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I often ask myself the question, what would I do if I was incredibly wealthy?

But I have honestly never come up with an answer as zany as some of the things that actual rich people have done.

It seems that when folks have millions and millions under their belt and perhaps a chip on their shoulder, they get up to a “staggering range” of utterly weird things.

Consider animal role-play, sexualising horses, eating off of and then shooting blow-up dolls that resemble Taylor Swift, and getting covered in lobsters in an empty restaurant as you mourn your stocks losses.

Those are all scenarios outlined in a VICE article that had hotel staff reveal all the wacky things they’ve seen rich guests get up to.

Let’s get into it.

A housekeeping staff member, Shrishti, revealed the strange things that the president of a multinational automobile conglomerate often does when he stays at the hotel:

Late into the night, he would step into the hotel lobby with over two dozen security guards surrounding him, and start crawling and growling on the floor like an animal. He would even ask some of his guards to do the same. It probably gave him some weird power trip.

He’d then proceed to have dinner, not from his plate but from the plates of his two escorts who’d sit on his either side. He’d call them Sundari (which means “beauty”) and Param Sundari (“utmost beauty”). He enacted this animal ritual every night in the lobby for nearly a month in front of other visitors who’d silently witness the sheer horror of it all.

This was also someone who apparently “holds immense sway over the who’s who of Indian politics”.

In another hotel, where Willie works as a front office manager, a customer that is often ranked among the top 500 richest people in the world had one of the weirdest mourning sessions I’ve ever heard of:

Even though he is usually very composed, one day his stock plunged to a record-breaking low. That night, he wanted to sleep on the table of the restaurant and asked for around 20 cooked lobsters to be laid out across his body.

As if this wasn’t weird enough, he asked the hotel staff to empty three Italian red wine bottles in an ice bucket. He dipped his shirt in that bucket and kept wiping his face for the next few hours with that thousand dollar wine-soaked shirt.

Of course, he had pre-booked the restaurant for the extravagantly private mourning of his tanked stocks.

I have an overwhelming urge to know if that works now.

Meanwhile, in one of India’s oldest luxury hotels, Wajiha recounts a rather tragic wedding ceremony:

In the late 1980s, the wedding of a mega industrialist’s son made all of us confront boundaries of our sanity we didn’t know existed. For starters, the groom had a horse and he wanted to be on or around it always, even in the lobby. The horse had to follow him everywhere, whether he was eating or shitting.

It was only on the second or third day that we found out he had developed an unhealthy, almost sexual, infatuation towards the horse. It didn’t take a detective to crack it; he had named the horse after his ex-wife. And everyone in his family and that of his [new] wife somehow seemed okay with it.

A tech millionaire from China also had an unconventional way of dealing with his grief, which definitely had something to do with Taylor Swift and his “disastrous singing career”:

…whenever he would come to our hotel, where I work as a bellman, he’d demand his food be served inside a special guitar that he’d hollowed out himself. Initially we pitied him because it seemed like a classic case of trauma to our amateur eyes.

But things came to a head when he actually wanted to have dinner off a blow-up doll resembling Taylor Swift. The doll itself was heavily bejewelled and had an expensive swimsuit put on it. This continued for a few days until we found the doll riddled with what looked like bullet holes, lying supine outside his room.

There are other stories to digest, including one about a billionaire sheikh and his many wives in rooms across two floors blasting death metal.

You’ll also read about a PETA ambassador making hotel staff go to gargantuan lengths so that she could pose with two elephants in a photoshoot.

Dabble deeper here, if you dare.

[source:vice]