‘Every night, I can’t sleep well’: body-under-the-bed guest at Tibet’s Guzang Shuhua Inn demands answers
- After a traveller surnamed Sun found an unbearable smell in his hotel room in Lhasa, police told him they had discovered a corpse under the bed he had just slept on
- Sun tells the Post, ‘This has affected my life and work’. He says the hotel has kept silent since his story went viral, and threatens to take legal action
When a post a traveller left on a Chinese hotel review website on April 21 that a body had been found under the bed he had slept on at a hotel in Lhasa, Tibet, went viral last week, hotel staff told a local online news service it was “false information”.
On Monday, a day after they spoke to Hongxing News, their story fell apart when another online news service posted on Weibo, mainland China’s equivalent of Twitter, a 50-second clip of the dramatic arrest of a man on a train.
Police later confirmed the arrest, on April 21 on a train bound from Tibet to Lanzhou in northwest China, was of a suspect linked to the discovery of a corpse at the Lhasa hotel, the Guzang Shuhua Inn.
Hongxing News’ Sunday report also quoted staff of the hotel as saying it had shut for renovation, not because of an alleged murder, and quoted a police station near the hotel – the Lhasa Chengguan District Bureau of Public Security Jiri Police Station – as backing up their claim about its closure for upgrading.
The same day, Shangyou News quoted the traveller, a 37-year-old from Shanghai who it identified by a pseudonym, Zhang, as saying he noticed a “strong” smell when he checked into his room at the Guzang Shuhua Inn on April 21. He recalled he didn’t think too much of it at first and wondered if his feet were the problem.
But when he returned to the room after dinner the odour became “unbearably pungent”, the man was quoted as saying. He demanded to move to a different room.
Later that evening, officers from the Lhasa Public Security Bureau Criminal Police Detachment contacted him to say a body had been discovered under the bed on which he had slept for three hours.
“That’s when I found out there was a murder in this hotel, and the deceased had been lying under the bed for several days,” he told Shangyou News.
The police officers took a statement from him, and a DNA sample, and told him they had arrested a person in connection with the case, the man was quoted as saying.
Hong Kong man arrested in Macau for murder after woman’s body found in hotel room
Reached on Wednesday by the Post, the traveller, who said his actual surname was Sun, said: “Every night, I can’t sleep well. If there is any sound I wake up very easily. This has affected my life and work.”
Sun said the hotel had not reached out to him since his post went viral on Friday and subsequently the video posted on Weibo.
“I hope the hotel will give me a statement. If it continues [to stay silent], I will definitely take legal action,” Sun told the Post.
The corpse has not been identified.
Other travel stories with deadly endings
The Tinder killer
For women who travel solo, the story of British backpacker Grace Millane sends shivers down the spine.
In December 2018, Millane arrived in New Zealand as part of the student’s gap-year adventure. There a man she met on the dating app Tinder strangled her.
Mystery at the Cecil Hotel
The story of Elisa Lam is one that has intrigued the online community for years.
The 21-year-old Canadian student disappeared in 2013 at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles while travelling across the United States.
A media frenzy, and theories about her death, was triggered by bizarre CCTV footage of her last sighting in the hotel’s lift that was released by the LA Police Department.
The naked body of Lam, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, was found 19 days later in a water tank on the hotel’s roof.
Additional reporting by Kylie Knott
