“I’ve been in hotels where a bed platform is not used. I have found a bra, unopened candy, worthless Ecuadorian currency, sock, etc.”
What Strange Items Have You Found In Hotel Rooms? A Chain Saw? A Corpse?
The sentence you just read was posted by derek — who is a reader of The Gate — in response to this article pertaining to guests rearranging furniture in a hotel room.
Curious about what strange items people have found in the rooms of hotel and resort properties, I then turned to FlyerTalk. For example, FlyerTalk member rc408 found an extra long lighter and a crack pipe at a very cheap motel property years ago. After breaking it, rc408 flushed it.
Found items which previous guests left behind in a hotel room are not the only thing which may be considered bewildering. Sometimes the places where the items are found can be just as peculiar.
“I’m told by a friend who flies for FedEx that in hotels where crew often stay — the official hiding place is the ceiling panel directly above the toilet”, according to FlyerTalk member eastwest. “She says that standing on the commode and pushing up the panel will often reveal all sorts of interesting things left by one crew mate for another…Some of the things she mentioned aren’t fit for polite company.”
Other strange things which FlyerTalk members found in hotel rooms include handcuffs, a prayer mat, condoms — including a used condom in the bed and a used condom as a hanging ornament from the lamp at the side of the bed — drugs, a chain saw, pornographic magazines, an armadillo, a dildo, a welcome amenity which was half eaten — and even a corpse!
A corpse? Someone must have been dying to stay in that room.
This discussion is the granddaddy of them all on FlyerTalk which has long ago since been mysteriously locked to additional content being posted: Why do so many people hide adult-oriented magazines behind drawers in hotel rooms? That discussion became a mission for many FlyerTalk members, who would report their findings from their hotel rooms in the oddest or most obscure of places — and they were not just finding magazines.
Some FlyerTalk members mentioned bibles which are placed in the rooms by The Gideons International — but even though the number of bibles in hotel rooms has declined by greater than 50 percent in ten years, as approximately two billion of them have been placed in hotel rooms over the decades, that is not really considered a strange item after all…
…is it?!?
Summary
Although perhaps not as disgusting as what I found in the seat back pocket aboard an airplane during a flight from Atlanta to Washington, I have found a variety of items in some of the rooms of hotel or resort properties — and in some of the strangest places. For example, I once found a plethora of pennies which were inexplicably placed on the frame above the door to the entrance to the room; and I have found a pornographic magazine stuffed between the mattress and the box spring.
I have also found many insects over the years — such as a water bug in a room in Prattville in Alabama that seemed to be the size of a Buick; and stinkbugs in the rooms of not one but two hotel properties in West Virginia.
Mostly, I have found improperly discarded trash — like empty wrappers as one of many examples. I found that innocuous but mildly irritating when people cannot take the extra couple of seconds of effort to properly discard trash — but I digress.
Now it’s your turn: What strange items have you found in the rooms of hotel and resort properties during your travels?
All photographs ©2018 and ©2019 by Brian Cohen.
