HORROR and HILARITY presents a special HOSTEL Giveaway!

The HOSTEL giveaway has ended, please read below for information and the winning stories!

TO ENTER: Please send an email here with the subject line "HOSTEL ENTRY" Send in the story of the worst place you ever stayed the night in. The first 20 people to respond will win one of four available prizes including Hostel t-shirts, nail clippers, leathermans, or a poster prize pack. Please be sure to include your name and mailing address with your entry to receive your prize. Winning stories will be posted right here so keep checking back to read all about it. HOSTEL opens in theaters January 6, 2006.

The HOSTEL/HORROR & HILARITY giveaway is now over. Here are the winning stories, thanks to all who entered!

 

"The worst place I've ever stayed at is in this hotel in Vincennes, Indiana. It was really creepy and run-down. They had a pool, and it was like a cave - dark and damp. It was a room with carpet and it was moist so the carpet smelled weird and the hot tub was freezing.

To top it all off, a fire alarm when off at about 3:30 am. There was hardly anybody there - no one came to check on us and when we found one of the workers in the hallway and asked what the hell was going on he just kind of shrugged...

And our 'complimentary breakfast' was a Little Debbie's snack cake and a glass of milk..."

-Abby Dugan

 

"Went to a ballgame in Cincinnati, Ohio and called ahead to get a room. Found it online. Let me say that they majorly misrepresented themselves. When we finally found the place it was a CRACK hotel. The window in the
bathroom was broken and hung open. When we walked in the room and opened the curtains, across the road two people were having sex on the side of the road at a bus stop. We took all of our luggage to the car everytime we left the room and tied the bathroom window shut with the telephone cord. Didn't sleep all night long--they even charged us a key deposit??? Never so glad to get back home!!!"

-Crissy Clark

 

"It was two years ago around Christmas time and I had to go to Ohio to visit family. The only hotel with a vacancy was the Motel 8. The room we got smelled like mold and body odor. The couch looked as if someone picked it up off the street after it's been sitting outside for a year, the beds were in the same condition. We had a dog with us, and he found a used condom under the couch. Everyday after the maids would leave (what they actually did in the room, I have no idea), our bottle of rum would be less full. We complained to the manager, turned out the manager WAS the maid. Anyway, we got out of there after 3 days."

-Kimberly LeMaster

 

"The worse place I ever sayed at was a hostel. Well actually I didn't stay there.

A friend and I drove 8 hours to see Mike Ness about 6 years ago. We planned on saying in a hostel that I found out about instead of sleeping in the car like usual. Finally we find it...you have to drive down this dirt road that leads to a corn field with a building next to it. We go inside and it is dark and smells bad...when you walk in there are doors to rooms on both sides of the hallway and at the very end of it is a group TV room. The whole place is nicotein stained. We find the guy who runs the place. He lives in a room in the hostel...and he is the source of the nicotein. He must have been in his late 70s, he was tall and skinny with longish fingernails that were stained from cigarettes.

We pay him our $12 each and he shows us our room. The room wasn't THAT bad, and this place was a lot different than most hostels, our room had 3 beds and its own bathroom, so there was no bunking with strangers and sharing a community bathroom. We put our stuff down, I hop in the shower. While in there I notice spiders in their webs all over the place. Fine as long as they stay there I can deal with it. When I am finished with my shower I get dressed and my friend takes her shower. While she was in there I sat on the bed and noticed that there were tiny spiders crawling all over the bed; they must have just hatched. So I freaked out. As soon as she got out of the shower and dressed we gathered our stuff and left, we didn't even try to get our money back. That night we slept in the car."

-Stacy Lessig

 

"The worst place I ever spent the night in is the 1st day of the house we now live in, the night we moved it was about 10 degrees out and it had been snowing all day. We get all of our stuff moved in. and find out.....There is no heat. It was constantly about 40 degrees in the house, the basement was the warmest place, we could have stayed down there, but upon flushing the toilet, the sewer backed up, spewing human waste into the basement about an inch or 2 deep. Wouldn't have been so bad if my wife handn't put my comic book collection down there on the floor. So that night we slept upstairs, I wore boxers, 2 pair of sweatpants, 2 sweatshirts socks and gloves. We had 4 blankets on the bed. And all 5 cats flocked to us and slept on the bed, wich actually helped. The next day the heat was fixed and the plumbing was fixed the day after that, many of my comics had to be thrown away after sitting in shit. Luckly my toy collection was in rubbermaid tubs, but I still had to spend 2 hours cleaning shit out of the basement."

-Don Hinrichs

 

"The worst place that I ever spent the night in was a single wide trailer in Halapaw Flordia. When I was 18, a few friends and I moved down to Flordia on a drop of a dime and moved into a trailer in the middle of nowhere that was owned by one of the above mentioned friends parents. This trailer had no heat, gas, electric, or running water. The trailer also had holes all through the walls and floors. It was a complete nightmare. Also infested with bugs, fire ants, and God knows what else. My girlfriend at the time and I got the honor of sleeping in the so called Master Bedroom. There was no funiture either. The first night we slept on the floor. It was freezing because of the wind blowing through the holes in the walls. We awoke several times durring the night to whipe off the attacking fire ants. Durring the middle of the night, I awoke to find one of the neibors was standing over us drunk. He proceded to talk drunk gibbish and told us that we were not welcome, and then poured beer on top of us. This was my worst nightmare come true. In the morning, my legs were covered with ant bites and I smelled of Milwakees best. My car had broke down after we had arrived, and needed a new altantor. I walked five miles to town and called my father collect, begging for money to get the hell out of there. To make a long story short, we got the money, got the car fixed, the crazy drunk neibors tried to take the lugs off the car, cops came, and we got the hell out of there. WORST NIGHT EVER!"

-James Giles

 

"When I was 16 I got kicked out of my house. My friend let me stay in the crawl space of his basement bedroom. There was only about 3 feet of head clearance. I lived in it for an entire summer. It was hell."

-Ron DeCaro

 

"I don't think I've every had a really bad night (that or I'm too optomistic, but I remember one night a few years ago, my dad, brother and I stayed in a used camper when we were deer hunting. It was freezing cold and raining all night. The wind was blowing hard, which kept us up because the sides were fabric and rattled all night. and the worst part about it for me was my toes were so cold. That kills me; I hate having cold toes when I'm trying to sleep, it bothers me to no end. The second worst part is I hate that the only warm part of my pillow is exactly where my head is, if I want to lay on my side the rest of the pillow is cold. Not to mention the next morning the ground turned into mud."

-Jared Heselmeyer

 

"It was the smell of curry every night that did it for me. I was away for the first time from living with my folks. All the way across the Atlantic in the hub of London. We didn't have many Indian restaurants in my quaint suburb that I hailed from much less living above one. I wasn't even an fan of spicy food in general so the waft of strong heavy smells in the air every night when the place was jumping made me want to jump...right out the window.

There was a flat full of seven guys, myself one of them. It was a semester abroad from some crappy junior college. There were three bedrooms adjoined by one long hallway. On one end, towards the back, was the bedroom next to the train tracks. Every morning at 5 AM when the Underground started it was a wake up call that you couldn't say no to. In the middle was my room, the receptacle for all things curry and down at the far end was a bedroom that looked for Cromwell road. A major thoroughfare with lots of traffic at all hours.

Aside from the external barriers to peace and quiet you had those six other guys. All of them fresh from their mommies and daddies. Away from home and ready to party. Even the nerdiest guys would be out at the pubs all night. Coming home to pass out and spew half eaten spaghetti all over the pea green carpet. Making weird noises in their coma induced state in which you didn't know if they were going to live or die. Sorta hoping they might die to finally give you some peace.

Yes, it was one of the worst places I ever slept at, but like a Dickens novel it was also the best of times. Because this would be a snapshot in my early youththat I would never forget and once removed from all the chaos it would take on a magical glow of nostalgia. Making it shine like never before.

THE END"

-Sean Cain

 

"Mine isn’t too bad, but here it is. I was up in Modesto for the ShockerFest Film Festival that my film was playing in. From the outside of the room, everything seemed nice. When my fiancé and I first entered the room, the accommodations were passable, though certainly a drop from the lobby and central area. When I put down my bags I noticed a couple ants on the table. My fiancé was a little bothered (she doesn’t like insects), but I killed them and didn’t think much of it. In the morning, the table was crawling with ants. Needless to say, we didn’t spend the second night there.

I guess I’ve been pretty lucky—most of the places I’ve stayed have turned out well."

-Nate Barlow

 

"My story is when I was in the Navy; I was in Australia and happend to stay in a hostel. It was really crappy and me and my friends had to share a room with 3 other people we didnt know, so that was creepy enough. There was one shower in the room, no bathroom - that was down the hall. The bathroom stalls had no doors on them. It smelled too. Needless to say we only stayed that one night."

-Scott Houfek

 

"Me and my girlfriend went to Miami for vacation. The hotel we booked screwed us over so we had to find another place to stay. Everything was booked. We ended up staying a night in the worst motel imaginable. It was nowhere near the beach and in one of the scariest areas I have ever seen, gang members all over. Filthy rooms, gun shots, drug addicts/protitutes coming in and out. The most terrifying night of my life. Had a crackhead taxi driver when we left that actually stopped to make a purchase and left us in the cab. We thought we were going to be robbed, beaten, murdered. Cant wait to see Hostel! Hopefully it will be even scarier than my experience!"

-Greg Grimes

 

"The worst place I ever stayed was a house my boss owned. He had been renting it for 20 years to a family that basically wrecked the place. While the rental agency had it cleaned up a little and repainted, the defects began to make their presence known right away. Toilets flooded. There was mold everywhere. Every time I came home, spiderwebs had completely blocked the front entry way. The sinks were all clogged with some green goo. And when it rained, there was an invasion of worms in the living room. Add to that the lack of screens and heating and air conditioning, it was sort of like living in an abandoned cabin but without the rustic charm."

-Lee Knicht

 

"Let's see...the worst place I have ever stayed. That would have to be when I slept in a van once in a camp ground for the entire summer with my girlfriend at the time, right out of high school. It was uncomfortable, cold, lot's of strange things happened (she seemed to attract trouble, as a matter of fact, she thrived on it)."

-John Bowker

 

"The worst place I've stayed in was a litte hotel in PA about 7 years ago.

I was there with one of my sons for a convention. It was suppose to be a decent hotel, but we thought different.

The line of carpenter ants that were in the hallway was a dead giveaway. And their "Continental Breakfast" was horrible, we still laugh about it, the donut holes and the coffee were like they were 2 weeks old?! And during the night you could hear things "scurry" through the walls!?"

-Neal DeConte

 

" The worst place I have ever stayed was The Orange Motel. It's a small place on Nebraska Ave in Tampa, Fl where crackheads and prostitutes mainly live/work.

I was living with my boyfriend in a small apartment when the owners informed us they were tenting the place for termites. Living in the area for a long time I'd always seen the place, but all of a sudden I found myself staying there along with my neighbors for two nights. We made the best of it, hanging out together killing a bottle of Jager and trying to one-up each other on who had the crappiest room. Met a couple of the "residents" and even shared a couple shots with them.

One guy tells us the place is infested with snakes and tells us to make sure we look under our beds before we go to sleep. His friend told us he's harmless, just a little "out there". We called it a night shortly after that.

It was a crazy night. But hey, they let us keep our pets there (the real ones)."

-Josette Valdes

 

"I've stayed in a lot of undesirable places over the years. My Dad died when I was 11 and my mother deserted her 5 kids when I was 12. Growing up without parental guidance during the teen years really put a hard strain on the learning curve of life.

Which of these is worse? You be the judge...
1:
I do recall being penniless and jobless and sleeping on lawn furniture in an open garage in a friend's back yard during the first month of Indiana winter. Oddly enough several other hippie youth were doing the same thing so not only was it kind of a commune of the homeless, but anyone walking by would think they just witnessed the equivalent of a Hoosier Hobo Nativity Scene.
2:
Another night of bliss would be any of several spent in Goose Creek South Carolina. I was 15 and still without parental guidance. A group of the hippie youth and myself got jobs as backstage help at a three day concert in Tennessee. On the drive down, we got quite innebriated to say the least. When we arrived at the site of the concert, it appeared the local authorities had passed a last minute injunction against having such a huge concert event in their town and police were turning all comers away at the gates. Totally bummed, the rest of us in the car passed out with our fragile lives in the hands of the car driver. When we awoke, instead of being back home in Indiana, we found ourselves out of gas, out of money and in a trailer park in Goose Creek South Carolina. The driver had driven to see his girlfriend who had moved away just the month before. Not only did he put us all in foreign territory without a penny to our names, but when he arrived at her new home, she was in bed with her new boyfriend. Needless to say, we were unwelcome all the way around. One of my friends and I decided to hitchhike back (we were only 15). We walked two blocks from the trailer when we were picked up by the local police. Long haired hippie youth wandering the streets with just the clothing on our backs, getting ready to hit the high road picked up by the straightest South Carolina police. They cuffed us on the spot and hauled us to the station. Apparently the people staying at the trailer had been stealing from their neighbors and they decided to question the first ones venturing out of the house. Well they decided I was a runaway when I couldn't explain where my parent was, so they held me in jail for a few days until they found my mother back in Detroit Michigan. One night in jail, a U.S. serviceman was thrown into the same cell for drunken disorderly conduct. While the drunk was well behaved, his sergeant was quite beligerant when he came to pick him up and it was time to bash the hippie youth again. Definately one of the worst places I've ever stayed.
3:
On a more recent note, I ventured to Screamfest in south florida. The main hotel was completely booked so they directed me to stay at another branch hotel of theirs just minutes away. The room they set me up with must have been a recent crime scene, for the lock on the sliding glass doors were still busted and off it's track. I asked for another room and they refuesd, saying their handyman was on his way up to fix it and it would be fine by the time I got back. I kept all my belongings in my car and returned to the hotel after spending the day at the Screamfest event. Upon my return, the lock was still busted, and the handymand had just jammed a plunger stick behind the sliding glass door which was still off its track. I was too tired and stoned to not pass out for the night regardless of whether a midnight slasher would come bursting through the door. Definately a shit hole of a hotel. That's all for now."

-PurpleHazeFL69

 

"The worst place I have ever stayed... hhhhmmmm. Since I am always careful to pick a nice hotel, this is hard! The worst, I think, was when I had to travel to San Francisco to install an museum exhibit, and since we were from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they thought we'd appreciate this hotel, that was more of a motel, which was supposedly all young and hip and rock'n'rolly. My room was facing the courtyard, which echoed the disco music til 3am (I had to be to work at 7am), there was no AC, so you had to crack your windows or you'd suffocate, the bathroom was no where clean enough for me to be happy, and they told us where we could find drugs when we checked in. I suppose if you were in the younger, partier mode, this hotel was really pretty hip. But for those of us on business trips, it sucked. After 2 nights, I managed to find a super hoity toity room available, right next to the museum, which was some god awful price of $400 a night or something. But heck, I got to sleep and I didn't feel gross using the shower!

The second worst was also in San Francisco, and that one was so old and gross that I had to put a towel on the shower floor in order to take a shower! I have a problem with bathrooms that aren't my own, incase you haven't figured it out! Fortunately, I was with my boss, and she found us a nice, fancy spot elsewhere.

San Francisco hotels can be scary! And the best thing is to pick your own, then you know it's a good one!!!!

The third worse place was a motel we stopped at on our honeymoon so we could sleep a little on our drive to Nova Scotia, and the bathroom was so grody I only stuck my head in the shower stream in the morning!"

-Erica Noble

 

"I have three places that tie as the worst places I’ve ever spent the night at. Two were by choice, one was not. Thanks for the fun little entry game!!

1. Dixmont State Hospital. Over the years as a self-proclaimed professional ghost investigator, I got to know the owners of the Dixmont State Hospital grounds and for two years before they demolished the buildings I had “free access”. Once we chose to spend the night. The idea of being up in a mountain, in the woods and spending the night in an abandoned and rotting insane asylum was as much of an adrenaline rush as ever. Between the wild animals and the odd sounds that were heard inside the buildings and underground in the tunnels, it wasn’t hard to imagine a “hostel” environment. The asbestos was noticeable. The wild animals, bugs, dirt and piles of deterioration from the falling walls, floors and ceilings (some from a fire) made it all the more dangerous. The smells were intolerable, especially in the medical building where the morgue tables and some equipment were left. Again, our time spent on the Dixmont State Hospital grounds were always granted with legal permission by the owners. http://www.rebeccashott.com/?page_id=38

2. The Trinway Mansion/Prospect Place in Dresden, Ohio. The place is actually open as a bed and breakfast and take reservations for ghost hunts. I’ve spent one night there and I have never been in a place that oozed of such a pungent odor no matter where we were in the mansion. The amount of cockroaches were more than I saw the entire two weeks I spent in Florida. The cellar, an actual stop on the original Underground Railroad is all dirt and radiated the smell of cat urine, as their “guard cats” use the cellar as one giant litter box. The two rooms that are available as a bed and breakfast stay contain dirt piles of dust in the corners, on the tables and when I sat on the bed and stood up (it was in the summer and I had shorts on due to extreme heat and humidity), pieces of dirt, paint and other “particles” stuck to my legs. Mice run rampant. The bathtub was full of smashed bugs and “mouse feces”. I would never recommend it as a bed and breakfast spot, but it does make the perfect location for a typical haunted house! http://prospectplace-dresden.com/

3. When I was sent to New Jersey for training to gain work responsibility, we had to fly in and out of Baltimore and drive down to our training location. On the way home, after standing in line for two hours at the airport to check in luggage, our flight was canceled due to “tornadic weather”. Because so many flights were canceled, we were unable to find a vacancy in any of the close, decent hotels. We were able to find one single-floor roadside motel miles from the airport that looked as if it belonged in The Devil’s Rejects. My room was dark, only one lightbulb worked. It looked like they had not dusted in a year. No fingerprints or footprints could be seen on the 1970’s light green shag carpet. The yellow and gold walls had dirt smudges, bugs crawling up them and in the middle of the floor was a huge dark red/brown stain. I went to the bathroom, and while doing my business, I heard “scratching” sounds in the bathtub. When I dared to move the shower curtain over, a variety of bugs including spiders, ants and a 3-inche cockroach were doing their business on the bottom of the tub. When I turned on the water to wash my hands, it was actually yellow.

I locked my door with the bolt since the knob was loose enough for me to pull off the door itself. I slept maybe an hour, with paranoia of bugs eating me to death or some crazy hotel worker breaking down my cardboard door and murdering me, in my clothes. I actually cried out of disgust, exhaustion, frustration and fear when I heard a man and woman screaming at each other down the hallway. I got up in the morning at 4am per my watch, put on a baseball hat, checked out and sat on the curb which was cleaner and seemed safer to me than sitting in my hotel room, which didn’t even have an alarm clock or television set. Finally at 6:30am, my cab came to pick me up and take me back to the airport. I don’t even know the name of that motel, nor do I care to try and remember it!"

-Rebecca Shott

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