My girlfriend and I decided to take a last-minute trip to the beach a few weeks ago. There were no other rooms available in town other than one at the Tulban, and it was only available because the person who’d booked it backed out at the last minute. We’d been fairly warned, nearly every review site said to stay away from this place, but we were desperate to get out of town and decided that if the place was as bad as they said we could just sleep in the car.
The motel was in an old building behind an unkempt parking lot. Huge tufts of grass were coming up through cracks in the pavement; we felt like we were walking in a bit of a jungle to get to the office. We noticed that paint was flaking off the sides of the building, and the shutters on the windows looked in need of repair, but we expected the shoddy appearance given all that we’d read. The only thing that put us off was that there were fewer cars than we expected for a place that was supposedly at capacity. We wrote that off, we figured that most people staying there probably couldn’t afford a car.
A man smoking a cigarette greeted us at a barred window. I wanted to remind him that smoking inside was illegal, but didn’t want to piss him off. We needed the room. The other thing we noticed about him is that he stank of old sweat. I didn’t want to guess when he’d last had a shower. He asked our names and checked us in, handing us an old-fashioned ringed key with two bits (?) at the end. We thought nothing of it, an old motel wouldn’t have technology such as key cards that modern hotels have.
Our room was on the second floor. My girlfriend was a bit scared of the wooden steps, one of them had a hole in it. The room was better than we’d expected, at first. We were surprised that there wasn’t any trash to be seen and that someone had made the bed. A number of reviews had mentioned used needles and such, we found none of those. The window was open to let in the breeze, and we soon learned that the room had no heating or AC, something either the reviews failed to mention or we’d missed. To that point, there weren’t really any amenities - no TV, fridge, etc… All that was there was a queen bed, a dresser, and a bathroom. There were no towels or paper products, including toilet paper (we found this out the hard way). The shower and sink were operational, although they had old tin (?) fixtures that creaked when you used them.
Perhaps the only unsettling thing we encountered when we entered the room was a stench in the air of something we couldn’t quite put our finger on. There were times when we couldn’t smell it at all, and other times when we caught a pungent whiff of it. We eventually wrote this off to someone having had a dog in the room, but it didn’t quite smell like a dog. We didn’t care. Overall, we were pleased and felt like we’d gotten away with a steal.
On our first night, we slept well to the sound of the ocean. We got up and had breakfast at a diner nearby. Just as we were paying the bill I started scratching my right forearm. That’s when I noticed a few bites had popped up. I figured I’d been bitten by a mosquito and wrote it off. We got some beers and headed to the beach. By the afternoon the bites had turned an angry red with a slightly raised point in the middle. They didn’t look like any mosquito bite I’d ever had. I tried to put it off in my brain, I’d had a few drinks by that point and was enjoying myself.
I didn’t start becoming concerned until my girlfriend started scratching her ankles right before dinner. When she looked, some identical bites to mine had popped up. We’d been on the beach all day and there wasn’t a mosquito around, there’s no way a mosquito caused those. That’s when we started googling on our phones and learned about bedbugs. I’d only heard of them in passing before then, and I’d written them off. Bugs had never bothered me. In fact, some of the reviews of the motel had even mentioned bedbugs. It was only when I got bitten that I paid attention.
What I learned was absolutely terrifying. They live inside the mattress and around the bed and come out to feed on humans after 1:00 AM when they’re likely asleep. They suck human blood and then go to rest nearby. The females can lay dozens of eggs, which are nearly impossible to kill due to their size. These eggs hatch and quickly cause an infestation. Getting rid of them is extremely expensive, requiring heat or chemical treatment, and sometimes it fails to get rid of them at all. Some of the advice I saw online was “burn the house down.”
When we got back to the room we overturned the mattress. We saw no blood spots or any sign of them. If it hadn’t been for my girlfriend’s eye for detail, we might have written the bites off as not being bedbugs at all. The colony was well hidden, deep within a nook in the frame, but when we found it, we saw hundreds of them clustered in a little corner. A bunch of them were fat with our blood. We FREAKED OUT. She had her luggage out of the room within 2 minutes. I was right behind her.
We went to the front desk to report the infestation and demand a refund for the nights we wouldn’t be staying there. The same man who’d checked us in pointed to a sign that said stays were non-refundable. We called bullshit. The place was literally trying to eat us alive, there was no way they couldn’t refund us. After we screamed at each other back and forth, he finally gave in and said he couldn’t offer a refund, but he could offer us another room and that we could check it for bedbugs first before deciding to sleep there.
My girlfriend and I talked about it, she really just wanted to go home. I kind of wanted to stay, but gave in when I thought about how the bugs could jump rooms. It just wasn’t worth it. I consoled myself that I’d leave a bad review and take the loss on the trip.
When we got home we threw away all of our luggage and our clothes, not wanting to take any chances that we’d taken some of the bugs home with us. Immediately after we’d showered and changed I sat down and left the place a scathing review warning others about bedbugs.
I expected that would be the end of it.
A couple of weeks later a woman we’ll call Jane (her real name redacted for anonymity) reached out to me via email about my review. She asked if we could talk on the phone, and at first, I declined because I didn’t want to give my phone number out to a total stranger. I asked her to put her questions in writing. She said she’d only talk on the phone, and would be happy to give me her number so that I could call from a burner phone. After she said this, I accepted.
On the phone, she told me that the review site had taken down her review a few months ago because it “made unprovable claims”, but that she was trying to reach out to others to see if anyone had the same experience she’d had when staying at the Tulban.
She claimed that when she’d stayed there, she’d also had a bedbug infestation in her room. The bugs were not only in the bed frame, but also in the crevices along the wall. She tried to get rid of the bugs by using a cigarette lighter to burn them out and then wiping them away with a paper towel, but many of them just fled under the molding in the wall. She said she’d have probably left the wall alone if it wasn’t for the awful stench coming from it. “There had to be something there,” she said. She debated just breaking the wall, but didn’t want any trouble with the law.
She said that she was having some problems with the guy she was seeing and that he’d left her alone for the night. She had nothing else to do and couldn’t sleep because of the smell, so she got up and started searching for other ways to get behind the wall. That’s when she said she noticed a weird plastic cover on the wall in the bathroom next to the shower. When she looked at the bedroom and the bathroom, she realized that the cover on the drywall was pretty close to where the head of the bed was in the room, and could be an access point to whatever was behind there. It was screwed in pretty tight, using a weird hex screw that only a handyman would have access to. I told her I didn’t recall seeing such a panel in our bathroom.
She took a picture of the screw on her phone and went down to the hardware store the next day, where she was able to purchase a small wrench that would fit it. That afternoon, she was able to remove the cover on the wall, which revealed an access point to the area in-between the drywall. “It was very weird,” she said. She stuck her phone in there and took a picture.
The picture revealed a mound of something covered in black patches, which she suspected were bedbugs. “It looked like a dead mouse or something.” Terrified, she immediately ran downstairs and handed the picture to the guy at the front desk, whom she described as the same man that was there when we were. He demanded to see the phone. When she handed it to her, she said that he immediately deleted the picture and told her that “the staff would take care of it.” He told her to stay right where she was. When she screamed, “hey, why did you do that?” He told her that she’d accessed an area she wasn’t supposed to and had no right to that picture. Disgusted, she demanded a refund, and he complied, refunding her for the entire week. I found this very suspicious, given that we weren’t given the option for a refund.
When she got to the car, she tried to recover the picture but said she wasn’t able to. He’d deleted it permanently, and it hadn’t been saved to the cloud anywhere. She started to freak out, and as she imagined what she saw over and over again she started to see fingers coming from the mound in between the walls. She’d thought it was a mouse or something because the idea that it could be a human hand was “impossible.” But, in retrospect, “it was far too big to be a mouse.” “It had to be a hand.”
She called the police. they said they were too booked to take a non-emergency call, but would send an officer “as soon as possible.” The next morning she met an Officer Trout, whom she took the room where she’d stayed. The officer took the panel off the wall, but when they looked inside they saw nothing. “Even the bedbugs appeared to have vanished.”
I told her that it could’ve been a mouse. After all, there was no proof that it was a hand. But that man at the motel desk was so… creepy. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. It got a lot worse yesterday when I found a bedbug in our bed at home - that’s when I learned that you can carry them inside with your shoes, and we didn’t take ours off before coming inside the house. We’re currently freaking out all over again.
All I can think about right now is that the bedbugs in my bed grew out of eggs laid by a female that had drunk from a dead human hand.