For some travelers, a Victorian ghost that opens the dresser drawers in your hotel room or gremlins that hide your shoes in your vacation rental are comforting compared with the of-this-world horrors associated with travel.
This Halloween, we have a bubbling cauldron of scary stories seemingly conjured by Stephen King, if he were possessed by the spirit of travel writer Paul Theroux. Our contributors faced an invasion of creepy-crawlers, a bed seemingly slept in by Cousin Itt and a bathroom entrapment that fortunately did not involve a maniacal man with an ax.
Obviously, everyone lived to tell their stories, but their adventures, like any good travel tale, still haunt them — and now us.
A TV host is mistaken for a man on the lam
Andrew Zimmern has seen it all while traveling as a TV host — typhoons, police shakedowns and near-death disasters. One standout travel mishap took place in 2017 while he was filming his Travel Channel show “Bizarre Foods.” Zimmern and his crew had flown to Cuba through Canada, then back to the United States by way of Mexico. On his next trip to Canada three years later, Zimmern was taken to a room at the airport with no interior door handle and left without explanation.
“I was held in that room a total of almost three hours,” Zimmern said in an email.
At the two-hour mark, Zimmern posted a request on social media asking if any of his followers could help. In just 15 minutes, several fans who worked in Canadian immigration and customs arrived. It took another hour to sort things out, and he was released.
It turns out, “authorities thought I was hiding in Canada for years,” Zimmern said.
A ‘free’ layover turns into airport purgatory
Bangkok resident Kartik Goyal was shopping for flights from New Delhi to Madrid last month when he was intrigued by an offer from EgyptAir. Customers who booked a flight with at least an eight-hour layover in Egypt could get a free hotel and short-term visa. The destination was on his bucket list, so Goyal chose an itinerary with a 22-hour layover in Cairo.
He landed around 10 p.m. and handed over his passport to airport staff. “Then I waited for 15 minutes, a half an hour, one hour, three hours,” he said. He waited for six hours to be processed by immigration, before waiting several hours for a bus to take him to his hotel, then waited even longer for another bus because the others were too full.
With time dwindling, Goyal used his 30-minute allotment of airport WiFi to see where his hotel was. On the map, it appeared to be about 10 minutes away. Once the bus took off, he wasn’t so sure. Fifteen minutes passed, then 20. From his bus seat, Goyal could see majestic pyramids in the far-off distance. The ride took about an hour.
By the time he got to the hotel, Goyal could spare 30 minutes for a nap before it was time to haggle for a ride back to the airport. It took another hour to get his passport back from airline staff. The clock was ticking. “I ran through the airport like a mad dog to catch my flight,” he said. “But you know what? To all my friends … I just said I visited Egypt and saw the pyramids.”
Trapped in a ‘toilet room’ for four hours
PBS host Samantha Brown was eager to drop off her bags and go for a walk after she checked in to her hotel in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland region in August 2017 but needed to use the restroom first. So she went into her very European bathroom, with just a toilet in one room and a sink and shower in another. Even though she was the only person in her room, Brown shut the door and locked it. “Habit from being a mom with toddler twins,” she said in an email.
As the lock switched, the entire mechanism fell out on the other side of the door, leaving Brown no way of opening it again. “I was trapped in the toilet room,” she said.
Brown started to yell. She didn’t hear a soul in the hallways. She played around with her inflection to lighten the mood (think Rita Moreno hollering, “Hey, you guys,” on the TV show “The Electric Company,” Brown says). Nothing worked. She surveyed the water closet for any tools, “but with only a box of tissues and the toilet paper holder, even MacGyver would have been challenged,” Brown said. The sun went down and the closet became pitch black. She fell asleep sitting on the floor.
A pounding noise at the door woke her up. Her husband had grown worried back at home in New York City when Brown failed to text him back and called the hotel. By the time the crew got her out, she’d been trapped for four hours.
“Now I know why hotels sometimes put phones in those toilet rooms,” Brown said. “And I will never again enter a bathroom without my phone.”
A ‘Hairbnb’ ruins a country retreat
It was supposed to be a relaxing four-day getaway in Michigan. After road-tripping from Ann Arbor for more than four hours this June, Liz Silverman and her partner, John, got to their rustic Airbnb around 10 p.m., exhausted but excited. “I’m a medical resident at one of the local hospitals, so I don’t get a lot of vacation,” said Silverman.
Then they noticed the ladybugs. Dead ones. “Everywhere,” Silverman said. The couple tried to brush off the disturbing discovery, as well as other unsettling developments. Like the dirty coffee machine and the filthy floors. “I was making all the excuses,” she said. They went for a quick run to a grocery store and got ready for bed.
Silverman pulled back the comforter to find hair all over the bed. “All different kinds of hair,” she added, and not just in the master bedroom; all four of the rental’s beds were riddled with hair. “I’m just like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t stay here,’” Silverman said. Stranded in rural Michigan with no other place to stay, the couple decided to drive home that night and pivot to a staycation. From then on, they refer to their nightmare accommodation as their “Hairbnb.”
A toxic seat assignment
Travel blogger Allison Sicking boarded a plane home to Mexico from her best friend’s wedding in St. Louis in February 2020. She took her seat next to a couple, then put on some noise-canceling headphones. It didn’t take long for disaster to strike her peaceful world.
Shortly after takeoff, one of her row mates started projectile vomiting. It came on so quickly, there’d been no time to grab a barf bag. The contents of his stomach erupted onto the airplane seats, window and floor.
“He just kept going,” Sicking remembered. On a full flight, there was nowhere else for her to go. All she could do was watch in horror.
“Fortunately, there was a doctor on board, and she came over and switched seats with me for a while,” Sicking said. The doctor suspected the man had had a seizure. The flight was rerouted to make an emergency landing in New Orleans, where paramedics escorted the couple off for medical attention. Back in her soiled seat, Sicking and the rest of the plane (and the lingering stench of the incident) continued on to Cancún.
Sharing a hotel room with a complete stranger
Stephanie Brown felt her stomach drop when she couldn’t find her laptop in her backpack after a flight from Greece to Budapest with her boyfriend and two friends.
She and her boyfriend, Skylar Renslow, were three months into a year-long trip around the world last September when they stopped for drinks at an airport lounge in Mykonos.
Brown, realizing she’d need the laptop for work, arranged a last-minute Ryanair flight back to Mykonos the next morning.
“It’s that feeling of going down a roller coaster and just telling yourself — ‘Oh, my God, how am I this stupid?’” Brown said.
Her return flight to Hungary was repeatedly delayed and eventually canceled. Ryanair began booking passengers in a nearby hotel. Brown said staff began asking if women could share rooms, a question she recalls men weren’t asked.
Brown, in her 30s, was paired with a woman a few years younger. Crammed in a room with two twin beds, Brown’s new friend asked her thoughts on what Instagram photos she should post.
“I wondered if this is what it’s like to have a little sister,” she said.
A surprise guest at a spooky Airbnb
Online, the Airbnb couldn’t have looked more charming. It was like a gingerbread cottage straight out of a fairy tale, nestled in Topanga Canyon, Calif., just outside Los Angeles. In person, however, was another story.
When Marianne McCarthy arrived to the address with her husband and daughter for their 2012 trip, they were greeted by a massive gate. She was confused; there hadn’t been any mention of a gated community in the listing. They called the owner, who told them they were in the right place.
Inside the property, there was a constellation of run-down buildings, monkey bars and teepees. The property turned out to be a defunct summer camp. But they found the cottage and parked nearby to start unloading their bags.
It turned out someone was living in the house, and it wasn’t the gingerbread man — just some guy. The owner claimed he didn’t realize which property the family had rented and apologized for the mix-up. He said they could instead stay in “the big house,” which turned out to be a huge, four-bedroom home holding on by a thread.
“There were certain rooms that didn’t have electricity,” McCarthy said. “And it was very, very, very spidery.” The family got a partial refund.
A break-in and a breakup
It had already been a tense 30th birthday trip to Reykjavik for Lora Pope when another disaster struck in July 2019. Her friends and boyfriend were scheduled to meet her in Iceland, but they missed their flight and weren’t sure they could afford new tickets.
Pope spent her actual birthday alone, but her friend’s parents bought the group new tickets so they could join her. She rushed to drive two hours back to Reykjavik after a day trip, where she picked up a speeding ticket.
When the group returned to their Airbnb after attending the Secret Solstice music festival, they found the door kicked in and their belongings scattered across the apartment.
Thousands of dollars of belongings, including her laptop and cameras, were stolen. Their rental car was also gone.
Pope’s two friends and boyfriend also had personal items stolen and were distraught. The relationship with her boyfriend was already on the rocks, and the incident only added more arguments. They broke up later on the trip.
“Now I can look back and laugh about it,” she said. “Everyone is always in shock when I tell them I got robbed in the safest country in the world.”
A bedbug-infested mattress on the roof
Washington Post features reporter Jada Yuan racked up travel stories both good and bad circling the globe for the New York Times as the newspaper’s 52 Places reporter. She spent a year bouncing between continents week by week, sometimes spending up to 38 hours in transit.
But before her whirlwind year and all the trips she’s tackled since, there was misfortune on a 2005 trip to Arizona. After the death of a friend, Yuan and her friend Erica traveled to his memorial in Phoenix and stayed in a hostel. When she got back home to Brooklyn, she noticed bites all over her body.
“I called Erica, and it turned out she had itchy red welts on her forehead, stomach and legs, too,” Yuan remembered. “We started looking up what the bites were and realized they were all like two or three in a row, and a slow-motion panic dawned on us that these were bedbugs and we might have brought them into our homes with our clothes and our suitcases.”
In an attempt to kill any remaining interlopers, Yuan shoved all her cloth belongings into her freezer for days, then the dryer.
“It was the middle of winter and thankfully didn’t snow, so I threw my mattress and suitcase on the roof and slept on the floor for a week,” she said. “The sense that the bedbugs were just in hiding in my mattress never went away, but we were too poor to actually get new things. I definitely feel like they came back a few times but never verified it.”
