The Night(mare) before my Wedding
"Some day this will be a funny story." - My Wife (while crying)
On the night before our wedding, my then-fiancé and I lay awake, unable to fall asleep. Our restlessness didn’t come from excitement, however unromantic that may seem. But that wasn’t our fault, I swear. We didn’t have the chance to feel like kids on Christmas Eve about our rapidly approaching wedding. We couldn’t sleep because of a looming sense of dread.
That also, thankfully, was not about our upcoming marriage. It was about our safety.
Eventually, we made a decision; we had to get up and leave. It was the middle of the night on the eve of our wedding, and we had to get the hell out of our Airbnb.
Because somebody had been there when we were gone.
And they left evidence in the toilet.
Now that I have your attention, let me back things up a bit. What is this, the cold open of a prestige drama television show from the last five years? Seriously, why do shows all start like that now? Every single one starts with a flash forward. Please, stop that. Did I start this article with a flash forward just so I could complain about television shows doing it? Perhaps. But, I digress.
Our wedding was an extremely DIY affair. We live in Los Angeles. My family is in Central Pennsylvania. Her family is in Illinois. We wanted to do something to get both of our families in the same place at the same time for what would be the first and most likely only time, possibly ever. An extremely generous gift from my Father-in-Law made throwing an actual wedding possible instead of just making our families fly across the country to watch us get married in a courthouse and then going out to lunch. That meant we had to plan things on a super-tight budget and do a lot of work ourselves.
We wanted our wedding to be nice, but not break what I will laughingly refer to as “the bank.” When I say “we” wanted it to be nice, I mean that my suggestion of “let’s just rent out a basketball court at a rec center and throw a pizza party” was immediately shot down, decapitated, lit on fire, and buried, with the earth in which it lay salted so that nothing could grow from its remains. Which is more than fair. It would have been rude to ask our families to travel all that way for what would have been the equivalent of two full-grown adults throwing a party fit for an 8-year-old’s birthday.
We basically took on a second job as event planners for the year. We found a beautiful, surprisingly affordable (especially for Los Angeles) venue in Topanga Canyon that also provided the catering. We bought a few cases of wine. Our friend who works as a brewer gave us beer he made personally. We made playlists for the music throughout the evening, expertly curated to fit the moods of the pre-ceremony arrival, cocktail hour, dinner music, early-evening dancing, and late-night (probably drunk) dancing. We bought flowers in downtown LA1 and arranged them (again, with some help from friends). We found a nearby hotel to make things easy for our family (many of whom do not travel often and needed help to plan their trips).
The fact that most of our family members would be staying in the same hotel meant that we did not want to stay in the same place for the weekend of our wedding. Nothing against our families, we just didn’t want to be that accessible to them for the entire wedding weekend. Some quiet time to ourselves would probably be nice. So we found what looked to be a cozy, peaceful, quiet mountain home in Topanga on Airbnb and planned our stay. Our problems came because the place was a little too quiet and a little too mountainy for our own good.
Our DIY Wedding included a whole bunch of running around doing errands on the day before the big day. We had to pick up our wedding cake and make sure that our refrigerator had enough room to hold a confection meant to feed 50 people. We also had to pick up the linens from the linen rental place. I didn’t even know there were places to rent linens. I never thought about renting linens before. I never really thought about linens before. But there’s a place in Burbank where you can pull up your car and then load it full of what seems like a thousand pounds of tablecloths, napkins, things that are apparently called “runners”, and other cumbersome cloth items we’d need to return as soon as possible after the event or face dire consequences.2
Once our car was packed to the brim with linens, cake, clothes, flowers, vases, and other necessary items for our DIY-Wedding3, we were ready to drive to our Airbnb at the top of a mountain in Topanga, where we would unload our car and then get ready to gather with our families at a restaurant so they could all meet each other for the very first time so the pre-wedding mingling would be less awkward for everybody. The only problem was…my fiancé’s 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid4 didn’t exactly have the juice needed to make the ultimate climb up said mountain while packed to the gills with all of this shit. We never had a problem climbing a hill before, but our car was never loaded up like this before, either. I made the incredibly genius decision to start carrying stuff up the hill (in 90-plus-degree October weather) to our rental in order to lighten the burden for our poor little Honda. But no matter how many trips I made up that hill, the car kept getting stuck. Surely, carrying a thousand pounds of linen would do the trick. Nope. How about carrying a wedding cake up a steep, dusty hill, hoping not to trip or slip or do a hilarious pratfall on top of our beautiful, custom-made, locally sourced cake? I made it safely, but it didn’t help the car climb any higher. Maybe I could help the car with a little push? We’ll never know because again, My Beloved shut down my idea because she “didn’t want me to get squished to death by a car rolling backwards down a hill on top of me on the day before we got married.”5 The neighbor at the bottom of the hill came out of their house to ask what the fuck we were doing. They seemed thrilled that the house above them was being used for a short-term rental property for people who can’t afford to own a car that could climb the damn hill, but what could they do about it?6
We also made the very stupid decision to contact our Airbnb host to ask if anybody else had ever had trouble getting up the hill and where we should park our car, since we kept landing just short of our destination. Of course, they told us nobody else ever had an issue climbing the hill and suggested that, perhaps, we needed to get our car serviced.7 We didn’t know this decision was stupid at the time, we’d only find out later when we needed to get in touch with them again.
We finally got all of our stuff into the Airbnb with just enough time to need to rush to get ready for the rest of our evening activities. We were expected at the venue soon for a quick rehearsal and to drop off some stuff that could be left there overnight. Then we had to meet our families. We desperately needed to shower and change our clothes first.
It was during this period of getting ready that we started to notice that some things were off about our rental. First, we accessed the cabin with a lock-code, and upon entering, we were supposed to find a key in a dish on the kitchen table. There was no key to be found anywhere. As we looked around the cozy cabin on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, we also discovered that one of the sliding back doors was left unlocked. Things were starting to seem like the setup of a classic horror movie when, in a classic case of “the rule of three", my soon-to-be wife discovered the final, and strangest thing of all.
The pièce de résistance.
The shit that was left in the toilet.
That’s right. The toilet, which neither of us had used, was full. Of shit. While this was definitely weird,8 we were in such a hurry that we clocked it as strange and went about taking showers and getting ready. We flushed it first, you weirdo, why’d I even have to clarify that?
As we left the Airbnb, we decided to reach out to our host again to let them know about the missing key and ask them if a cleaning person, or landscaper, or anyone else could have possibly been there before us. That would make sense. Someone was there and forgot to flush. I don’t think we mentioned the poop. We just said that the key was missing and could tell that “someone had used the restroom before we were there.” That was a nice, polite way to put things. They apparently operate on a “one strike and I don’t trust you anymore” rule because we were left on read, waiting for an answer.
We had our quick rehearsal at the venue and then set off to meet our family at the restaurant for some introductions and drinks, and snacks…but the restaurant was closed. There was a power outage, and they didn’t know when things would be back up and running. We stood outside on the corner like a bunch of fools while family members continued to arrive at an obviously closed bar. Eventually, we found a new place, sent a series of text messages, and hoped that everyone involved would find the new venue. A hiccup like the restaurant you planned to have your pre-wedding celebration at being randomly closed would be the biggest turd in the punchbowl for a lot of wedding stories, but unlucky for us, our biggest turd was a turd.
We had a great time with our families. A very helpful friend agreed to swap cars with us for the night so that we could climb the hill and actually park at our Airbnb. Then we heard back from our host.
They said that they checked with all their people, and they all said they hadn’t been in the cabin.
This means that either they were not telling the truth and had been there and forgot to flush the evidence (which in this case would be preferred) or that they were telling the truth, and some unknown party had left a shit in our Airbnb. We messaged the host with the full story,9 but at this point, it was well past 10 pm, and the hope of getting an answer was slim.10 We were a full-on nuisance to them at this point. How dare we be inconvenienced by a mystery toilet log. When we got back to the unit, we discovered another door that was left unlocked, and at this point, we both felt very nervous about the prospect of spending the night in this cabin that was relatively remote yet surprisingly easy to get into by some unknown stranger or entity.
“This has horror movie vibes,” I told my fiance.
“Yeah, leaving a shit in a toilet is definitely the type of power move someone would do before coming back later to murder them,” said my wife, an avid consumer of true-crime documentaries, podcasts, books, and general lore. The threatening poop, plus the missing key and unlocked doors, filled us with a sense of dread we just couldn’t shake.
My first genius idea was to block the doors with tables and chairs. I moved any and all furniture into a place where it would block any hole that could potentially give entry and access to our vulnerable bodies to a human murderer or supernatural monster-beast-of-the-forest. That lasted all of about 10 minutes until we felt uneasy again. Which brings us back to the little opening teaser again. To remind you:
We had to get up and leave. It was the middle of the night on the eve of our wedding, and we had to get the hell out of our Airbnb.
Remember, we had a ton of shit11 to pack, including a big-ass god damn wedding cake that needed to be refrigerated. We also didn’t have cell service - only adding to the creepy feeling of isolation that came with our mountain lodge. We had to leave and blindly hope that we could find a place to stay and a place to keep a cake once we were far enough away from the murder cabin in the woods to once again get reception. And it was now like 1 am, or even later, I think, I can’t fully remember for sure how late it was. Luckily, my sister is an insomniac and answered her phone when we called her, and their house rental had a refrigerator that could fit an entire wedding cake. That took care of that. Now we just needed to find a hotel.
A handful of calls to fully booked hotels (including the one housing most of our families that we had previously tried to avoid) made it look like we’d be crashing in a borrowed car in the parking lot of our venue like a couple of drifters. At least we’d have all those linens to use as blankets. We were technically a little less than an hour from home, but we had given our place to out-of-town family for the weekend, and we live by a strict “no take-backs” policy when doing favors for loved ones. Finally, we were able to find an opening, about a half-hour’s drive away. Coincidentally, our backup hotel option was right across the street from our backup pre-wedding family meet-up restaurant option. I wondered if I should search for a backup wedding venue option somewhere nearby as well, because obviously, our venue would be taken over by wolves in the night. Maybe we could just have the ceremony in the middle of the goddamned road.
We settled into our room for the rest of the night and were finally able to breathe, sometime around 3 am. We were not, unfortunately, able to get any sleep. Too much had happened, and we had to wake up too early to start getting our venue (and then ourselves) ready for the wedding to risk falling asleep now. We had to pull an all-nighter. We put on Friends for some comfort television, and just kind of zoned out for a while.
Luckily, the day of our wedding went off without a hitch.
Just kidding! Our ceremony started late because an attendee we could not start without needed to treat a newly found case of headlice. I think I need to repeat that. Lice! Somebody (who will remain nameless) had to delouse themselves before they came to our wedding! Our wedding officiant forgot that they became an ordained minister online and wrote “none” in the “Religion” section when signing our marriage license by mistake, officially rendering our first attempt at legalizing our union invalid. And I’m pretty sure I had COVID all day (or I contracted it at the wedding, along with a handful of other attendees - a risk we knew we were taking in 2023, which is why we planned that our honeymoon to Italy would not begin for another two weeks - smart on us.)
To wrap it all up, our Airbnb host was very skeptical of our “claim”12 that somebody was in the cabin when we were gone. They thought we were so mad about the fact that our very old (but very reliable) car could not climb the hill that we made up the shit story in order to get a refund. They were mad that we used the shower and temporarily used a bed before we decided to leave out of fear for our own lives. They asked if we took a picture of the offending turd.
Let me say that again.
They asked us if we had photographic evidence that somebody had left a shit in the toilet.
Let’s just say we did. Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that we took a picture of the shit that a stranger left in the toilet of our Airbnb before we checked in, most likely as a power move before returning to murder us in the night. How in the hell would you know that it was a pre-check-in deuce? How would you know it wasn’t ours? What if we sent you a picture of the big ol’ shit? Did they plan on examining it? How would you use this as evidence for or against our claim?
Was this their own poop? I’m just now, two years later, concluding that this was the host’s poop. They did the power-poop move. They’re some kind of poop weirdo. They wanted us to experience their poop, and then claim victim when we ask for a poop-related refund.13 And probably try to get us in trouble for sending them a picture of what was definitely their own poop to begin with. Smooth move, host, smooth move.
Fast forward again, two years. We got over COVID14. We had a fantastic honeymoon in Italy. We are officially, legally married thanks to some corrections in our paperwork. We have a brand new baby daughter who is the best person in the entire world. Our Honda Civic Hybrid has not failed to climb a single hill since the cursed Topanga Canyon dirt road to hell. We haven’t used Airbnb since. We didn’t get murdered. And we have a pretty funny story to tell.
While I’m here, let me say “fuck ICE”
The dire consequences in this case would be monetary penalties. Remember, we were on a shoestring budget.
I haven’t even mentioned until now that my wife MADE HER OWN WEDDING DRESS. While clothing design is her chosen trade (and she is very skilled at it) we really took the DIY to extremes in our DIY Wedding.
Soon to be our 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid, that’s how marriage works, baby!
No word about how she may feel about this happening now, after we are married.
Shut the hell up and mind their own damn business is what.
It was just as rude as it sounds.
And, as only my wife can testify to, because I did not see it, also gross.
Which was “by ‘someone used the bathroom’ we meant ‘someone left a huge shit in the toilet.’”
Unlike the enormous shit left in the toilet by a mystery party.
I should probably say “we had a ton of stuff to pack,” the offending “shit” was long gone.
The quotes are theirs; I assure you I am telling the truth. Their skepticism was made clear in their review of us on Airbnb, which we didn't have time to provide our own in return because we were GETTING MARRIED, then SICK WITH COVID, then ON OUR HONEYMOON IN ITALY.
We got it all back, except the cleaning fee. Because we used the shower and the beds. If any of you plan on renting a cabin in Topanga Canyon, please check with me first, and I will steer you away from this house of horror.
I think. Who knows what the long-term effects will be.
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