I’ve got a good one for you.
Pay attention, because if you’re a traveler, frequent vacationer, or bop from city to city and hotel to motel on business, you’re going to want this in your toolbox at some point.
Some of those accommodations even get cleaned from time to time, and that’s where the cleaning staff come in – the target of our tough love today.
You see, for today’s AllWorld.com fun travel project, we’re going to make a dead body out of pillows and sheets and leave it in the hotel bed for the cleaning lady (or cleaning dude) to find.
Hotel Prank Ideas
Terrible, right?! Yup – absolutely!
Ok, so let’s get started.
The end result is that the nice cleaning lady, probably rushing from room to room working her tail off, is going to enter your room with the mission to clean it and get out as fast as possible. She may give a courtesy knock or something and then walk right in. She’ll scan the mess in the bathroom on the way by (“Good – no one puked in there!” she’ll think), and then enter the main area where her eyes will go to the bed.
And that is exactly when she’ll see the dead body lying there, wrapped up in the sheets.
Of course, it’s not really a dead body. (Disclaimer from the legal team: AllWorld.com does not condone murdering anyone, no matter how high hotel prices climb).
But the effect will be the same to the cleaning lady, who may or may not scream, likely will drop her feather duster, and probably will be scarred for life.
The good news is that this horror movie prop can be set up in only a few minutes with just the things already in your room.
1. Take the top sheet out. We’re going to use that to wrap our body on top of the bedspread or comforter.
2. Grab all available pillows. You’ll need at least 3 full sized pillows to pull this off, and the more the better.
3. Lay down your top sheet and then, center one of the pillows on it running lengthwise along the bed. Place it near the bottom of the bed. (This will be your “legs”).
4. Now, add a pillow right above it for the torso, and then a second pillow on top of that (the torso is thicker).
5. With the legs and torso set, we’ll now work on the head and feet, which is a little trickier.
6. The head should be smaller and more narrow than a full-sized pillow, so you can either use a small arch chair pillow if they have one, or bunch up some of the hotel towels and make them in an oval shape.
7. For the feet, you can do the same with small hand towels, but make sure they are sticking up in the air like feet would.
8. Now, wrap it all up by folding the top sheet over and tucking it in and viola! You have the perfect form of a dead body.
9. Here’s a crucial note: if you’re leaving this for the cleaning staff when you check out, then you’ll have to just use sheets, pillows, towels, and anything that will be left behind. But if you are just setting this prank up for them to see when they clean your room daily (you step out but don’t check out), you can add a few things. I like to put a pair of sneakers, tucked into the sheets so they look like they’re attached, sticking up at the bottom. And you can do the same with a baseball hat at top, although that’s not necessary.
10. Lastly, if you want to get really morbid, unplug the hotel’s telephone and wrapped the cord around the “neck” of the dead body. Or, you can add an empty bottle of booze and a love note nearby.
Now that we’ve set up the perfect hotel prank, I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t have the heart to leave this for the cleaning staff, as I don’t want to shock or be mean to anyone. So I just set it up (which was still fun), took a few photos, and broke it down again. But maybe you can surprise some friends with it?
About Norm Schriever
Norm Schriever is a blogger, Amazon best-sellling author, cultural mad scientist, and enemy of the comfort zone. His work appears in the Huffington Post, Business.com, Good Morning America, The Anderson Cooper Show on CNN, NBC, MSN, Yahoo, Hotels.com, and media all around the world.
Norm grew up in Connecticut and graduated from the University of Connecticut, where he was never accused of overstudying. After expatriating to Costa Rica in 2011, he started traveling the world and documenting what he saw. He now lives in Southeast Asia, writing his heart out and working with local charities.
