Someone asked people who’ve worked in cinemas about the ‘craziest things’ they’d witnessed – 19 horrors that weren’t confined to the big screen

When we imagine seeing bizarre or scary things at the cinema, we tend to think that they will be safely contained within the film we’ve come to enjoy.

However, for the cinema employees, it turns out that the most frightening monsters are us, the audience.

They’ve been chatting about this on the AskUK subreddit after Secure-Attention1131 posed this question…

;To those who work in a cinema what’s the craziest things you’ve seen or found?’

And plenty of people chipped in with tales freakier and far more gruesome than Friday the 13th, like these…

1.

‘Every Sunday a woman would come in to exclusivity buy a large drink cup of nacho cheese. The first time I served her she asked for “A large nacho cheese, please,” being 17/18 at the time I just gave her a large serving of nacho cheese in a pot.

‘She said “No, sorry. A large” – points to the large soft drinks cups on the side – “one of those of nacho cheese, please.”

‘I thought she was fully taking the piss because I was new and visibly nervous throughout this whole conversation. I finally managed to say “You sure? I’ll have to put it through the till as however many ‘extra sauce servings’ it takes to fill it.” She couldn’t have cared less. “Yeah, not a problem.”

‘I charged her, like, £45 or something back in 2013. She paid without batting an eyelid and took her litre and a half jug of nacho cheese, turned 180 degrees and walked straight back out the front door.

‘I walked in the back and said to my manager “Mate, this woman just bought £45s worth of nacho cheese in a fucking Coke cup, what the fuck?!” He replied with “Fuck, is it Sunday already? Karen’s lovely isn’t she?”‘
–TheAdmiralDong

2.

‘Used to work in Cineworld. Had a lady go into the ladies toilets, drink a box of wine and pass out. She got missed on the final toilet checks, woke up and stumbled around after we had locked up setting all the alarms off.

‘Ladies toilets generally far worse than the mens. Sanitary bins emptied all over the floor, contents stuck to the walls, blocking toilets, fecal matter basically finger painted on walls and fixtures.’
–Square-Shallot

3.

‘Worked for Odeon back in the day. Half term was a nightmare, 13 year old half clothed dry humping orgies were a regular occurrence!

‘We also once found a human poo in the corner of a screen. For the final showing we would clean up next morning before opening, so luckily it had dried out a bit. Our manager took the hit on that and said she couldn’t in good conscience ask us to deal with human shit for minimum wage, so she tidied it up.’
–sparkypants_

4.

‘Used to work in Cineworld and had the misfortune of working the Magic Mike release weekend.

‘The worst audience I’ve ever seen, almost entirely drunk women, people getting in fights, police having to be called and folk banned from coming back.’
–glasgowgeg

5.

‘Worked in Odeon cinema years ago and cleaning up after MIB2 we found a false leg.’
–AlwaysSideshow76

6.

‘Worked in a London cinema for most of my 20s, you do see some stuff. Found fingernails, toenails, Coke bottles filled with piss, entire takeaways, bags of drugs, mountains of used tissues.’
–Impressive_Lynx_8305

7.

‘Worked in a cinema for 5 years! People can be gross, I’ve found:

‘A dirt nappy, happened more than once too! Once left in a popcorn bucket.

‘An entire pack of gum stuck to the bottom of the seat

‘Underwear.’
–snobbylibrary

8.

‘A long-life orange juice carton full of sick. No I don’t know either.’
–dobbynobson

9.

‘I use to work for a very large country estate that had arts college which hosted a month long music event and a literary festival in the summer. The estate has a rather lovely cinema in a 14th century barn on several occasions when people had filtered out I found sleeping babies in car seat and once a toddler.

‘Best one when I was walking around the various bustling venues carrying a baby in it’s seat looking for someone who might be missing their child, was being accosted by a man demanding to know what I was doing with his baby, both he and his wife had got up at the end of the film, gone off to different events, both believing the other had the baby.

‘Also found a guide dog, who had fallen asleep, and his owner had taken the arm of a friend when leaving, and forgot the dog, the dog just took me to bar and was quite please to be back with his owner.’
–1Harvey2Trent3Temple

10.

‘Odeon, drunk guy that fell asleep under the masking of one screen that we found the next morning. Then not me but a colleague, she cleaned the ladies toilets then not 5 minutes later someone (a child we think) had done a poo in the middle of the floor.’
–AndyMcFudge