7 of the Worst Travel Nightmares Ever

Whatever your tale may be, there is one thing that we as humans cannot deny, namely our innate nature that causes us to actively enjoy hearing about the misfortune of others, despite harboring a deep hatred and fear of anything similar happening to ourselves. With that in mind, you are invited to partake of this selection of some of the finest travel horror stories that the internet has to offer, all deeply unpleasant and cringe-worthy.

1. Hotel Frustration

Our first tale of woe involves a guest that was staying overnight in a hotel situated in San Francisco. This particular hotel had recently undergone extensive renovation and refurbishment, so was looking as good as new and fresh out of the box, as it were. Everything was so new, in fact, that the lamps and light fixtures - resplendent and still with tags - were yet to be in possession of light bulbs.

A minor inconvenience, considering the guest would very much like to be able to see where they were going at night; they decided to rectify this injustice by calling down to the hotel reception via the mode of telephone. Imagine their surprise - no doubt coupled with immense disappointment - when they reached for the phone, only to find it nonexistent, a mere portent of things to come.

Having idled away a few minutes during the long elevator descent, our traveler reaches their destination, the reception desk. A short while later, they were reassured that someone would deposit the required bulbs and phone whilst they were out at dinner. Placated, the guest accepts this and heads out for a fine meal, only to then subsequently return to their room and find that they did indeed now have light bulbs, yet to their dismay and horror, no outlets in the walls in which to plug the aforementioned lamps into the wall.

Still lacking a phone, they once again took the elevator down to the reception area where they were once again deceived into believing that their troubles would be at an end soon. Now moved to a new room, our protagonist was fully-prepared for a night of rest and recuperation, all they had to do was reach over to the alarm clock and set the ala- but wait, there was no alarm clock! Understandably feeling thwarted at every turn they took, our guest dials reception - for this time, there was a phone in the room - and is personally assisted by the manager and helped to move rooms. Again.

This new room was adequately furnished with lights that turned on, a phone that worked and even an alarm clock. However, despite this seemingly fortuitous turn of events, the occupant of the room would soon discover that - much to their chagrin - the electric blinds in the room were unconnected to a power source, the end of the cable defiantly displaying its many-colored innards.

Wanting the nightmare to be over and desperately seeking respite from all of this, the reception desk is again called and the guest is connected to the electrician who then made it perfectly clear that there wasn't any way there was going to be a working blind anytime soon. No doubt wanting to wage some vehement pogrom against the hotel staff, the guest admits defeat and falls into what one can only hope was a peaceful slumber. The hotel had won, but there was always tomorrow...

2. The Passenger Who Spewed Too Much

On a plane, it's never cause for celebration when you're seated directly opposite a screaming child, overly talkative person, or any of a whole host of annoyances. However, it's usually possible to get on with what you're doing, be it sleeping, eating or sitting still for hours on end.

But what if you were sat opposite someone that could literally not stop vomiting? Not just a mild case of travel sickness in which the unfortunate recipient of the illness only loses their lunch once or twice, but rather a case in which your fellow passenger issues forth a veritable fountain of rancid technicolour, unable to cease for the duration of the flight.

This happened to one unfortunate passenger travelling from Jacksonville to Newark who was no doubt put off her in-flight meal, delicious as they are. The passenger even reported that the flight attendants eventually had to provide the sick traveler with an industrial-sized garbage bag to contain the constant flow of...well, you get the picture.

Eventually - and thankfully - disembarking from the plane, our healthy passenger had not long made it into the airport before hearing over the PA system that a cleanup at the gate they had just left was needed. It didn't take long to guess what might have happened...

3. In-Flight Bathroom Malfunction

A rather unfortunate occurrence took place on a flight out of LA, travelling east. One of the bathroom units onboard experience what could only be described as a "technical malfunction", which in turn somehow caused the toilet to back up when flushed, a sort of "reverse flush" if you will. Whilst not the comical upwards blast that you might be imagining and rather more of a gentle flow, the scene inside the tiny cubicle was certainly one of the things you could do without seeing in your life.

4. Everywhere But The Bathroom

A guest staying at an Aloft hotel had a rather unpleasant experience during of their stays there. Once they had gotten past the uncomfortable bed sheets and the surly girl working at the front desk, things took a turn for the...well...downright sinister.

Upon entering the elevator, it would soon seem apparent to the guest that someone inside the hotel was actually taking it upon themselves - as if it were their sworn duty and sole right - to smear fecal matter all over the inside of the elevator.

Who knows if it was their own fecal matter or they'd merely found it, or even WHY someone would think it good sport to smear a mode of transport necessary for all with excrement, but the hotel was apparently aware of this problem for the whole day since the early morning, but hadn't bothered to shut the elevator down. So the valued customers and guests of this fine establishment were going up and down inside what was essentially a box of sewage. Delightful.

The fun and games did not stop there for our unfortunate guest, no matter how they wished the nightmare to end. The day after the smeared elevator experience was laundry day, our guest had left their laundry in one of the hotel's dryers so they could return to their room to wait for it to finish. When they returned to open the dryer they discovered that someone had "put **** in the dryer" with their clothes. The Elevator Smearer strikes again - and if it wasn't the same person, then one has to wonder why the Aloft would have been harboring coprophiliacs in their hotel.

5. The Hotel Carter Experience

So-called because one can guarantee that ANY stay in the Hotel Carter will result in a travel nightmare that will haunt you until the end of your days, this hotel has a special place in hotel history as being voted the dirtiest hotel in America year after year.

For a glimpse into just how much of an "experience" you can receive at the Hotel Carter, sample stories can be found all over the internet, but my personal favorite has to be Shawna N's experience of the place. "There are bums defecating in the lobby" she exclaims with revulsion, whilst going on to point out that they staple carpet runners to the walls for some reason and also have terrible (as in: you will go to hospital) bed bug problems.

User Brandon S states that the Hotel Carter will be fondly remembered as having "earned a place in Hades as the worst hotel [he's] ever stayed. EVER".

Many other memorable events have taken place at this glorious institution, including - but in no way limited to - the discovery of a human corpse, wrapped in plastic garbage bags and hidden under a bed. The Hotel Carter itself truly deserves a place on any Travel Nightmare list, as well as Hades.

6. The Dead Guy Next Door

Usually a scene reserved for movies or maybe an episode of a crime TV series, no one typically expects to be living down the corridor from someone else that has ceased to live. This was the unfortunate experience of one man who stayed at The Jane in NYC with his son as they were both visiting for a while. The Jane itself is an incredibly old building that's permanently undergoing some sort of restorative process, having housed survivors from the Titanic disaster back in the day.

Whilst acting as a hotel, The Jane also has residents that live in some of the rooms left over from before it started its continuous renovation process. It was one of these older, slightly more disheveled doors in the same corridor that the guest was staying in that had a bright green "Seal For Door of DOA Premises" sealing it shut. DOA meaning Dead On Arrival, it was quite clear that the overpowering stench that the guest had been experiencing for the past day or so might possibly be the odor of a fetid corpse: the stench of death.

Naturally curious as to if anyone was taking care (and at least aware) of the problem, he took it upon himself to ask a friendly maintenance man what the problem was, the man responded with the supposition that someone had "really bad hygiene" and that "some ladies used the bathroom in there, too" thus equating the rancid smell of a dead person with ladies using the bathroom, an unnatural comparison if ever there was one.

While waiting to leave the premises, our valiant guest was finally rewarded with the truth when, as he asked another employee as to the cause of the strange smell in the corridor, he was told that "some guy died in there. We think it was maybe Tuesday". It was now Monday.

7. Moroccan Dinner-Time Disaster

To end with, we've chosen a sorrowful tale of panic and desperation set in the capital of Morocco, where a group of young travelers are invited to dine with a seemingly friendly Moroccan family, but then it all goes horribly wrong.

Having received an invitation to dinner from an outwardly harmless-looking gentleman, the group decides to accept. Dinnertime arrives and the group are about to be picked up by their host, only to be informed that their host's promised car is busy being repaired and that they will unfortunately have to take alternative transport - the somewhat dirty, crowded buses of the public transport system.

Some time spent sweating and claustrophobic later, they arrive at their destination: a dilapidated, run-down hovel, accompanied by what was quite possibly the piquant aroma of stale urine, far-removed from what they initially imagined to be their host's domicile.

As the group sit down to initiate the ritual that is eating at another's home, their host opens the bottle of wine brought by his guests, which they consume with gusto as the lady of the house prepares what is no doubt to be fine dining of the highest order. Time passed and the host fetched another two bottles of wine, whilst simultaneously another woman appeared from nowhere and proceeded to adorn the hands and feet of one of the visitors with henna tattoos.

This went on for some time, with the host becoming more and more inebriated, until his wife started asking for money, which the guests - not wanting to make matters too awkward - duly relinquished, placating the woman for a time.

As the host continued his relentless assault upon the bottles of wine before him, his guests did the opposite and had stopped drinking some time ago, perhaps simply wishing for a way out of this nightmare, but their ordeal wasn't over quite just yet for the henna artist was now a asking for money for her work. The guests - sensing that this was quite obviously an extortion attempt of some sort - declined, but their disinclination to acquiesce to handing over yet more money only riled their host - whose eyes had long since turned a shade of red, their own personal devil to accompany them on this journey through hell - into also attempting to get them to pay the artist.

The situation growing ever more desperate and with the guests eager to escape, the food finally arrived. However, the host took it upon himself to grope one of the females of the group under pretence of presenting her with a necklace - a trinket of crude fashioning - and placing it on her neck. Further realizing the extent of their predicament, they hastily consumed the food in order to vacate the premises all the more rapidly.

With the female suffering more slights to her honor, the guests took it upon themselves to leave with the utmost haste, to which their decision was met with uproar from the household: the men of the house demanded that they stay the night (as by this time the buses had stopped running) as the women asked for yet more money, perhaps as a jailor's bribe for releasing them from their imprisonment.

The group gathered their belongings and headed for the street which was indeed empty of buses. Despairing, they spotted an off-duty cab-driver who was returning home for the night and they hurriedly bargained for a ride home, albeit a rather expensive one. A short way from departure, their host had found them and scrambled into the passenger seat and alongside the driver, speaking in frantic Arabic. Eventually and after much arguing and haggling, the group - minus their "host" - had reached their destination, thankful to be alive after such a harrowing experience.