4

Hotels Don't Exactly Want You To Know About This Stuff

Obviously, hotels know deaths are bad for business. (Stranksy and the other staff got strict "Don't talk to the press" instructions after their jumper made the news.) The main goal is to just clean up and get the room ready for guests as soon as possible. "I generally find a room is off-market for about a week or so, and then it's fair game again."

Cillian has similar experiences during cleanups: "Everything needs to be discreet. If I'm going to a high-end hotel, I already know I can't wear shirts with my company logo. I have to keep everything in black bags and then red bag it [in biohazard bags] in the truck, and make sure nothing I bring is marked. Sometimes we're going in through back elevators and stuff."

Not that all guests are alarmed by the truth. That incident in which a woman died falling down a laundry chute? According to Stranksy, "There was a lot of controversy over whether she fell or was thrown down ... about a year later, we had a group of girls staying with us for a bachelorette party. They came down to the desk waiting for their Uber, and one girl walks up to me and randomly asks, 'Can I move to the room where the woman was murdered?' She went on a whole thing about what she'd read about it, and how she thought the boyfriend murdered her."

That's not all that uncommon. A few years ago, the Beverly Hilton "retired" the number 434, because it was the room where Whitney Houston died, and people came from all over the world demanding to sleep in the same bed she'd died in. Now, you may be wondering if they'd actually keep that mattress, but that really depends ...

3

Cheaper Hotels Aren't Great About Cleaning Up

As you might assume, a nicer hotel is going to do a better job of cleaning up a dead body and its related fluids than a shitty motel will. What you might not realize is how those nice hotels pay for that cleanup. Cillian says it's charged directly to the deceased.

"Hotels take your credit card, so most of the time, I'm told they'll charge the credit card back. They're not too worried about cost, because they've got an open card and they'll just charge them." Seems like a really shitty thing to do ... until you realize what a difference that open card means for the actual cleaning.

"High-end hotels will usually try to replace anything that gets even a couple of spots of blood on them, but you really need to be careful of lower-end hotels. I knew a carpet cleaning company who kept getting calls from a cheap motel, and the owners wanted them to come in and try to use the carpet cleaning equipment to erase the bloodstains out of the carpet -- which is almost impossible -- instead of replacing it."

Well, that's just the carpet. It's not like they'd keep a bloody bed ...

"Even worse, sometimes somebody would get shot or stabbed in a bed, and the mattress would be soaked with blood, but they'd be hired to just try to suck the blood out of the mattress itself. If that didn't work, they'd just cover the stains with a mattress pad and call it a day."

Related: 5 Ways Staying At A Hotel For The Rich Messes With Your Mind

2

There Are A Couple Of Ways To Tell If Somebody Has Died In Your Room

Knowing all those stats about people dying in hotels is pointless if you can't tell whether they were actually murdered in your room. We asked Cillian for what to look for, if you're curious about that kind of thing. "Look for mismatched carpet, or anywhere the carpet seems to have been replaced. Same thing with wallpaper and blinds ... sometimes you get lucky and things are replaced because of feces ... but it's usually because somebody bled on it."

Other oft-recommended tips include searching for weird amounts of flies in the light fixtures, or simply never leaving the comfort of your own home. Still, if you spot signs of a cleanup, it's not exactly easy to find out what happened, even for a professional.

Cillian was once in a room in Las Vegas when he noticed the carpet had clearly been replaced. "I didn't think anything of it until I looked up and saw a huge bloodstain on the ceiling. It'd been sort of cleaned, but you could see the pattern on the wallpaper where blood had run down. Somebody must have been sitting in the bed and put a gun under their chin, shooting the blood straight up."

1

Sometimes A Guy Will Up And Chop Off His Penis

The good news is that not everybody who stays in a hotel has died. Sometimes they will in fact just hack their dick off because the Devil tells them to. According to Cillian (and these news articles we just found), somebody slicing their own penis off -- whether in hotels or elsewhere -- isn't as uncommon as you'd think.

"A pretty big hotel called about a guy who told the front desk that Satan was telling him to cut his penis off. Eventually, they sent somebody up, and what do you know, he'd actually done it. But he did it perfectly -- unlike one guy I'd worked with who tried to hack his penis off with car keys. At least this guy used a pretty sharp blade, but it was still like somebody filled a squirt gun full of blood and shot it all over the room -- walls, everywhere. They also couldn't re-attach it, which was weird, because he'd done such a good job cutting it, unlike the key guy, who did get his re-attached."

And of course, since Satan was involved, Cillian realized they'd eventually need a priest. "Because many of the housekeepers were Catholic, they absolutely refused to go on that side of the hotel -- you know, because of Satan. Word had gotten out, so I suggested to management that they call up the Catholic Church and get a priest to come in and bless their room or have an exorcism or whatever and invite the housekeepers. That's what they did, and it satisfied everybody. I've had to call priests several other times as well. Always does the trick."

So maybe nobody died in your room; they just sprayed their dick blood over every conceivable surface. But it's OK, it's probably also been blessed by a priest. Plan your next vacation accordingly!

Jordan Breeding also writes for a whole mess of other people, the Twitter, and a weird amount of gas station bathrooms.

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