Halloween comes earlier every year, it seems, and so we continue yesterday's somewhat premature spooky theme as QoD today takes a turn for the grisly.
We confess to having heard the same story some good few years ago, when we seem to recall it being related by an old pit boss who'd been working on the Strip for donkeys years. We couldn't swear to it, but we're pretty sure the hotel he named as the location was the former Maxim, long-since converted into the Westin.
We never put too much stock the tale, but when your question arrived in our "in" box, we figured we'd Google around a bit, since lord knows Las Vegas has had its share of gruesome hotel fatalities, deliberate and accidental (check the Archives for tales of suicides landing in lobbies, in-room double homicides, fatal bombs, people pushed from windows, severed heads in the desert, construction disasters, and the like).
We'd pretty much dismissed the box-spring story as an urban myth, however, but then we dug around a bit (although not under the bed, we hasten to add) and came across this article on About.com that seems to indicate a certain prevalence of this gruesome occurrence. Further investigation led us to a feature on snopes.com that underlined both how Las Vegas seems mysteriously to have been inserted mistakenly into such stories, but that while the location has been twisted, the grisly hotel corpse-under-the-bed story has plenty basis in fact. Should you ever be told such a tale by a German tourist, in particular, and should the location cited be anywhere other than Las Vegas, that would appear to significantly up its likelihood of being true (click links for details).
Sleep tight, QoDers, and trust your noses!
