We’re back with another edition of Urban Legend: Fact or Fiction. In this chapter, we’re going to find out if a body has ever been discovered inside a hotel bed. Just like the popular and succinctly-tilted tale, “The Body in The Bed.”
So kick back and get your Febreze ready because this one smells like death.
The Story
A couple vacationing in Las Vegas noticed a foul odor when checking into their hotel room. They complained to management who immediately sent up a cleaning crew. Despite their efforts and a lot of air freshener, the stench persists, and now has a weird pine-sol layer to it.
The couple asks to be moved to a new room but there is a conference in town so that hotel, and pretty much anything close to the strip, is booked solid. Exhausted, they decide to bear the smell for one night and figure things out in the morning. They were able to rest for a few hours before the odor became so strong it woke them up.
Fed up, they decide to check out and spend the night in their car. A few hours later a new cleaning crew is sent to the room with stern instructions not to leave until the smell is gone. After hours and the odor only getting worse one determined cleaner stripped all the mattresses again and went to flip them thinking some prankster may have smeared something between them and the box spring.
That’s when they found a dead body had been stashed in a hole created in the box spring. By the looks of the corpse, it had been rotting under unsuspecting guests for several days.
Variants & Themes
The core elements of The Body in The Bed urban legend stay roughly the same. A hotel guest complains about a smell, and the staff attempts to remove the odor but fails to find the cause. Then, for one reason or another, the guest(s) stay in the room for at least one more night. The body is always hidden inside the bed itself since there is no way to get readers to suspend their disbelief enough to think someone wouldn’t check under the bed early into the stench investigation.
The location of the hotel changes to better fit the “this could happen anywhere” format of urban legends with Vegas being a popular setting. Sometimes it’s a solo traveler but normally it’s a couple or family because, by the transitive property, it happening to more people makes it more gross. This is also why the body is typically days old and in a high-demand room, so it is heavily rotated. An element that pulls double duty as the reason the guest(s) can’t leave, since everything is booked up.
It also lets the reader think of how many people unknowingly slept on top of a dead body, and now wonder if they have done the same.
Pop Culture
While hiding a body UNDER a bed is common horror fare, ala the monster under the bed fear many of us have as children. Hiding a body IN a bed is much rarer, we could only really find two examples and the first is, admittedly, a reach.
- 1977 – “Death Bed: The Bed That Eats” is a heartwarming surrealist slasher about, you guessed it, a killer bed. But that’s less about a dead body being stashed in a mattress and more about the mattress doing the killing.
- 1955 – “Four Rooms” is a bit more straightforward retelling. Two kids are in a hotel room and one of them notices a disgusting smell. Upon further investigation, he realizes it’s a dead body stuffed into the mattress they are sitting on.
Is it Real?
Yes, several dead bodies have been hidden inside of hotel room beds all across the country.
(Content/trigger warning for sexual assault.) In 1988, the body of Mary DeOliviera was found in a box spring at the Oceanside Motel in Mineola, New York. In the days that it took for her body to be discovered several guests had rented the room, unknowingly sleeping on top of her murdered body. She was killed at the hands of Cornelius Walls. Walls was later busted for her murder and the kidnapping and rape of another woman who he had been holding captive for three days when he was arrested.
Since folklorist, Jan Harold Brunvand was able to track this urban legend back to 1991. It’s believed that details of DeOliviera’s case mixed in with countless reports of bodies found under the beds of hotel rooms to create the tale.
In 1996, an unidentified woman’s body was hidden underneath a mattress at the Colorado Boulevard Travelodge in Pasadena, CA. She was discovered after multiple guests had complained for several days about the bad odor emanating from the room.
A Continuing Problem
In 2003, a customer of the Capri Motel, in Kansas City complained of an awful smell. After being told there was nothing they could do, he stayed four days before it became intolerable. When the cleaning crew went in they found the severely decomposed body of an unidentified man hidden in the box spring underneath the bed. The culprit also used wooden panels to help hide their crime.
In 2010, the body of Sony Millbrook was found several months after she was reported missing after failing to pick up her kids from school. Her body had been hidden inside the metal frame of the bed in the hotel she had been staying at. After the hotel assumed she ran off the room was rented approximately five more times and cleaned often.
So dear reader this legend is, unfortunately:
Join us next month for another edition of Urban Legend Fact or Fiction. (We aren’t promising it’ll be The Choking Doberman, but it’ll probably be The Choking Doberman.)
Print Sources Used:
- Brunvand, J. H. “The Body in The Bed” Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, W. W. Norton and Company, 2001, pp. 39-40.
- Brunvand, J. H. “The Body in The Bed” Too Good to be True: The colossal book of urban legends, W. W. Norton and Company, 2014, pp. 266-268.
- Brunvand, J. H. “The Body in The Bed” Be Afraid Be Very Afraid, W. W. Norton and Company, 2004, pp. 109-111.
