17 years ago Nick Burchill made the mistake of leaving his hotel room window open. What followed was a string of unfortunate events earning him to a lifetime ban from The Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC.
Nick Burchill is a simple man from Nova Scotia. He likes Brother’s pepperoni, would do anything for his Navy brothers and, as of April 1st, was finally pardoned for his lifetime ban from the quaint Victoria hotel. The staff initially thought Burchill’s story was an April Fool’s day joke, but the story has since been corroborated by other employees.
Burchill was in the Canadian Naval Reserve when he initially booked a room at The Empress, 17 years ago. Since he had come from Halifax, his Naval buddies asked him to bring Brother’s pepperoni (a Halifax delicacy) back with him.
“Because this was the Navy we were talking about, I brought enough for a ship,” Burchill wrote in a Facebook post.
Apparently, his airline misplaced the suitcase full of pepperoni so it spent longer in transit than intended. Burchill was worried about the temperature of the meat so he left it beside an open window, knowing little about Victoria’s psychotic seagull population. When presented with food scraps, seabirds on the West Coast of Canada act like unhinged, aggressive rockstars – and this case was no different.
Our unsuspecting friend left the hotel to stroll around the Island before his work conference that evening.
Burchill included an explanation of what happened in his apology letter to The Empress:
“I remember walking down the long hall and opening the door to my room to find an entire flock of seagulls in my room. I didn’t have time to count, but there must have been 40 of them and they had been in my room, eating pepperoni for a long time.
In case you were wondering, Brothers’ TNT Pepperoni does NASTY things to a seagull’s digestive system. As you would expect, the room was covered in seagull crap. What I did not realize until then was that Seagulls also drool. Especially when they eat pepperoni.
I’m sure you have an image in your head. Now remember that I have just walked into the room and startled all of these birds. They immediately started flying around and crashing into things as they desperately tried to leave the room through the small opening by which they had entered.
Less composed seagulls are attempting to leave through the other CLOSED windows. The result was a tornado of seagull excrement, feathers, pepperoni chunks and fairly large birds whipping around the room. The lamps were falling. The curtains were trashed. The coffee tray was just disgusting.”
Burchill tried to usher the manic birds out, throwing his shoe out of the window in the process. Oh, and Burchill had swaddled one particularly large bird in a bath towel and thrown that entire bundle onto a group of tourists headed for High Tea.
Retrieving his shoe from the muddy outdoors, Burchill attempted to clean it resulting in further debauchery.
“I went into the washroom and rinsed the mud off of my shoe. It cleaned-up nicely, but now I had one wet, dark shoe, and one dry, light coloured shoe.
In retrospect, I should have just wet the dry shoe. Instead, I choose to dry the wet shoe using the little hairdryer. It was actually doing quite well. I had the hairdryer jammed in there and the shoe was drying quite nicely. Then, the phone rang.
I walked into the next room to answer it and the power goes off. It turns-out that the hairdryer had vibrated free of the shoe and fallen into the sink full of water and the GFI didn’t seem be 100% functional. I don’t know how much of the hotel’s power I knocked-out, but at that point I decided I needed help.”
So, Burchill ‘fessed up and got banned from returning due to damages. He’s finally been forgiven officially and has a hilarious pepperoni-seagull story to boot.
For more bird depravity, check out this seagull who figured out how to rob unsuspecting tourists.