Transcript of Armchair Anonymous: Hotel II

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Jennifer Buckmire.

Wow.

We have crazy hotel stories today. Feels very appropriate. It's summertime, people are traveling. Someone might be listening to this on the bed of a hotel.

If you're on a trip, just check for bed bugs.

I heard that, but I'm not gonna do it.

I am.

You are?

I'm never not doing that now.

I don't think I can see them at this point with my eyesight being what it is. Please enjoy Crazy Hotel Stories.

Hello. Hi.

Jesse, where are you?

So I am in Manchester in the UK.

Oh, home of my girlfriend from high school.

That's right. Yeah, one of them.

How did you end up in Manchester?

My boyfriend is from Manchester.

Is he a rugby player?

Actually football. Well, soccer.

Does he have the sexiest legs?

He does. He's very sexy legs, a very sexy accent, very typical British.

And are you guys super into the World Cup right now then?

We are, although we're rooting for different teams.

Oh no, a house divided.

Who are you rooting for?

I'm rooting for France because I'm originally from France, and he's actually not rooting for England. He's rooting for Portugal.

Oh, okay.

Does he have a friend on the team or something? What's that allegiance?

No, his family's from Northern Ireland, so I think he feels more connected to Northern Ireland, so he's now rooting for Portugal because he doesn't want England to win.

I got it.

Yeah, he's a bit of a traitor.

An enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine.

That's right.

Okay, so you have a hotel story.

I do. So just to set the scene, this was 2014. So I just graduated high school and I was almost 18, and I'd worked at this hotel through high school. But because I graduated and I wanted to go traveling, I decided to just work there full-time for a year so that I could save money.

Was this in Toronto? Where was this at? Montreal?

This was in the south of France. So this was right next to my hometown. I don't sound French, but I am.

But didn't you say Canada as well?

They met in Canada.

Oh, met in Canada. You're straight French.

I'm straight French.

This is so confusing. You don't have an iota of an accent.

Wow.

Am I being catfished right now, Jesse?

You know what, you're not the first person to tell me that. I've had to show my passport to people and my birth certificate to prove that I actually am from France, but I traveled a lot in my childhood. I never developed an accent.

Wow, that's cool. Okay, so you're working at a hotel in the south of France. Is it a fancy hotel?

No, it's very mom-and-pop, 20 rooms, 5 floors, like very very chill, right by the beach. Still to this day, best job I've ever had. I had a great schedule. I just would work the breakfast shift, and then my coworker would relieve me or finish the breakfast shift around 10 when she got in. And then I would go up into the rooms, clean the rooms, do the turnovers, and I would be done by like 2 or 3. So then I would just go straight to the beach.

Oh, lovely.

I lived in the hotel, so it was also a really nice way to have independence. I didn't have to be at home.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

This was a few months into the summer season. And this couple in their 60s. I never saw people check in because I was already gone at that point, so I would always meet guests around the breakfast time. That would be like my first impression of them, and then my second impression of them would be when I went in to clean their rooms, because you can tell a lot by people by the way they keep their hotel rooms.

I think we could do 2 hours on this, couldn't we, Monica? I want to know what you know. Yeah, I want to know what you would think of our respective rooms.

I think I do Pretty good.

I don't let anyone clean my room. Let's start there. You must like that kind of guest, right?

You know what? I like it until when they check out and they complain that nobody cleaned their room.

Oh, no, no, no, no. That's ridiculous.

That wouldn't be you.

Right.

I hang the sign on my door the second I get there, "Do not disturb." And if I'm there for a week, it never comes off.

That's great. And so this couple, nothing out of the ordinary. Very sweet. Weirdly clean. Even when I walked into the room, everything was kind of off the bed so I could make it. Everything was neat and tidy. And they were staying for a whole week. Whole week, which is quite rare to have such long stays. It's a small town. There's not that much to do. You can basically get it done within, like, 3, 4 days max. And so about 2, 3 days into their week-long stay, the woman comes down screaming bloody murder. It's about 9:00 AM. She's running down the stairs and starts yelling that there's a rat in her room. Ooh! And that there's droppings everywhere.

Ew!

Oh, boy.

And it's disgusting and she doesn't know what to do and she's just complaining, which naturally there's a rat in your room, fair enough.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But me and my coworker are kind of listening to her and we've never had a rat issue. We're by the sea, so we've had a lot of ant problems. We've had seagulls going into the rooms cuz when the window's wide open and people leave their food, the seagulls kind of smell it from the beach and then they go into the room. So we've had those issues before. But she's on the 5th floor. We've never had rats. It feels a little off, but we kind of just, with the benefit of the doubt, we're like, okay, well, we have to go and check this out.

Is she English or French or neither?

She's French. She's from Paris, which won't mean much to a lot of people, but being from the south of France, we don't like Parisians.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, tell me why.

It's kind of a thing, like, between the north and the south. We don't really like each other. And so I remember telling my coworker, I was like, oh, she's from Paris. No wonder she found a rat. It's probably just like a really big bug or something like that.

It's like snotty, like Parisians are uppity.

A little bit.

This comforts me a bit because I find that the Parisians hate my guts when I'm there. And it's just nice to know that y'all are hating each other too.

They hate everybody's guts.

Okay, good. I'm not taking it personal.

Parisians don't think of France as a country. They think it's Paris and then the rest is just like wilderness.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we're kind of not really taking it seriously, but my coworker's terrified of rats.

She's like, I don't want to go.

I don't want to go. Me, on the other hand, And I love to prove people wrong, especially guests. So I go up and I open the room, and the first thing I notice is I thought I went into the wrong room because I open up the door and this couple that had been super neat and tidy, the room looks ransacked, like completely turned over. There's chips on the floor, there's cheese on the floor for the rats, peanut butter on the wall. It just looks completely ransacked.

I wonder if they relapsed. It sounds like they checked in sober and then had a big relapse.

Oh my God, weird. Okay.

So I'm just walking in and I think, okay, well, this is a little strange, but we'll take a look. And I'm looking over fully expecting to see nothing. And then I see little rat droppings.

Oh.

Ew. And I'm thinking, well, this is strange, but okay. And I continue to look and I hear a squeak. And I'm looking over, I head into the bathroom and lo and behold, there's a rat. Curled up under the sink in the bathroom.

Ew!

Oh, wow.

Just sleeping there. Oh, did he look cute?

I was expecting a big, like, sewer rat or maybe even, like, a field rat, something really gross. He was pretty small, probably the size of my hand. And he was black and white and just looked terrified.

Oh, yeah.

And the first thing I thought was, I wonder if my mom will let me bring him home as a pet. He looks adorable. I felt bad for him. I was like, I can't believe you're stuck in this room with that awful lady screaming. And so as I'm kind of thinking this out loud, trying to figure out I'm going to grab him. Something clicked, and I start scanning the room, and I'm looking around, and I see a waste bin. And so I go in, and I start rifling through it, and I see a receipt. And I look at the receipt, and I'm reading it, and I had to read it twice because I was just so shocked. And right there, there was a purchase for a pet rat bought the day before.

Oh my gosh. Now you've stumbled into a case. You're investigating now.

That's a domestic rat mouse.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

So this poor guy thought he was going to be a pet, and then he just gets turned loose in a room full of cheese and peanut butter.

Although that sounds fun for him.

Sounds like Eden.

It was just kind of shocking, and I didn't really know what to do with it. I grabbed the receipt. Well, I put the rat in this little box. We had brought up this like shoe box with holes in it. So I managed to kind of wrangle him in. He didn't really move, which is another thing. I'm like, you're used to being handled, clearly. I go downstairs, check the 4 digits of the credit card on the receipt against the credit card that we had on file for them.

You're an inspector.

You're an inspector.

I was on it.

I love this.

You're Veronica Mars.

They both match. And we walk up to this lady and we're just like, so you don't have a rat in your room. You bought a rat and you set it loose in the room, spreading food around so that he would poop and that there would be droppings everywhere. She's kind of going against it, which was weird. She was saying, I don't know how that got here. I've never seen this receipt. There was also a full pet store bag. We later came to find out it had, like, the logo and everything.

They bought merch.

They're wearing a sweatshirt from the pet store.

Uh, Bites, Grabs, or whatever.

It was just a really cute sweatshirt.

We didn't really know what to do. And we said, well, obviously you're not getting a refund because she had been asking while I was upstairs. She was trying to get a refund and we were trying to see if we could process anything. And then the second I showed up with the receipt, my boss, being a lovely lady that she is, just said, you're done. Pack your stuff. Please leave. You're not getting a refund. And we also asked her if they wanted to keep the rat because they bought it for about €8, I think, like $9. But we just ended up bringing it back to the pet store later that day. And then we had to go around and call all the other hotels and kind of warn them that they were doing this weird little scam. It's a small hotel. You just don't want that happening in a small town. Maybe if it was a bigger hotel, they have more money to lose, but word of mouth is so important in that industry. At that level of like small, small mom-and-pop hotels, that it would have just ruined us.

Wow, what a racket. I want to interview them. I want to know how many trips they've taken for $9. I bet a ton.

Did they look normal?

They looked honestly fine. I spoke to them at breakfast. They were excited to be in town, and they definitely felt Parisian.

I don't think they were Parisian. I think that was part of their scam to say that they're Parisian.

Yeah, because they know—

yeah, they know that feels uppity, so no one would expect them to be scam to be trafficking in rats.

Wow, 8-year-old rats.

That's wild.

Wow, what a unique couple. I'm kind of proud of them. No, I'm glad you busted them, but also look at them out there just trying to figure out how to vacation for $8. Really good hustle, because most people aren't gonna dig through the trash.

If that were here, I think they'd be like, that's privacy. They would sue the hotel for going through the trash and get even more money.

Yeah, no, thankfully they left without an actual fight. They did kind of deny it.

Do you ever go back and stay at that little hotel?

I haven't been back in a while. I actually haven't been back to France in years, unfortunately. I love it. We're going back this summer so that my partner can meet my family.

Lovely.

But I haven't really stayed there. It changed. My old boss isn't there anymore. It's a nice phase, and I have an idea of what it was, and I just don't want to ruin it with what it potentially is now.

Right, right, right, right. Well, Jesse, what a fun caper.

Yeah, this was a mouse caper.

Thanks so much for having me.

Well, have a beautiful summer, and I hope your team wins and your partner is sad. That's what I hope.

Yeah, I hope that.

Me too.

All right, well, lovely meeting you, Desi.

Lovely meeting you guys.

Bye.

All right, bye. Hi!

Hi!

You look a little bit like Elizabeth, Monica's friend.

Elizabeth Lane?

Yeah, a little bit.

Oh, thank you. I'll take that as a compliment.

It is a compliment. Where are you, Kate?

I am in Minnesota.

That's the place to be this time of year, but only this time of year.

I don't know, I really like the winter. I like winter sports. I like being in the cold. I was born in the winter, so I am all for the winter in Minnesota.

When you're watching Game of Thrones and they say winter is coming, you go, ooh, you go, ooh, can't wait.

No, maybe not that much into winter, but it's definitely a good time of year. You just got to get used to it. Got to dress right.

And are you by Minneapolis?

I'm about an hour northwest of Minneapolis, so I'm closer to the St. Cloud area.

Do you do any snowmobiling in the winter?

I don't. My in-laws are really into it. They take big trips and do it a lot. But I am scared of fast. I'm not like you, Dax. I am very cautious when it comes to motorized vehicles and motorcycles and stuff like that.

We need all of us.

Yes.

Yes.

You have a hotel story.

I do, yes. So in 2021, my husband and I went to a wedding. It actually takes place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is where the wedding was, and the reception was in this hotel. So we were staying at the hotel where the reception was, and it's about 9:30, 10 o'clock. I'm a huge grandma when it comes to going out, so I was like, it's time for me to go to bed. I will see you guys tomorrow. I say goodnight to everybody. Probably 20 or 30 minutes, I've changed into my pajamas, I'm laying in bed. My husband calls me from the wedding and says, hey, make sure the door is locked and lock the deadbolt. And I'm immediately like, what? And he goes, just do it, just to make me feel better. Somebody just came through the wedding. He seemed like he might have been on drugs, was saying weird stuff like, they're after me, things like that. And so I'm like, okay, freaking out. In hindsight, my husband probably should have just come up to the room and been with me, but I think he had been drinking. He didn't want to seem like he was being too anxious or anything like that.

So I, being the true crime fan that I am, decide Not only am I locking the door, I'm changing out of my pajamas into my regular clothes. I am going to put the ironing board in front of my door, and then I'm gonna grab my big hairspray bottle, and I'm gonna use that as mace because I've determined in my head this psychopath is coming straight to me in my room out of all the hundreds of rooms in this hotel.

Yeah, I was gonna ask, there's a few rewrites I'd put on your husband. One is probably don't even need to make that call. You got a couple hundred rooms, the odds of selecting your room Secondly, the lock is sufficient that's already there. If this person's gonna try to kick the door, then the deadbolt at that point's a little moot. I don't know if I would have riled up everyone over this.

I would want my husband to just be like, hey, I would want that little heads up.

Don't answer the door for a stranger, right?

Like, there's a little weirdo around, just, you know, be alert. I'll be partying down here.

I'm thinking active shooter. Deadbolt the door, hide under the bed.

I added that.

I always deadbolt.

They had to come back to the room, so I wasn't going to deadbolt it yet. But so then probably 20-30 minutes after he calls me, I hear pop pop pop pop pop pop pop, and I am pretty confident at that point that there was shooting happening. Yeah, yeah. So I call my husband back. By the time I get my husband on the phone, the fire alarms are now going off. My husband picks up and I hear him talking, everybody get out, everybody get out! And I'm like, Mia, I need to leave. He goes, no, no, Kate, you shelter in place. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, what is happening? Why is the wedding party being evacuated but I'm sheltering in place? I am very anxious. I'm freaking out. What is going on? These alarms are going off. So they're clearing out the wedding. All the other hotel guests are being sheltered in place. Finally, after I don't know how much time has passed, but the fire alarm stopped going off, and now I hear the police going door to door for all the hotel rooms, knocking on the door saying, please, please open up. And I'm assuming at this point they're looking for the shooter, they don't know where he is.

So finally they get to my door. Please, please open up. I open the door, and when I open the door, I realize now I have been anxiously peeing this whole time, like going to the bathroom, but I also haven't been flushing because I'm like, the shooter's gonna hear me flush and he's gonna come to me.

I thought you meant in your pain. Pants.

Oh, I just realized now I'm talking to this officer, I've pooped 6 times in my pants.

I did think that.

It's in the toilet. But so now all I can think about is they're gonna think I'm a freak who doesn't ever flush the toilet because it's just filled with pee and toilet paper. Like, I'm no longer anxious about this active shooter, I'm just anxious that these police officers who I don't know and will never see again are gonna think I'm a weirdo.

Will judge you. Right, for going pee pee.

Oh my God, there's so many things to be anxious about in this world.

Then they obviously clear my room, they leave, after which they come back and they escort me down to the wedding party. My husband had finally asked them to come get me so that I could be with him and our friends. And him and all of our friends had to be questioned by the police because they saw that guy run through the wedding. I guess there was more things that they could have been witnesses to, so they ended up being not held by the police but like asked to wait by the police until like 2 or 3 in the morning is finally when they were like, okay, we can be done, like, go on, get out of here. By that point, none of us were gonna stay in the hotel. We were all ready to to hightail it out of there. So we pretty much packed our bags and we drove all the way home to Minneapolis.

Oh wow.

Wow.

The next day we found out from the news what had really happened was the police were called for shots fired in the hotel, which we didn't hear the original shots fired, but when they were going door to door for welfare checks on the hotel guests, they were met with gunfire from a separate person. Like not even who they were called for.

Oh my goodness.

So the police ended up up getting shot at, and 3 police officers were injured from this.

No way.

So it turned out to be like this way bigger deal than what they were originally even called for.

So that guy had nothing to do with it?

He's the red herring.

It was totally random, like just happened to stumble upon this other crazy person.

God, you just gotta wonder if the police ever randomly went to a hotel, knocked on every single door, if that's awaiting at every hotel. That's just so crazy.

It was intense. We were only a floor above the shooting. I just feel so heavily for the people like on the same floor. There was like a mom and a child right next to it, so much closer and so much more affected than I was. But it was insane. And for a long time we were like, we're never going back to Milwaukee, as if it couldn't happen anywhere.

Yeah, scary boy.

Yeah, Kate, we're so different. One time Bree and I were at this terrible hotel on the side of the I-5 in Stockton. Clearly the guy next door is dealing drugs. There's people in and out, and sure enough, there was a gunshot in the middle of the We just stayed.

Yeah. If we weren't in a group of people, we would have stayed. But because there are so many of us, we were like, whatever, we can all just make a thing of it.

And are they still married?

They're still married. I have only ever met them at their wedding because they're my husband's college friends and they live far away from us. Okay. But to my Facebook knowledge, they are still happily married. And besides that happening, it was a really beautiful wedding and very fun until the very end.

And very memorable for everyone.

That's true. Sucks on your wedding.

I hope they take it as like rain on your wedding means good luck.

Exactly.

Well, it rained bullets.

Well, Kate, it's so nice to meet you. We're so delighted to have someone as nice as you listening.

Yeah, you're very sweet.

Thank you so much, you guys.

All right, have a great summer. Winter will be here soon. Don't get impatient.

That's true.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

All right, bye.

Hello.

Hi, can you hear me?

Beautifully. Is your name Savvy?

Abby.

It is.

Oh my God, I've never met a Savvy. I'm sure you hear that often.

All the time. I usually on the phone get Abby, Gabby, or once Debbie.

And do you just go with it like I do?

All the time, until later when— because I own my own company and they're like, well, we talked to an Abby, and I'm like, I promise you didn't.

And how did your parents come up with Savvy?

Savannah.

Oh, cute.

And are you from Georgia?

I am.

Maybe you and Monica were on the same Savannah streets as kids.

We probably crossed paths. Part of the story goes into that a little bit.

Oh, oh my God, this is so exciting.

Let's hear it, Savvy.

Let's go.

Okay, it's gonna start in 2022, off the tail end of COVID and I had completely switched careers and gone into hotels. I've always been part of customer service, so I was like, I'm gonna like this. And I got a job for a pretty well-known hotel chain in Athens, Georgia. Oh, and if you know where the Classic Center is, it was right across the street.

Okay, got it.

I started in hotels. I loved it. I worked every position, and by the tail end, I was head of housekeeping, which I didn't want to do. But if you want to move up in hotels, you have to learn every position. Ended up loving it. It was one of my favorite positions.

Tell me why really quick. What was the bennies of housekeeping?

It was the staff. I loved my staff and it was hard, dirty work. And at the end of each day, you high-fived and felt good about the work you did.

Great.

So I'm in this hotel and I'm not loving it and I'm wanting a change. And my best friend who lived in Colorado, we've been friends for over 15 years now. She was like, you need a change in your life. Come out here. I have some ideas I wanna run by you. I was like, okay. So me and my boyfriend went to visit. She's like, I wanna buy a business with you. And I'm like, I'm like, okay, I need to move to Colorado. So that was in January, and I decided to move to Colorado in May. So during this time, I was like, well, buying a business, I've never done that before, it's going to take some time. I think I need a job in between that. I got a job offer from a— and I can't say it— but a pretty well-known haunted hotel in Colorado.

Oh, okay, great. A lot of clues there.

Very famous, very haunted. I was very excited.

Sure.

Yeah.

And getting this job wasn't easy. They paid me a lot of money. I think I may have sold my soul for it for this year that I worked here because we get out there and I kind of knew from my first day within 30 minutes I may have made a mistake. Oh, wow.

30? That fast?

Oh, boy.

The first 30 minutes I meet my boss. The position I had was a front desk manager. She said, well, we're really in our busy season right now and you're going to be working a lot of 12-hour days, probably 6 to 7 days a week. We'll give you a day off here or there. And I kind of stated, well, that was not in my contract. I'm a 40-hour work week. Obviously, I know I'll work a little bit, but I'm salary. That doesn't come with overtime. We had 400 people coming in and out every day. Our check-in time, even thinking about it now, my stomach hurts a little bit.

400?

Wild.

4 o'clock always was doomsday because that's check-in time. And if that room's not ready, you're going to be yelled at.

It sounds like the type of hotel people are only staying for a night or two, not like a week.

Only could afford to stay one night.

Oh, okay.

Turnover's high. The complaints are high because it's definitely a destination. So this was a very hard job. Just setting the stage. Every day there was a fire to put out. There was a ghost to be seen, a customer complaint. I had been working there for about 6 months. I got my feet under me, and there used to be 2 office managers, so me and another person, and we would kind of divvy up stuff. I mainly worked mornings until around 5:30, 6. They would come in around 4. We'd overlap, go over the day, they'd finish out the day, starts over the next day, and you would just keep rotating like that. When I was gone There was always someone supposed to be on shift covering. At this time, they had fired the other front desk manager, so I was kind of taking on everything. And with that paycheck, you're kind of expected to be on call 24/7. Things happen. And I was also required to live within 10 miles.

Oh, wow.

Because things happen. And so it was a day off. I have my phone on, but I'm at home. I'm relaxing. And I may have been partaking in things Coloradans partake in some edibles. Feeling good. I'm cleaning my house and I get a phone call and it's my supervisor. So not the manager, just my guy who's on. And it's around 5:00. So people are checking in and I'm like, hey, what's up? And he's like, um, housekeeping just came. They're about to leave for the day. There is a room we can't get into. And I was like, okay, let's go through the process. When were they due to check out? They were due to check out this morning.

Okay.

Did we knock on the door? Yes, we knocked on the door.

Okay.

Do we call the cell phone number of the room? Who? The person who signed in.

You have to have a cell phone number to check in.

We called.

No answer.

Do we call the room? We called, no answer. So I'm going through those processes and I said, well, you need to go to maintenance. In hotels, even though you lock your door, we can get into your hotel room if we need to. We were very limited of who had those master keys. And so I go, go to maintenance, have them make you a master key. And the way my supervisor's talking, he's like, can you come in? And I'm like, ugh, yes.

Ugh.

So I asked my husband to drive me in. Husband, or my boyfriend at the time. But I was like, can you drive me into work? It's 5 minutes down the road. And he's like, yeah, of course. And I was like, and will you wait here while I go in? And so I get there and I'm on the phone with my supervisor and he's like, well, we got the door open, they're dead.

Okay.

In all of your hoteling, was that the first corpse of your career? No, right?

Okay.

I was gonna say, my grandparents owned— I don't know what it was— a 36-room motel on the border of Indiana. My grandma found dead bodies like once every 6 months, I think, because people go to hotels to kill themselves.

100%.

Yeah. Wow. Okay, so it wasn't your first rodeo?

Wasn't my first rodeo, but first rodeo in a very stressful environment with people who weren't prepared for this. So I go up to the room, and the old school chain, it's one of those, so we can get the door open. And I'm trying to move my hand, I'm like, I can't get it. So we go get the tool, we get it open, and it is what we all think it is. This kid, I will say, checked in the night before. One of my very close friends had checked him in, so they had to do a police report. But here starts the process of hotel work. When you're in a hotel of this capacity and you have people who have reserved their rooms a year in advance, they've paid a lot of money, this is a one-time experience for them, you don't want them to know what's going on. This hotel is also very, very, very old, and we have one elevator. This happened to be on the fourth floor. The fourth floor is my most popular floor because it has all the haunted rooms.

Okay, and now another.

Yeah, now a new one.

I've oversold this hotel by 3 rooms, so I need this room. Now I have probably 4 people who aren't going to stay in said hotel that they wanted to stay in. And so I'm thinking of how I'm going to do this, and I obviously have to call the police. I have to call HR. So my HR person is coming in as well, and they're talking to me. I just got on scene, this is what's happening. My housekeeping staff was not okay that day. I sent them all home, and I tried to just get everyone as far away I have to shut this floor down in a sense, and it's got over 40 rooms on it. And I'm trying to talk to the police about, you don't want people knowing what's going on behind the scenes. Just go get free drinks, here's some coupons, go away please. That's how all hotels are. You have fires in the background, but nothing, everything's fine guys, just keep going. So I don't want them to put up the crime scene tape, but they will. The police of this city were so wonderful. They took care of everything. It was very stressful.

I don't know how they did it. I think they went down the back stairs. I have to do a police report with the HR person who's also like, "Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you—" And I'm, "Yes, I'm fine. I'm just really inebriated right now and did not expect this on my day off." My staff at the front desk is not doing well either. So I have to kind of handle things with them. And I don't mean this as a joke. "Do you need therapy? Do you need to talk to someone? I can have someone come out." They were like, were awesome though. It was just very traumatic. I go through the records of the night before. These walls are thin. You can hear people throughout the walls. It's such an old hotel. No one heard anything. It was a gunshot.

Oh really? Did he have like a silencer on the gun or something?

That's crazy. He didn't. The rooms next door were full of people. The other thing is now you have cleanup. So the next day I come in after everything with the police, and I'm talking to HR, and they're like, well, can we do it? And I was like, no, I'm not doing it. No. I was like, you can either pay for therapy for your whole housekeeping staff, or you can pay a company. I promise you're going to want to pay a company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Also, what about like biohazard stuff? I mean, there's like blood everywhere.

This hotel may not have followed a lot of rules. For sure. We get a company out, they take care of everything, which is nice. So when you're in a hotel, you have to have a room inspection before the room goes out. Theoretically, you should never have a complaint about a room because it's been cleaned and it's been inspected. Things happen. But I was going to do my inspection. I was feeling weird about going in this room. I had seen everything that had happened. The kid was very young. It messed with me for a couple weeks after this. I go in there and I'm like, all right, it's looking good. Oh my God, they did not get the ceiling. No.

Oh, oh boy.

Can you imagine if I checked someone into that room? Into the horror hotel?

Exactly. They would think you were doing it as a joke. Yeah, like as a shtick.

Oh cool, they put ketchup on the ceiling.

I promise you, I would have went with it. Yeah, exactly. It was awful. So I called maintenance and I was like, I have a problem. And they're like, what? And I explain it. We'll be right there. They painted the ceiling for me right then and there. I sold that room. That room sold for the night.

People had no idea that 24 hours earlier, the bed they were laying in—

so isn't that wild? I actually hate this.

I wonder if I've ever been in a room like within 24 hours. Yeah, of course we all wonder that now.

Working in hotels ruined me because any hotel I stay in, I check for bed bugs. Oh no, you should check your corners of your mattresses. And I always just kind of do a glance over, what are we working with here? But it's very sad. This was a very awful story. I ended up finding the kid on Facebook because he was missing for a while. We kind of helped the police find who he was through some Facebook posts because a lot goes into this. It's not just, oh, it happened. And I think maybe people think this when they stay in a hotel, I'm never going to see these people again, so I don't care what I do to this room, right? And so I'm happy his family didn't have to find them. It's selfish, but I understand.

It's like they don't want to ruin their house. They don't want to burden the people in their lives with cleaning up the way you guys had to.

I mean, I think they think they're doing everyone a favor, but I think it's also, you know, like when dogs go to die and they go away, they like go into like the forest and they just want to be not in their environment. In a way, it's kind of like that.

Yeah, that too, I'm sure.

The peace I got from this, because I still had to work there for quite some time after this, but where they had positioned themselves, they were looking right out the window, and it was such a beautiful view. And I only hope that in that moment that maybe they had a sense of peace that they had been just looking for. And we kind of— I don't say joke because it's nothing to joke about, but we said maybe they get to be part of the other ghosts at this hotel.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Did you see any those?

Yeah, I was going to ask that.

Oh, all the time. Oh, oh, all the time. Multiple times where I would work a night shift there because someone called out, and you have to do hotel walks. So you're walking through the hotel, you're just checking, making sure no one's being too rowdy, making sure nothing's out of the ordinary. And there are these long hallways, so I'd be walking and then all of a sudden I'd hear a whisper, just a whisper behind me, and you turn around, there's no one there. Oh, multiple times if I was cleaning a room, because I would jump in and help housekeeping, doors would slam. The doors would get stuck and you're like, please don't do this to me, please, please. And it would open. But there were constantly people coming and showing us photos. We took this photo in our room last night. Do you see the shadow? Yes, we see it. You can submit that and we'll put that on our website. Oh wow, this is like a whole subculture.

It is. I bet my cousin stayed there. My cousin, you know, is obsessed with ghosts and he's like a ghost tourist. Oh wow. Yeah, he takes vacations to all these haunted places. A lot of famous people too. I'm gonna guess Nic Cage has stayed at that hotel. Seems like a ghost hunter. I could see that.

I could totally see that.

Well, Savvy, currently you're in hospitality but not a hotel.

I ended up buying my business. Oh, okay, great. And it's going well? It's stressful, but I work with my best friend, my then boyfriend, now husband. We got married in February. He gave up real estate to come work for me because I needed help. And so it's kind of like my whole family now, and it's a wild dream. And I tell myself every day, you can't fail if you don't give up.

Do you want to shout it out? What's the business? Yeah, what's the business?

I'll say it's a sign company. So we're a women-owned sign company. Oh, okay. We do everything from vehicle wraps to billboards to huge monument signs. It's a very male-dominated industry, so there's only a few of these women-owned ones. Ones. Love it.

Yeah, and printing in general is very male.

We actually just had a job come in that my employee was like, come look at this, and I was like, is that a— oh, this is very erotic.

Oh yeah, I'm sure you get a lot of fun requests.

Will you print this?

Absolutely, love to. Well, Savvy, it's a delight meeting you.

Nice meeting you. It was so nice meeting you guys.

All right, well, take care. Have a great summer. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Hi, Lauren, where are you? Hi, I'm at work in Southern Orange County.

This is an inviting space. What do you think I am?

I think you're a therapist.

That's a great pick, but I'm thinking medical.

Monica nailed it. Yes, I'm a therapist. Oh, wonderful. Oh, wow. But I'm sitting on the couch, not in my chair, because I'm at work and I had clients before and I have clients after.

We don't have closets. It looks like a very inviting therapeutic space. I've sat on many couches like that.

Do people ever fall asleep on the couch?

Yes. So I'm an anxiety and OCD specialist. My boss actually worked with Allegra and Kimberly for many years. Oh, wow. Cool. What they do is what I do all day, and so I do a lot of meditation and mindfulness stuff. And yeah, they fall asleep sometimes.

I gotta imagine you're in a tricky situation. Like, once they start snoring, great, we know for sure what's happening. But I bet there's a confusing zone where it's like, oh shit, are they out?

1,000%. And when I do a lot of virtual therapy too, and then it's really awkward. And usually you're doing, okay, and wiggle your toes and fingers and start to blink your eyes open. And then I'll wait a minute and I'll repeat it again. And sometimes I just call it out. I'm like, you totally fell You didn't do this. I also just want to thank you guys as a therapist, your guys's vulnerability and humility and ability to really like correct things and update yourself and keep learning. It's so cool. And I talk about your guys's content with clients all the time. In fact, was it Cohen? This Gets So Effective? I just shared that podcast like 2 hours ago with a client.

That makes us really happy because we play it a little fast and loose. We get into some depths that maybe sometimes I worry like, God, I wonder how the psychology community feels about us wandering into this stuff. I'm relieved to hear that feedback. What are we gonna say, the only problem is when I'm diagnosing people?

Well, no, I mean, the expert is the expert. I don't ever feel guilty about that. Yeah, like, whatever you say or I say should be taken with a massive grain of salt, but the expert, sure.

If you're a listener, you know you guys aren't claiming to be experts about it.

One time I did say— what did I say? We had a funny moment where I said, in something we say— oh, it wasn't in anthropology because that would have been somewhat legit, but I said, like, no, you know, in psychology we say, or I said something like that to be funny one time. Monica's like, hold on a second, there's no we. Okay, so you have a crazy hotel story. I do, yeah.

And I originally submitted this for a different prompt, but I won't tell you what that prompt is until the end. So this takes place in 2010 in San Diego, in the Gaslamp District to be exact.

For people who haven't been, beautiful, historic, looks like Charleston, South Carolina. Super cute, very busy.

Me and my 5 girlfriends were down in San Diego for the weekend for my girlfriend Bree Bree's parents fostered a young gentleman, and he was graduating from the Pendleton Marine Corps boot camp. So we were there for that weekend and celebrating him, and it was really cool. It was the 5 of us and Bree's parents. So we were spending the night in the Gaslamp District in a hotel that is very reputable. I won't share their name, but everyone knows it. It's a 10-story building right in the heart. It was about 5 o'clock. We finished up everything at the Marine Corps base, and Bree's parents were like, okay, go upstairs, change, do whatever you need to we're gonna go to dinner in 20, 30 minutes. So we all go upstairs to the 8th floor. The 5 of us girls go in our bedroom. Bree's parents go down the hall to their bedroom. And as 22-year-olds do, we turn on music and we're chatting and dancing, shooting the shit. For context, the hotel room is a U-shape. And so like, if you start at the top of the side of the U, it's the door and a kitchenette with a little table table, and then windows, 2 queen beds, and then the bathroom on the other side of the U.

So if you're in the bathroom or on the beds, you can't see the front door area. I'm sitting in the bathroom peeing. My other girlfriend is in there doing her makeup, as us girls do. Oh yeah. Uh, another girl is right outside the bathroom, one's on the bed, and then my girlfriend Allie is in the kitchenette area. Allie hears a pounding on the door, and it had been about maybe 15 minutes since Free's parents left us, and So thinking confidently, it must be Bri's parents coming to say, hey, time's up, let's go. She just confidently stands up, opens the door nice and wide. Oh, wow. And who's standing there but a 40-something-year-old man with really sketchy tattoos on his face and neck. He's very clearly drugged out on something. He's got an LA Dodgers tattoo on his neck that was probably done behind bars. And he's wearing a floor-length black trench coat. Yeah, yeah, I'm peeing. So this is all what I'm hearing from Ali afterwards, but he says to her, I'm an undercover cop and I've been shot and I really need your help. So Ali realizes immediately, I'm gonna back up and get out of here.

And so she placates him, right? And she says, no big deal, I'll totally help you, let me get my phone. And she kind of goes to back up and close the door, and when she does that, he pushes it in, grabs her, comes in the room, closes the top lock, and they start wrestling. Oh my God, he starts sexually assaulting her, like putting down her pants and ripping out her jeans. So I hear pound at the door, loud scuffle, screams, arguing, and the next thing I know, my girlfriend Mara runs in the bathroom and is screaming like I've never seen her scream before. Allie's being attacked! There's a man in our room! Oh wow. I'm the Monica of the group. We've had more than one instance where I've had to call 911, and I had my phone with me, and so So I immediately call 911. I jumped in the shower, which was right next to the bathroom, and start pounding on the wall because I knew it shared a wall with another hotel room. So I was like, I'm gonna beat the shit out of this wall hoping that someone can hear us screaming bloody murder while I'm calling 911.

And this all feels like it was 15 minutes, but it was seconds, probably. He probably was in our room for 2 minutes max. But Mara then realizes, I'm gonna get my phone and call Bree's parents who are down the call. She opens the bathroom door, goes to grab her phone from the nightstand, and now we can see them. They're wrestling on the bed. He's trying to pin Allie down on the bed.

Oh my God. And he knows there's other people in there.

Well, did he know there were other people?

We don't know, so we don't think so. But there was 3 of us in the bathroom. He didn't see us until that moment. And so Mara goes to reach for her phone, and I'll never forget it, he stops dead in his tracks, stares Tamara right in the eyes, and like, he doesn't let go of Ally, but he stops and he says, if you grab your fucking phone, I'm gonna kill your fucking friend. And I can hear the dispatch saying, listen to him, don't move, because he's got a trench coat on. We have no idea, he's not in his right mind, so we don't know what to do. So she just says, listen to him. So we do, we stand there, we freeze. But Ally has been wrestling with him for a minute now, so she's like, fuck this, you guys, like, let's get out of here. And she screams to Bree, run, run, Bree. So Bree literally jumps over them, runs, gets out, and she turns right and sprints down towards her parents' room. He follows Bree, goes right, falls, as luck would have it, and then he goes left and goes to the stairwell.

So about 5 minutes later, police showed up, and of course they take all of our statements and swabs off of Allie. They take all of Allie's clothes and stuff. And maybe 20 minutes into them getting our statements and stuff, the police get a call saying We have him. We think we have him downstairs. We need Allie to come down and ID him. And it was him. He left our hotel room again, 8th floor. There was a Fleming Steakhouse that was basically attached to the hotel. And he went into the steakhouse, went into the women's restroom, hid in a stall, and then another young woman came in to use the bathroom and he sexually assaulted her as well. Oh my God. Rampage. And luckily the bathroom must have been next to the kitchen staff or something because they were able to help her out and tackle him until the police came. So that is where he got arrested. But a couple more little fun details to add. We found out later that night that he actually was on the 9th floor before coming down to our floor, and he tried to get into another room that had 2 or 3 women in it as well.

I don't know how or what they did, but they were able to keep him out of the room. And so he then came down to us.

Oh my God, he was in no hurry or fear. I know. Yeah, you would think if you were thwarted once, you would like get scared and run out of the hotel, not go down to the 8th floor. Wow.

We don't know if he saw us at any point or just got lucky or heard us, because our hotel room wasn't right next to the elevator or anything. Even more interesting, little cherry on top, is he had been paroled 5 days before his incidents with us. So come to find out, he had a litany of charges of burglary, robbery, drug charges, assault charges stemming in Santa Barbara from the '90s.

Maybe you guys crossed paths. Yeah, truly, I'm afraid I might know this person. You might.

And so because of that, he ended up pleading guilty. He had a bunch of charges, and he is serving 55 years to life for everything he did.

Whoa. Oh my— What photo do I have here that we haven't looked at Yeah, yeah, you have a photo of him.

Oh, I can't wait to see.

Maybe I'll, I'll know him.

Like, oh, it's Steve.

Oh, oh, he looks like I was expecting him to look. Yeah, that's terrifying. Thank God your friend fought so hard. I know, valiantly. She's a gangster.

No one was seriously hurt, but obviously there was some emotional trauma and some trauma responses that come for a while. But we're all still best friends. And oh, I wrote in or cautionary tale, always look through the peephole.

Definitely big time.

If we had looked through the peephole, this would have never happened. So I'm constantly telling, especially young women, but telling anyone, like, look through the fucking peephole no matter what.

Scary. Oh, very— I'm so happy everyone was—

did she shake it off, or has she had like kind of residual—

she's probably had less residual stuff than the rest of us. I think we had a lot of guilt. We've all had to stay in the gas lamp since then, and I've definitely had my fair share of panic attacks related to it.

It is wild, the maze of the traumatized mind, because it's like so often the painful thing or hard thing to get over isn't the Russell laying on the bed. It's like the guilt of I didn't look through a peephole, the guilt of I didn't run and jump on his back. It's like all this guilt we put on ourselves after the fact, which is so sad because we didn't do anything. I know, we just made like less great decisions in a very heightened and then we judge ourselves as if that was our game plan we thought of.

All of us learned what we do when fight or flight happens and got to prepare. Like, I know I will call 911. I know I'm probably not gonna fight usually. Like, that isn't my instinct. My instinct is to fix somehow. But it's helpful, 'cause people are always like, "Oh, I know I'm gonna fight." I thought I would have too.

Right. Mike Tyson's famous quote, "Everyone's got a game plan till they get punched in the nose." knows. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, Lauren, it's lovely meeting you.

So nice to meet you. Thanks for that story.

I think you have lucky clients. Oh, I appreciate that.

Thank you guys so much.

Guys, look at that peephole. I think you just helped a lot of listeners.

That's my hope. Check your water bottle for rats. You can check the peepholes. A lot of checking.

There's a lot. Yeah, life is about checking, you guys.

This is so smart. This is not going to help Monica's anxiety.

Very cool to meet you guys. You too. Be well, Lauren. Have a great summer. Thank you.

You too. Bye-bye.

I'm about to be in 3 hotels. Are you scared now?

Yes, I'm excited. I hope something interesting happens. I'm gonna be in a— not to you, to me. Okay, sorry. To me now, something— I'm gonna be in hotels and I hope something interesting happens.

Well, you'll be with people. I'll be by myself. I shouldn't tell people that.

Oh, look in your peephole. Guys, I'm gonna be home. Happy hoteling. Happy hoteling. Love you. Love you.

Do you want to sing a tune or something?

We don't have a theme song. Oh, okay, great. We don't have a theme song for this new show, so here I go, go, go. We're gonna ask some random questions, and with the help of our cherries, we'll get some suggestions. On the Flyer Rhyme Dish. On the Flyer Rhyme Dish. Enjoy!