Next time you check into a hotel, spare a thought for the housekeeping and maintenance staff who straighten out the rooms – because their jobs can involve dealing with stomach-churning discoveries.
Hotel staff have been revealing some of these via online forums, also divulging forgotten items that were X-rated, sinister, heartbreaking, and downright bizarre.
In short, items that you’d imagine were simply unforgettable.
Hotel employees have taken to online discussion forums to share the oddest things guests have left behind in their rooms (stock photo)
The discussions bubbled up on Reddit after users asked hotel workers about the weird things they had found in rooms after guests checked out.
And it seems weapons are all too easily forgotten.
‘Rattler00’ revealed how they found a gun underneath a mattress.
They wrote: ‘Guest called me at the desk while he was driving and asked me to go look for it after he remembered leaving it there.
A hotel worker has revealed that a guest left a gun behind (stock image)
‘In hindsight, I should have made his a** go up there himself and get it, instead of bringing it to the back office myself.’
‘X-4180’, meanwhile, said they found a ‘purple lightsaber’.
Two other posters revealed how guests had left behind incredibly large sums of money.
One, ‘Korbindallas912’, who said they used to work at a hotel on the Las Vegas strip, recalled the time a ‘high roller left $328,000 [£243,000] cash in the safe in his suite’.
Two posters revealed how guests had left behind incredibly large sums of money (stock photo)
They added: ‘I met up with a security guard to watch me carry it down to the casino cage. Most money I have ever had in my possession at once.’
Another time, he said a ‘housekeeper called me to come up to a room with hundreds of live crickets all [it]’.
Poster, ‘sugaree53’, moving the discussion back to cash, said they came across $18,000, left in a room’s safe.
They explained: ‘It was brought to the desk by the next guest who checked in. It had been left by a couple who had just gotten married and flown to Hawaii that morning.
‘I took it and put it in the hotel safe. Sure enough, they called frantic that night while I was on duty.’
For other hotel workers, what they discovered in rooms was rather more grim.
One said they found a ‘literal crack pipe in the freezer’.
The worker added: ‘I was told to never ask questions and just throw any drugs away that we found.’
Another, ‘meaniescreamtrain’, revealed they lifted up a bed skirt to be ‘greeted by about 15 needles’.
They explained: ‘I realised one was stuck in my hand. Immediately went to my supervisor who laughed it off and told me I was being overdramatic. My mom then took me to the hospital for blood tests and my doctor made me take HIV medication for a month “just in case”.
‘It cost me about $370 and I live in Canada. I ended up fine, but not cool.’
They also added: ‘In another room, the bathtub was full of dirty diapers. I recall the one kid in that room being like 10 or 11 and seeming perfectly fine but who knows, lol.’
A lot of hotel workers seem to find unusual items have been left under the bed (stock photo)
Another disgusting find was discovered by ‘Turquoise_Tentacle’, who said they ‘found the ice bucket with an inch or so layer of nail clippings in it and an Arkansas license plate under the mattress both in the same room, same day’.
An un-named worker who said one of their worst jobs was a hotel cleaner also joined in on this topic.
They said: ‘A very fond (not) memory is of a room booked by a trio of young guys. After they had spent a weekend there the whole room smelled like sweat and booze, there were bottles and pizza boxes everywhere and clearly there had been more people than the three guys.
‘Worst part was that someone had taken a s*** on one of the beds… Not a smear on the sheets, no, an actual f*****g large turd. And I mean unless they did it minutes before checking out, they had stayed, and perhaps slept in a room with the giant turd on a bed.’
Hotel staff have uncovered everything from used needles to stacks of cash in vacated rooms (stock photo)
Another poster with hotel cleaning experience, named ‘RapscallionCat’, was horrified to spend a week cleaning a ‘room that had flakes of skin literally coating the carpet from wall to wall’.
The poster added: ‘Every day I’d hoover it up and every day it would be back again. Thought I was going insane.’
A lot of hotel workers seem to find unusual items left under the bed.
One un-named maintenance worker, who used to work at a ‘well-known’ hotel chain, recalled his strangest finding of all time – an unedited adult film on an SD card.
He said: ‘I was called to the room to fix an HVAC unit, and on my way out, it was standard practice to look the room over, make sure we didn’t miss anything.’
The employee spotted an SD card under the bed. He continued: ‘I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it till later that night when I got home and was putting my wallet and keys up. Curious, I put the SD card into my computer, figuring it had business files and random uninteresting b******* on it. I was very surprised to find an unedited porn scene, showing not only the “lovers” but also the camera crew.’
He ended up handing the SD card over to the hotel’s lost property in case someone came looking for it.
A hotel maintenance worker found a lightbulb filled with water (stock photo)
Another maintenance worker, ‘KewlBeanx’, made a curious discovery in a room they’d be sent to in order to fix a light.
They said ‘the light fixture was full of water, yet wasn’t touching the bulb or wires’, they recalled, adding: ‘The fixture (which is essentially a bowl that screws up) was manually filled with water.’
The hotel worker then shared their theory, saying: ‘Hotel is located near an air force base. I’m guessing someone filled it to drown out voices in case of hidden microphones without hindering them.’
One hotel worker remembered happening across a discarded photo album. Though it was moved into lost property, its owner never claimed it (stock photo)
Meanwhile, one worker said they uncovered a ‘sad’ item that had been left behind.
They said: ‘I was a housekeeper at a hotel for a year and a half and while I don’t remember anything too weird, I do remember something that struck me as sad; an old photo album thrown into the trash, full of photos that looked like they were taken in the ’70s.
‘I felt like whoever threw it away might regret it, so I took it back out and put it in lost and found with a note. I don’t think it was ever claimed, so it probably got thrown away again.’