A woman speculated she may’ve been a victim of potential human trafficking while staying at a Days Inn hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband and two children.
TikToker Sha (@ellashache) posted a series of clips delineating her experience at the hotel that culminated in a conversation with a front desk employee as she explains to him what happened. Many viewers who saw the exchange found the worker’s answers unsatisfactory and speculated alongside Sha that there was something nefarious going on in the business.
@ellashache #humantraffickingawareness #indiana #indianapolis ♬ original sound – Sha
“I need to speak to corporate because I’m filing a police report,” Sha says a the beginning of the video.
She then tells the employee at the front desk that two men entered her Days Inn room at around 10 p.m. the night before.
“Apparently last night, you guys, I don’t know what happened, but y’all obviously like double-booked,” she says, holding her phone up to record the front desk employee. “I don’t know what the case may be, but there was two grown men that came into my room last night while I was in the room with my kids. And they were like forcefully trying to get in the room. I had the latch on the door but they had the key.”
The TikToker then says she went to the front desk to report what happened to the employee manning the desk at the time, but “she completely did not give a fuck.”
“She did not care,” Sha says. “So I ended up calling the cops. The cops ended up coming here, and they asked me if I wanted to press charges but the more I started thinking about it everything that was happening my phone didn’t work in the room, they had a key, then my key didn’t work.”
She then goes on to say that she was so frightened by the experience that she ended up booking another hotel closer to the airport as the Days Inn employee listens intently to her experience.
“I’m coming back here—all of a sudden, the key works now,” she says of the room key she used the night prior. “I don’t know how that key works in that room, and I checked out last night. I don’t know how those two men got into my room and they had an extra key.”
Sha then speculates that the incident “felt like human trafficking.”
In 2021, there were 176 cases of human trafficking reported in the state of Indiana with the majority of victims being women. The Society for Human Resource Management has reported that employees at major hotel chains like Hilton, Marriott, and Sonesta are receiving training on how to spot instances of human trafficking. Oftentimes, sex workers are forced to meet with clients in hotels while their abductor checks into a separate room in the same building.
A viral Twitter post from a woman named Maya Anqelique in 2021 gained traction online after she posted about a harrowing experience in Washington D.C., where she reports that a man wearing a mask tried breaking into her hotel room. Her experience was similar to Sha’s, where a man was able to open her door and attempted to enter the room, but was prevented from doing so by the doorstop.
During Sha’s discussion with the Days Inn employee, he expresses that it’s odd her key began working after being previously disabled. He states that when a new key is made, previous ones would be disabled, making it “impossible” for it to work.
Sha then argues that the night employee may have been in “cahoots” with the men who tried entering her room. She explains that her husband happened to be walking down the hallway around the same time the men tried breaking in. The men fled after her husband acted as if he was going to shoot them, and they ran away yelling “wrong room, wrong room,” she says, but that they were speaking another language before that.
The employee asked if the men were Mexican or Russian. Sha says she thinks the men are Russian. The worker says they do employ Russian housekeepers and the men could be using the master key to clean the room.
“So why are they opening doors at 10 o’clock at night?” Sha asked, to which the employee replied that he would need to “talk to them about that” but that he doesn’t know why they would try to enter a guest’s room so late.
The worker ultimately agrees that the situation was suspicious before he picks up his phone to call the housekeepers. Sha waits and records the employee while he’s on the phone, after the call he says he discovered that there were employees who worked at the Days Inn until around 9pm, so there may’ve been a chance that they mistakenly tried to enter her room at night. Sha points out that the men didn’t have any cleaning supplies with them and that they were “trying to force their way” into her room.
“I don’t know what to do right now,” the employee says, before Sha says that she wants to “press charges,” for the incident and that she intends on doing so.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Days Inn via email and Sha via TikTok comment for further information.
In the comments section, several viewers agreed that the situation was suspicious.
“That is scary!!! Note to self, put the latch on the door whenever I travel on my own with my kids,” one TikToker wrote.
Someone else who said that they previously worked at Days Inn said that it doesn’t make sense for housekeepers or maintenance employees to be on the job that late. “Oh hell no, I did housekeeping & front desk at Days Inn, HOUSEKEEPERS DONOT WORK PAST 5-6 WITH FULL HOUSE. NOT NORMAL SOMETHINGS UP,” they wrote.
Others suggested legal recourse that she could do in order to try and get to the bottom of what happened. “Press charges, file a complaint, demand surveillance footage,” one viewer suggested.
