For some travelers, a Victorian ghost that opens the dresser drawers in your hotel room or gremlins that hide your shoes in your vacation rental are comforting compared with the of-this-world horrors associated with travel.
Andrew Zimmern & Samantha Brown: These real-life travel nightmares are scarier than a haunted hotel
A ‘Hairbnb,’ a bedbug-infested mattress and more horror stories from the travelers who lived them
Obviously, everyone lived to tell their stories, but their adventures, like any good travel tale, still haunt them — and now us.
A TV host is mistaken for a man on the lam
Andrew Zimmern has seen it all while traveling as a TV host — typhoons, police shakedowns and near-death disasters. One standout travel mishap took place in 2017 while he was filming his Travel Channel show “Bizarre Foods.” Zimmern and his crew had flown to Cuba through Canada, then back to the United States by way of Mexico. On his next trip to Canada three years later, Zimmern was taken to a room at the airport with no interior door handle and left without explanation.
Trapped in a ‘toilet room’ for four hours
PBS host Samantha Brown was eager to drop off her bags and go for a walk after she checked in to her hotel in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland region in August 2017 but needed to use the restroom first. So she went into her very European bathroom, with just a toilet in one room and a sink and shower in another. Even though she was the only person in her room, Brown shut the door and locked it. “Habit from being a mom with toddler twins,” she said in an email.