The girl in my hotel

This past Monday my coworkers and I returned to our hotel from a day of work out in the field. Rebecca and I walked to our rooms and as we stood outside of our rooms, I opened mine and I saw someone in the bathroom. I said, "hello…" Nobody answered. My first instinct was that it was a cleaning lady in there for some reason - and then I saw MY bag with MY clothes in her hands.

I said to my coworker, "There's a woman in my room." Then I asked the woman, "What are you doing with my stuff?" It gets a little fuzzy here because I can't remember everything I said and what she said, but she kept mumbling about how her key still worked... how it still worked and that's how she got in.

I was in shock and she was obviously very flustered having been caught mid robbery. She dropped my bags and fumbled around with her purse and a white plastic bag. By this time my coworker was behind me watching all the insanity unfold. This woman was scrambling and walking towards the door and I said, "What's in the bag?" thinking it is probably my stuff and so she said, "No, no, it's just my things, it's just my things, I'll show you," and so she did. I looked and I didn't see anything of mine and so since I'm obviously in shock at this time, I let her leave.

I went into my room and it's been ransacked. I did a quick look around to see if anything had been taken. All of my electronics were still there. Then I went into the bathroom and I saw my underwear, my bikini, and my clothes shoved into my own bags randomly. Even my passport was shoved in there!! Then I looked on the counter and I saw that she got into my medication. I'm not sure what was going through my head at the moment other than I wanted it back, so I ran out the door to go find her. I ran to the laundry room downstairs and out to the sides of the hotel and I didn't see her. I realized I was never going to find her, so my coworker and I went down to the lobby to tell them what happened and then we called the police.

We went back up to my room to wait and I noticed that there is a metal bat on my bed a little larger than one of those novelty wooden bats you can get at a baseball game but there's also a flashlight on the end. She must've left it behind in her hurry. She also left behind a necklace that must've fallen out of her bag when she was scrambling with mine.

I was mostly freaking out at this point because I thought that she'd gotten away with my medication that I need. The police got there and took our statements and looked around the room as well. One thing that I noticed was that there were bits of drywall in the sink and I pointed that out to the cops but none of us really knew where it came from. We started looking at the door and the windows to see if she pried her way in somehow but there was nothing. So we kind of just went with the idea that she had a spare key or something, even though the hotel front desk was adamant that there's no way that could be.

The officer that came brought two more officers as back up because they thought the woman might still be in the vicinity. But after our statements were taken, there was nothing else they could really do so they left. I sat down to finally make some calls to tell people, and as I'm on the phone, I'm thinking about the drywall in the sink and it still didn't make sense to me. So I'm on the phone and looking at the drywall and the mirror on the wall right above it….. and then it hit me...

I got my coworker and asked her to help me pull at this mirror on the wall. And we took the mirror down and there's a hole there just big enough for a desperate junkie to squeeze through. I asked Brian and Rebecca if I should call the cops again to let them know that I found this and my boss said, "There's still two cop cars in the parking lot."

So I went down to tell them and the female cop kinda rolled her eyes, but the young guy said, "I'll come check it out."

They both came back up, looked in the hole, and found… A pillow, blankets, cigarettes, clothes, toothbrushes...….

This woman had been LIVING IN THE WALL BEHIND MY MIRROR for God knows how long!! She had access to me and my room at all times!! (I know it might be hard to picture - there was a crawlspace about 2 feet wide in between the two rows of rooms.) One of the officers called the original officer to come back and take pictures of this. She explained to him what's going on and all I hear over the radio is "No fucking way!!"

He comes back, takes pictures, and is just as mind blown as the rest of us.

Obviously we packed up and left immediately.

What's even crazier is she has probably been there a long time. The last time we stayed at this hotel I would randomly smell cigarette smoke and I assumed someone was smoking in their bathroom and it was traveling through the vents. But nope a junkie was smoking just on the other side of my mirror!

She had access to other rooms too. The holes in the walls were from a renovation and the hotel hadn't properly patched and just covered up with mirrors. She could have been hanging out in people's rooms when they were