages peed in the ball pit.
One time, a guy was screaming at a kid about skeeball tickets. He actually squared off to fight a 7 or 8 year old before me and another guy intervened his butt out the door. Over skeeball tickets for fake moustaches, and switchblade combs and such.
Boomerkuwanga
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I worked there for a whole year and I have plenty of stories.
Ok, so I was hired on as a pizza cook, and I usually worked weekends. As you’ve probably gathered, birthday parties happen almost exclusively on weekends, unless it’s summer. Anyway I’m working one night and I ask what the schedule for the parties is going to be like, and my general manager lays a doozie on me. We had three parties lined up all for the same time, two were average to small sized parties that maybe took about 5 pizzas each. Easy stuff. But then, this third party, well, party is not accurate, this invasion of people came in. I’m talking 35 kids, 78 adults to this mother-loving party. Those numbers will always be burned into my memory.
So on that day, I found out three things about them, they invited everyone they know to a party at Chuck E Cheese, they booked the party late, so no prep work can be done, and the one thing in the world that they love more than veggie combo pizza is BBQ CHICKEN PIZZA. They ordered 28 large veggie pizzas, somewhere around 30/35 large BBQ chickens, 16 med cheese pizzas just for the kids alone. That day I found out the two most tedious pizza types to make, just so happened to be the veggie combo and the BBQ chicken.
After the third large veggie pizza, my manager and I had to slice each vegetable because I wasn’t notified that the vegetable apocalypse was swinging through, and the BBQ chicken used up all the BBQ sauce and all our pizza skins that had been made for the WHOLE WEEK. It was hell, brother, we were forced into stretching medium skins into larges just to get the orders through. I still shudder at the thought of how horrible it felt to get so much done in such a short amount of time.
Chuck E. Cheese was the first job I ever had at the age of 16. I worked in the kitchen to start off but as everyone who has ever worked there knows, you have to be the mouse at some point.
Since I am about 6’4, the mouse suit with the head makes me about a 7 foot Chuck E. Kids were always just mesmorized when I would walk around in the suit because I was so tall. You can only see out of the eyes and through the mouse of the headpiece in the suit. However if you’re tall like me then you can’t see all the to the ground through the mouth. You can see down to your knees and that’s about it.
So one day we were having issues with the suit head where the strap wouldn’t latch around your chin. I’m trucking along acting goofy and a child running around the game room slams into my legs while I’m walking forward. I go flying face first, hit the ground, and my head comes tumbling off rolling down the floor of the game room. This is the old Chuck E. character so he has a tuxedo outfit, big shoes, etc. The back of the suit comes up high over your neck enough to where I looked decapitated to the little girl whom I tripped over. She’s in tears and starts screaming. Meanwhile, I’m struggling to get up so it probably looks like I’m having post decapitation convulsions.
Finally she calms down after we take her in the back with her parents and show her that a person gets in and out of a suit to play Chuck E. Probably damaged that poor kid for a while.
whorainy
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Worked there twenty years ago as a game technician. I’d get pulled out of my repair room to help understaffed areas, which I didn’t really mind much. They asked me to be the rat one time. I’m 6’7″, so everything that was supposed to be baggy was comfortable like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer goes to clown college. So I walk out there, over 7′ tall with the head on and wearing my own shoes since the suit ones are too small. Children start crying and running away. The poor kid who was there for his birthday shit himself. So they immediately pull me into the back room and get a guy from the kitchen to take over. They never asked me to do it again.
My second favorite story was the time the girl I was helping into the suit vomited in the head. So I take it from her and start carrying it outside to hose it off. Once again, the kids start crying. I guess I should have been aware that bringing the severed head of chuck e cheese across the floor could cause some panic in our young customers.
Then there was the time some father came in with every intention of kicking my butt because I gave his daughter nightmares. I remembered the girl was like four years old, and stopped me to say that her token was eaten by a game. So I explained to the dad and the GM that I had opened it up and the mechanism was clean, so I flicked her a credit and closed up. Then she said “haha I tricked you”, and I explained to her that lying isn’t right and what she did was basically stealing. I told her to enjoy the free game and to think first before doing something like that again. I got the dad to bring her in so I could explain she wasn’t in trouble and no one was mad, just to try to use better judgement next time. The dad went from angry to embarrassed, and I felt guilty for giving a little kid nightmares.
mlkelty
So, when I worked at Mr. Cheese’s establishment, I was delighted to get to partake in the honored tradition of ‘Being the mouse’. My mother ran a daycare out of our house for a lot of my childhood, so I enjoyed making kids laugh, and was pretty good at getting them to listen. I thought I’d be good at it.
Everyone has talked about the costume, I’m sure. Smells like the inside of a cast. Moving on.
One day I am the rat, and this kid… this kid is just standing, looking at me. He’s somewhere in the 8-10 age range, and he looks real nervous to be around me. My heart bleeds, someone is scared of the rat, time to cheer this kid up. I do the whole shy act, wave, all that. The kid starts laughing, opening up. I put my hand out for a high-five, he returns, all is right and good with the world.
“Chuck E.?”I hear him murmur. “Can I have a hug?”
I responded with an over-exaggerated nod and open my arms. This kid opens his arm, takes two steps close to me, and suddenly screams, “NOW!”
He dodges out of the way, just in time to miss his friend’s fist punching me square in the stones.
As the first shockwave hit me, I realized that I had been had by psychopath children. I ran into the kitchen, into the freezer, and told my boss what happened. I have no idea if he kicked them out of the store. I was too busy icing my balls through a costume of a mouse wearing a backwards baseball cap.
They got me, god damn it.
They got me.
[deleted]
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Worked at Chuck E. Cheese when I was in high school. Here are a couple of things that happened when I was there.
1) The longer a pizza sat in the window waiting for table delivery the less toppings it had when it got to the table.
2) The costume room was the only place without security cameras. It became a sex den for horny high school kids.
3) A Chuck E Cheese sex tape was filmed in said sex den. (The four participants were wearing nothing but the costume heads).
4) On nights when we threw out the raw pizza dough we would have pizza dough fights after we closed. A ball of raw dough to the gut hurts like hell.
Another short story:
So there were a number of gay guys who worked there with me. I got along with them and everything was great. Now one of the gay guys who worked there was also a cross dresser (At the time I was unaware of this fact). One night I walk into the managers office and see the back side of a woman in a tight pencil skirt. The ass in this skirt was easily the best ass 16 year old me had seen in person. The owner of the ass turns around and I have some on the best tits 16 year old me had ever seen staring me In the face. I then hear a horrifying deep voice greet me. My draw dropped and my eyes dart back and forth from face to tits as I put two and two together. As I relize this “woman” is actually my cross dressing coworker he grabs my hands and plants them firmly on his “breast”. They felt great. THE END.
bryguy2289
I worked there for a few months before getting a better job at a private school day care. Honestly, the kids really didn’t bother me all that much. The coworkers were awful. No one cared about their job and everyone was overworked. I legitimately wanted to make kids’ birthday parties super fun and give them attention and joke around with them but instead I had to be running to the back to clean up the salad bar, run pizzas to other tables, let someone know that they needed to fix a game, etc. I understand multitasking but they either needed to prioritize giving attention to the birthday parties or taking care of all the other stuff, because it’s next to impossible to do both (especially when you work two birthday parties simultaneously).
The worst, though, was that one of the managers apparently stole money and tried to pin it on me. I was new, I didn’t know I was supposed to count my register by myself, he told me he was supposed to do it. He stole money from it and when the other managers confronted him he acted like he had no idea where the money was but it must be the new girl. Fortunately they didn’t believe him (it was a pattern for him) and he was fired. He did not go easily. They had a security watch out for him for a couple of days because he tried to vandalize the place and stuff.
swimming_upstream94
Really the worst part was wearing the Chuck E. suit. It was so hot that you are dripping sweat and there is nothing you can do about it. Then the suit smells like every other person who wore the suit and dripped all up in it. You get hit in the nuts on a regular basis. Kids hit, kick, pull on you, or cry. I always thought it would be the best part of the job. It sucks.
Anonymous
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