Weird Hotel Stories from Crime Bake

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by Barb, who is soooo tired after attending the New England Crime Bake

Thankful for Our Readers Giveaway: I’ll give an advance reader copy to one lucky commenter on today’s blog.

I’ve just returned from a weekend with my mystery community friends at the New England Crime Bake, my hometown conference. It’s learning experience, a reunion of old friends and a chance to meet new ones.

I was reflecting that I’ve had a couple of weird experiences at the hotel when I’ve been at Crime Bake. (You’ll see why in a minute.)

The first one was in the hotel when Crime Bake was in Dedham, MA. The conference occupied pretty much the entire hotel on Saturday, but on Sunday other groups would come in as we were leaving.

One Sunday mid-morning when I got on the hotel elevator there was a single woman already on it. She was exotically beautiful and dressed in a bright pink bridesmaid gown, which looked fabulous on her.

In her hands she held a dyed-to-match pair of strappy high-heeled sandals, a dyed-to-match clutch purse…and a big red brick.

We’d ridden up two floors before I could hold back no more. I asked her what the brick was for.

“The bottoms of the bridesmaid shoes are slippery,” she said. “The brick is to rough them up.”

Perfectly logical, right? But somehow that image of the beautiful woman, in an elevator, dressed in a gown, carrying a heavy brick, has stuck in my head. Who is she? Who is she going to meet? And what is going to happen?

This year when I left Crime Bake, I was greeted by this sight.

A huge pile of gym bags on a luggage rack with doll arms and legs and skulls sticking out.

It’s creepy, amirite? It reminded me of the doll parts in Hallie Ephron’s You’ll Never Know, Dear.

Of course, a little Googling tells me these are Baby Annes, dolls used to teach CPR for infants and babies. Note: Not to infants and babies.

Obviously this guy wasn’t into packing them up neatly. But even when they are packed neatly, they’re still kind of creepy.

It’s a perfectly logical explanation, but my writer brain can’t help but imagine…

Readers: Tell us about something funny or creepy you saw in a hotel. Or just say hello to be entered for a chance to win the ARC of Stowed Under.

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Published by Barbara Ross

Barbara Ross is the author of twelve Maine Clambake Mystery novels and six novellas. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Portland, Maine. Readers can visit her website at www.maineclambakemysteries.com

106 Thoughts

  1. Hello. Obviously, she will use the brick to bash in the groom’s head for jilting her (because who thinks of a brick as a murder weapon?).

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  2. The funniest thing I ever saw in a hotel was a vintage red telephone booth filled with Christmas tree balls in the Charing Cross hotel in London. The creepiest, a hangman’s noose, giant spiders everywhere, a ball and chain, and almost no lights- for a Halloween party at a hotel in Freiburg Germany. The strangest hotel-like situation: being shoved into first class, because then all the vegetarians were together. The others in first class- a guru, in a blue robe, and twenty six- I counted them- women followers, all in blue robes and with gold chains with his picture. I slept a lot that trip back.

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  3. That is pretty funny! I can’t think of anything similar that I have ever seen. I have gotten stuck with the room keys that stop working after one swipe, but that is no where near as funny! Still sounds like a great weekend, I find reunions like that very rejuvenating. Thanks!

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  5. Barbara, Great to see you at Crime Bake – What a wonderful conference! No strange/funny hotel moments for me though. I have to say your “$ Lies” presentation on Sunday morning was perfectly timed and a great relief!

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  7. Barb, love the bridesmaid with a brick story. That’s hilarious. Hotels are great places for people watching, because there is just an unlikely intersection of people gathered there at any one time.

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  8. Those bags are so creepy. I always find it strange when staying at hotels that are modern and updated, until you walk down one hallway or setting that clearly hasn’t been updated and feels like you are stepping into a time warp.

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  10. Oh, love that bridesmaid story! Once in California, I saw a trail of white rose petals in the corridor. Which began–or ended, near the front of a closed door to a room. I followed them (Who wouldn’t?) and the very long rose petal path ended (or began) with a discarded bridal bouquet in the middle of the hall. Which way did that story go?

    And your Crimebake panel was TERRIFIC! fabulous. timely, smart, practical. Thank you!

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  11. Right off the top of my head the first funny thing I think of from a hotel stay would have to be the duck parade in the lobby of the motel. Who would have thought ducks inside a hotel? They were cute but it made me do a double take just the same.

    When I read what you said about the red brick, I thought of someone disposing of a murder weapon. It would seem obvious but I have always been told that if you act like you know what you’re doing then no one will question it. A local hospital bought new recliners for the ICU waiting room. The week before Christmas they just vanished. Seems that someone came in, picked them up and walked out with them. No one questioned what was going on because they acted like they knew what they were doing. Sad yes but also a statement to humanity that we don’t question what seems right at the time. So you could take out the murder weapon unquestioned EXCEPT by a mystery/murder writer. 🙂

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    1. I’m thinking you were at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. I loved the ducks.

      The hospital story is a good thing for mystery writers to remember. Do it in plain sight. Act like you should be there.

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  13. One year at Malice, the convention had moved to a different hotel. People were reporting that their rooms weren’t ready, there were already people in the room, one room didn’t have a toilet in the bathroom. And the hotel saved a suite for Louis Ferrakan.

    Our room had a toilet but there was a pipe sticking out of the bathroom wall. No idea what it was supposed to be connected to. And we had a hole in the window that looked suspiciously like a bullet hole.

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  15. Love the story about the bridesmaid. I was at Crimebake but ended up taking the stairs in most cases. I’ll have to rethink that strategy- I obviously might have missed out on some interesting experiences! Really enjoyed your talk Sunday morning, thanks for bringing a tough topic to us in an easily digestible format.
    Cathy Strasser in northern NH

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  16. Why can’t I ever have some of these unique happenings in my travels? Poor Baby Anne, she really is a lifesaver!

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  17. We never had any memorable hotel things happen at the ranch we stayed at on vacations for 24 years. We took a “You Cook” mini suite and it was set up in a row of 9 with a shared deck/porch with seating area. We had the same neighbors there for all those years, and our kids are still in touch with the friends they made there.

    My younger son is a para-medic and instructor. Years ago he went away for a weekend and left a whole family of ressee annie’s piled on the living room floor. My wife and I dressed them up and sat them at the dining room table (the table was set for a dinner) and waited for him to come home. HE NEVER LEFT THEM LYING AROUND AGAIN!!!! LOL

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  18. Wonderful stories! I think I may have started a creepy story in a hotel once though! I was attending a writer’s conference in a Fort Lauderdale hotel. There were many non-writers at the hotel of course. My friend Sharon and I were in the elevator which was quite full. (We’d been to a novel writing class and I was working on a mystery.) Just as we were about to get off at our floor, I said “I’ve decided to kill Mr. Pennington.” The door closed behind us, and I still wonder if anyone called Security!

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  19. While staying at Ashford Castle in Ireland, we could hear weird noises and giggling coming from the room next door. In the morning, we found out the staff was trying to shoo an owl out of the window.

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  20. This wasn’t weird in the same way, but I once stayed at a hotel in Rehoboth Beach that was hosting a quilters convention and a drag queen convention on the same weekend (LARGE hotel). Every ride in the elevator was delightful because the quilters and the drag queens talked about fabrics!

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    1. I loved that. I once stayed in a hotel in New Orleans with a group of people in adaptive technology. The other group in the hotel was a convention of gospel choirs. The women! The dresses! The hats! The best part was they piped all the performances into the hotel on its television system.

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  21. Bob and I checked into a hotel in St. Louis to attend a friend’s son’s wedding. I went up to the room while Bob went to get our suitcases. I opened the door but it immediately jammed against something. I shoved a couple of times but it wouldn’t open. Seconds later a man pops out of the gap and says, “Can I help you?” I made a hasty retreat. I called Bob and told him not to bother to come up to “our” room. I guess I should be grateful that he had the closet door open so I didn’t walk right in!

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  23. My husband and I were in our third floor room at a hotel in downtown San Antonio when we heard what we knew to be bagpipes tuning up. We looked out the window and there were about two dozen men in kilts standing in formation playing their bagpipes. We found out later that it was for an event and they were firemen from the local fire department.

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  24. She’s going to pass in the groom’s head because she just found out he’s been cheating on the bride even before the wedding. I’m still trying to work the dolls into the plot.

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  26. Had a great time at Crime Bake and very much liked the panels. Loved meeting you all. Enjoyed your Lies lecture. You have just the right humor to throw in when we are sitting there with our mouths open at our misconceptions.
    By the way, I almost got run over by that cart of dolls. The front man was pulling it, the back man was pushing it and he was blindly pushing it at an angle right at me until I was against the wall saying rather loudly-“HEY.”

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  27. My husband and I were in San Diego for the weekend, and one of our hotel’s parking lots was roped off, empty except for several overturned cars and trucks. It looked like a tornado had hit, but there was no damage to the parking lot itself or anything nearby.

    We found out the next day that the hotel was hosting a competition for tow truck drivers! We watched a few events. It was interesting to see how tow trucks can pull a large vehicle upright, especially now that we knew no one had been hurt. 🙂

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    1. A tow truck driver convention! I always say for every single human activity there is a conference, a newsletter, and people calling each other Nazis on a discussion board somewhere…

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  28. This incident was not at a hotel, but on Capitol Hill in D.C. I was getting ready to take the underground tram from one of the House office buildings to the Capitol, and when the tram arrived, out popped all of these women in square dancing dresses — the short ones with lots of petticoats. If there were any men, I didn’t notice them because the women were so fascinating — kind of like the munchkins in Oz ~

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  29. Carry a clipboard and wear a chartreuse safety vest and you can go anywhere with no questions asked.

    We once came into a town that was the center of a county fair. We weren’t there for the fair, just wanted a place to sleep. Everything was full except the original old house come hotel next to a newer more modern motel. Nothing had been done to the place in many years. The tile was pulling away from the bathroom walls, the air conditioner only worked if you got up and hit the side of it every so often (and it was HOT out), etc., etc., and it was just plain creepy being the only people in the building. The positive side? We didn’t see any cockroaches!

    Looking forward to Stowed Away!

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  30. Nothing more amusing than staying at a hotel when a school class reunion is taking place. It’s hilarious to see people from back then to what they are today. Also amusing in that same aspect is the people who hooked up then and tiptoe around during the reunion. My husband and I have attended several of his class reunions and each time we leave with many hilarious memories to take us through the next one. I am looking forward to read your next.

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  31. I’ve always hated being gone overnight . My husband and I were a the Nugget in Sparks Nevada and he was playing a card game so I sat and played poker on a machine. . Four machines and other than me a white haired older man playing one. They kept paging RED Skelton over and over. After awhile the white haired man got up and said ” it’s my wife, she wants people to know I’m here” and walked away.. I felt so dumb and didn’t get to talk to him but he had a showing of his Clown pictures and I did get to see them and they were wonderful.

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  32. When my kids were really little a new hotel had just opened in CT while we were there. The fire alarm went off in the middle of the night and they had no backup emergency generator. We ended up evacuating down five floors carrying the kids – a 2 and 4 year old – in complete darkness down unfamiliar stairwells packed with people. The hallway fire alarms had blinking lights, but the stairwell ones didn’t. To this day, my kids are terrified of fire alarms. And post script, they had an indoor pool that some poor kid fell in trying to evacuate the building. Fortunately, she was okay, but there was no light, so she had no idea it was coming.

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    1. That sounds horrible.

      My worst hotel alarm story was in Sydney in the middle of the night. It wasn’t climbing all those stairs. It was having my jetlag set back to 0 and having to start acclimating all over again.

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  33. Wow those are surely the beginnings of a good mystery. I have stayed in quite a few hotels. I think the one that sticks with me is when I had to go to Charlotte for training. First they couldnt find my bag – one flight nonstop. (Come to find out they were holding it for me, lol) I had to share a room and the lady I was rooming with wanted the bed closest to the window. Which happened to be closest to the alarm. When the alarm went off the next morning I jumped up to turn it off. Well for some reason my left leg was completely numb and my foot bent under. I swore it was broke, but they forced me to stay for the entire day of training and then fly home. It was of course broke and that was my first sign of m/s which would be diagnosed years later. The other one is going to Pittsburgh for training and being there during a blizzard and they declared a state of emergency. That meant the liquor stores closed. The hotel came very close to running out of booze with all of us there for 6 weeks of training. Not a good thing, lol. Thanks for the chance to win.

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    1. That is awful. I can’t imagine the pain you were in.

      In the eighties I flew from Boston to Dulles to do an overnight and one day of consulting in Vienna, VA. There was a massive blizzard and I ended up being there six days including over a weekend, walking along a busy road from my hotel to the client’s office everyday. The first few days I washed out my underwear in the sink every night and it was still clammy in the morning. Finally the local stores opened and I could stop in and by some new.

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  34. I don’t have any hotel stories—but I do have a travel story. Years and years ago when I lived in Alaska, I was taking a small seaplane flight to get to the larger city airport on only about an eight passenger plane, and someone boarded with a large German shepherd—-and they seated the shepherd in the co-pilot’s seat and the dog was our co-pilot for the flight.
    suefarrell.farrell@gmail.com

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  35. One of our grossest times was checking into our hotel in San Antonio about 1 am due to a late flight and the car rental having given our family sized vehicle as we had our two children with us. So we proceed to turn back the covers and we find huge amounts if black hair in the both beds!!! There is no way anyone in my family was going to get into that bed for sure. After an hour of frantic calls to the desk we finally got someone to come and see what we were faced with
    Here we are a family of all blondes and they think it was from us? I wanted another room because if there had been animals previously sleeping in those beds and running around that room I didn’t want to be there. By now it’s 3 am their time and 5 am East coast time and two kids 8 and 10 are zombies from having left MA early in the morning. I don’t know who finally brought us clean??? sheets but said they didn’t have access to the blankets. What? So we finally got to lie down on just sheets at 6 am and none too happy with this top name hotel. They told us no one had used he room before us, haha, but I still believe that either someone related to Bigfoot had shed all over the sheets or a pack of dogs got into that room unnoticed!!!! That happened 30 years ago and I can still remember it WAY too well…..not fun then but funny now.

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    1. I’ve had to change rooms a bunch of times for different reasons. I’ve reached the point where I check everything out–heat or AC, TV, shower, before I unpack anything.

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  38. I was at the Del Coronado on Coronado Island in San Diego for brunch with the family. I talked to one of the employees about the reported haunted areas and took a walk down that corridor by myself because I am a empath and sensitive to spirits and energy in spaces . I was slowly walking and felt a cold breeze in the closed corridor and up ahead of me saw a ghost moving off the floor in a sweeping white gown. The area remained very cold and breezy after she left. Afterward another employee told me she was murdered here in the early 1900’s by her husband and still haunts the halls.. .I loved it and hope to go again someday to explore further.

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    1. I’ve stayed at the Del multiple times, but never any ghosts. The ones I would like to see would be Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis filming a scene from Some Like It Hot.

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  39. Maybe the bridesmaid was a ghost albeit a colorful one. I live in an old house and try not to think about ghosts here because I would scare myself! I really enjoy hearing about other people’s encounters- not on tv, – but average people not expecting an encounter. Who knows!

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  41. I saw that cart with the dolls sticking out of the gym bags on my way out, too. Definitely creepy. I’m glad to find out the explanation. Though they still might make it into a story at some point. I loved your presentation, too, Barbara. Actually I loved all of the presentations I attended. It was a great conference!

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  43. We were at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park Colorado with friends. We were walking around exploring and one of our friends said he had seen two young girls dressed in antique clothes walking in the hallway and we he turned around to see where they went, they had disappeared.

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  44. We were in a hotel in Baltimore. My boyfriend went to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and the water in the toilet was steaming hot. We found out the nect morning that a steam leak under the street had heated the pipe carrying water into the hotel. Once people woke up and started running the water it cooled off.

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  45. I’ve never seen anything funny or creepy at a hotel. Those CPR dolls in the bags, though, are really creepy!

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  47. I have a not funny but creepy and very sad story. when my husband and I went to Disneyworld for our honeymoon, first day, we were waiting in front of the hotel for the shuttle to the park. all of a sudden, the ground shook beneath us as something landed in the shrubs next to us. A young woman had climbed the outerstaircase of the hotel roof (33 floors) and jumped. Yup. most bizarre thing that ever happened, a couple of landscapers were working nearby, and they just turned and looked, and went back to work!!! Surreal. I ran in the hotel and told them to call 911, this was 1993 so pre cellphone days. found out later, she was staying with her family at a campground nearby. our anniv is 10/24 but every 10/25, I think of her and her family. I was upset but determined to make the best of it but my husband was convinced she was pushed off and couldn’t let it go.

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  48. Many years ago I was traveling on business to Philadelphia and booked at a lovely
    upscale hotel ( the good old days on a corporate account). It was gorgeous and very old world. I zipped right through the registration process and went to my beautiful room. Usually I would do room service, so much easier when you are traveling alone but I wanted to partake of the restaurant and all the history of the hotel. As I sit in a very large and empty dining room, not another soul there I begin to really get concerned. I asked the waiter what was up. The hotel was closing. Since there had been an outbreak of what became known as Legionnaires Disease and I think 4 deaths, the hotel had never come back financially and this was the last night it was opened. There were around 5 customers in a 300 + room hotel. As I returned to my room, empty hallways and elevators, I began to get freaked out a bit. My exhaustion got the best of me and I stayed but slept with one eye opened!

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    1. I remember that outbreak of Legionnaires. Stephen King has said his inspiration for the Shining was he and his wife checking into a hotel on the last night of the season when everyone was checking out.

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  49. I can’t wait to read your newest book in the series, Stowed Away. I guess the creepiest thing was when I was staying in a place in Florida and had left a bag of sugar on the counter. When I got up in the morning, the whole counter was full of cock roaches. Gross

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