Laura Wright 
Urban Legends
You check into a motel late at night.
The room isn’t wonderful, but it will do.
You put down your luggage, turn on the television and climb into bed.
Then you notice the smell.
At first, it isn’t particularly strong. Perhaps someone smoked in the room. Maybe something spoiled in the refrigerator. Maybe the carpet needs cleaning.
But as the night continues, the odor becomes worse.
Eventually, it is unbearable.
You call the front desk.
Someone comes to investigate.
The room is searched.
And beneath the bed, inside the bed, or concealed within the box spring is the decomposing body of a murdered stranger.
It’s one of America’s classic urban legends.
Unfortunately, it is also one of the few urban legends where something remarkably similar has actually happened.
More than once.
The Hotel Room Legend
The traditional story usually involves an unsuspecting family on vacation.
They check into a hotel or motel and immediately notice an unpleasant odor.
The family tries to ignore it.
They can’t.
Eventually someone looks beneath the bed or complains to management.
That’s when they find the corpse.
Sometimes the body is simply beneath the bed.
Other versions place it inside the box spring or mattress.
The horrifying punch line remains the same:
They’ve been sleeping directly above a dead body.
The legend has circulated for decades, and many people have associated it particularly with Las Vegas.
Curiously, the real cases collected in the original article occurred elsewhere.
New Jersey, 1982
The earliest case in the original account occurred in New Jersey in 1982.
Three men were involved in automobile theft.
Two apparently decided that the third had become a problem.
Their first attempt to kill him involved a poisoned hamburger.
It didn’t work.
So one of the men strangled him instead.
Then came the problem of what to do with the body.
They were staying in a motel.
The corpse was pushed beneath the bed.
It remained there for four days before anyone discovered it.
Already, the supposedly ridiculous urban legend had happened almost exactly as described.
It wouldn’t be the last time.
Maryland, 1987
Five years later, another body ended up beneath a motel bed.
This time the circumstances were very different.
Two drug dealers checked into a motel in Maryland.
One of them had swallowed more than thirty balloons containing heroin in an attempt to conceal the drugs inside his body.
One of the balloons burst.
He died.
His companion panicked.
Rather than reporting the death, he concealed the body beneath the motel bed.
Once again, a motel room had acquired something the next guest definitely wasn’t expecting.
New York, 1988
Then came an incident in New York in 1988.
A woman’s body was discovered concealed inside a box spring.
She had already been dead for several days.
And during that time, the room had not remained empty.
Guests had slept there for at least two nights without realizing that a corpse was inside the bed.
That detail is what elevates the story from unpleasant to almost unimaginably disturbing.
Someone climbed into that bed.
Turned out the light.
And slept.
Jerry Lee Dunbar
In 1989, murderer Jerry Lee Dunbar provided two more examples.
Dunbar strangled two victims in separate incidents.
Both bodies were concealed beneath beds in motel rooms.
At this point, the idea of hiding a corpse beneath a motel bed starts looking less like a bizarre one-time occurrence and more like a grimly practical decision made repeatedly by people desperate to conceal a death.
A motel room provides privacy.
The perpetrator can leave.
Housekeeping may not immediately examine the space beneath a heavy bed.
And if the room is rented again before the body is discovered, the situation becomes considerably worse.
Florida, 1994
The phenomenon occurred twice in Florida in 1994.
Again, reality was reproducing the supposed urban legend.
By this point, the story had all the ingredients necessary to perpetuate itself indefinitely.
Someone could tell a friend:
“I heard about a hotel where somebody found a body under the bed.”
The friend might dismiss it as folklore.
But somewhere, sometime, it really had happened.
That makes tracing the legend unusually difficult.
California, 1996
Another woman’s body was discovered beneath a mattress in California in 1996.
She had been dead for approximately ten days before anyone found her.
Ten days.
Inside a motel room.
Again, the question almost asks itself.
How could nobody know?
The answer appearing repeatedly in these stories is surprisingly simple.
People did know something was wrong.
They just didn’t know what it was.
Missouri, 2003
In Missouri in 2003, another guest spent approximately three days in a room containing a concealed corpse before the body was discovered.
Imagine remembering that afterward.
Every time you climbed into bed.
Every time you sat on the mattress.
Every time you noticed something unpleasant in the room and decided it probably wasn’t important.
There are some hotel experiences for which a complimentary breakfast simply isn’t adequate compensation.
But perhaps the most extraordinary example came several years later.
The Memphis Motel Case
In 2010, a woman’s body was discovered beneath a bed in a motel room in Memphis.
She hadn’t died recently.
She had been there for 47 days.
Nearly seven weeks.
During that time, the room had continued to be rented.
Guests came and went.
People slept in the room.
Housekeeping presumably entered it.
Nobody discovered the body.
For weeks, unsuspecting travelers occupied a motel room containing a decomposing human corpse.
It sounds exactly like an exaggerated urban legend.
Except this time, the urban legend wasn’t exaggerating enough.
The Smell
There is one detail connecting virtually all of these stories.
The odor.
Guests noticed something.
Rooms smelled terrible.
People complained.
But a foul smell inside a motel room doesn’t immediately suggest murder.
There are dozens of more reasonable explanations.
Garbage.
Plumbing.
Mold.
Spoiled food.
Dead rodents.
Dirty carpeting.
Something left behind by a previous guest.
The human mind naturally reaches for an ordinary explanation first.
Almost nobody enters a slightly questionable motel room, wrinkles their nose and thinks:
There’s probably a corpse inside the mattress.
And ordinarily, that’s an entirely sensible assumption.
Why Under the Bed?
There is also a practical reason this particular legend keeps becoming reality.
A person attempting to conceal a body quickly needs somewhere to put it.
A motel room doesn’t offer many options.
There usually isn’t a basement.
There isn’t an attic.
The closet is too obvious.
Dragging a body through hallways or into a vehicle risks being seen.
But there is one large concealed space already available.
The bed.
Push something beneath it, leave the room and hope you’re long gone before anyone looks.
It’s horrifyingly simple.
And apparently, sometimes it works considerably longer than anyone would expect.
When an Urban Legend Is True
Most urban legends collapse when investigated.
The babysitter discovers the calls are coming from upstairs.
The escaped lunatic leaves a hook hanging from the car door.
Someone wakes in a bathtub filled with ice after having a kidney stolen.
Everyone knows somebody who knows somebody it happened to.
But nobody can ever identify the victim.
The body-under-the-bed legend is different.
There are identifiable cases.
Dates.
Locations.
Victims.
Criminal investigations.
The precise details change, but the central scenario has happened repeatedly.
That makes this particular legend more unsettling than most.
Because when someone tells you about the family who slept all night above a decomposing corpse, the correct response isn’t necessarily:
“That’s just an urban legend.”
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it isn’t.
Reality Creates Folklore
Perhaps the body-under-the-bed story demonstrates something important about how urban legends develop.
They don’t always begin with something completely imaginary.
Sometimes a bizarre event really happens.
Someone hears about it.
The location changes.
The victim changes.
The details become simpler.
Then the story happens again somewhere else.
The real incident and the legend begin feeding one another.
Eventually, separating them becomes difficult.
A traveler hears the story about a corpse discovered beneath a Las Vegas hotel bed.
Perhaps that particular story never happened.
But a corpse really was discovered beneath a bed in New Jersey.
And Maryland.
And New York.
And California.
And Missouri.
And Memphis.
The legend may be false.
The premise isn’t.
The Body Under the Bed
Hotel rooms are strange places when you think about them.
Hundreds or thousands of people may occupy the same room over the years.
You don’t know who slept there the previous night.
You don’t know what they did.
You don’t know why they left.
Usually, none of that matters.
The sheets are changed.
The towels are replaced.
Another guest arrives.
Life continues.
But occasionally, something gets left behind.
A wallet.
A telephone charger.
A piece of jewelry.
And, apparently, every once in a terrible while:
a body.
So perhaps the old urban legend deserves a slightly different ending.
You check into a motel.
You notice a terrible smell.
You complain.
Someone tells you it’s probably the plumbing.
Usually, they’re right.
But if the smell keeps getting worse…
Well.
There are some things you probably don’t want to find beneath the bed.
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