11. Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? Cheap Motel Rooms and Transgression

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of crime in the hospitality industry, a somewhat under-discussed site of criminal behavior given the industry’s commercial interests. The motel room is a rather typical crime scene, particularly for sexual violence and drug offenses. It presents a conflation of intimacy, privacy, and anonymity with a world of transience and strangers, and even stranger events. This chapter places the motel crime scene in the context of this volume, drawing particular links to autoethnographic approaches, like those employed here. Given the volume’s emphasis, the chapter’s analysis centers topically on the supernatural and occult themes evident in the sex crimes referenced above. This flows to a discussion of the sexualized space of motel rooms and the interrelationship between hospitality, guests + hosts (ghosts), and ritual. Finally, it discusses the motel room through the lens of my visual arts practice, in which the author photographs these sites in minute detail to document scenes of sexual violence and to capture a sense of the absent guests and lingering ghosts.