Professional dancer is told she might have a stalker after men try to break into her Holiday Inn room
On May 3, Alicia Mae Holloway (@aliciamaeholloway), a New York City-based professional dancer and former contestant on Season 25 of The Bachelor, revealed via TikTok that two men attempted to break into her Holiday Inn room in downtown Rochester, N.Y.
“So this past weekend, I was judging a dance competition in Rochester, New York, and after the competition all day Saturday, I went up to my hotel room and two guys tried to break into my hotel room,” Holloway begins. “I haven’t felt OK enough to talk about this until today because I’m still, like, honestly scarred.”
At about 11:30 p.m. or midnight, while Holloway was on FaceTime with her boyfriend, she said she heard a “massive thud” on her door.
“And he was the first one to say, ‘What was that?'” she said about her boyfriend. “It sounded like somebody just threw their entire body into my door. Then I heard somebody just aggressively start yanking on my handle and slamming their body, like, trying to get my door open. And then I heard two voices and I was freaking out. And I told my boyfriend, I was like, ‘Somebody’s literally trying to get in my room right now … what do I do?'”
According to Holloway, the two men sounded as if they “were going back and forth really rapidly” for “a little over five minutes.” Holloway also claims she couldn’t decipher if they were “drunk or foreign.”
“Do I jump out the window? Do I go underneath? Do they have a knife? Do they have a gun? I didn’t have my pepper spray with me, which is a lesson I learned. I was like, ‘Where can I hide?’ I’m in a hotel room. I don’t have anything,” she recalls thinking.
Holloway decided to call 911 and then one of the judges of the competition.
“So I end up calling him and I’m hysterical. I can barely speak words,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Somebody’s trying to break into my room. Come here now.’ And 30 seconds before they got there, I just heard footsteps … run away. Like the two guys just ran away.”
“And, you know, I wondered after I calmed down. I was like, ‘Maybe they were drunk and they were just trying to get in the wrong room.’ But there’s no way that’s the case,” she adds.
Holloway posted a follow-up video on May 5, detailing what happened when the cops arrived.
“So the reason that it got a lot scarier when the cops came was because the first thing that they asked me, besides if I was OK, was if they think I had a stalker,” she reveals. “When I tell y’all that, my whole world just, like, crumbled, and I just had the most terrifying feeling. It was … terrible.”
Holloway typically never posts on social media about where she’s been until after she’s left that location.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh my God. I literally posted a video earlier that day saying I was judging a dance competition in Rochester. I have to say, I never, ever, ever comment where I am, exactly what competition I’m judging until after I leave,” she says. “Like, I’ll post a get ready with me, and I’ll say, ‘I’m judging a dance competition in Rochester, New York, and then I have a ton of people in the comments asking me, ‘What competition? Oh my gosh, where are you? Where are you staying?'”
“But I never, ever answer that until after the fact,” Holloway says.
What also made this interaction with the police terrifying, according to Holloway, was the fact that it was occurring in the hallway outside her hotel room. When the director of the dance competition, whom she called, came upstairs the evening of the incident, as did the front desk woman, who gave Holloway a massive, comforting hug.
“But the first thing that she told me was that the hotel did not have cameras in the hallways,” Holloway says. “And I was like, ‘It’s literally 2023. How do you not have cameras?’ And she was like, ‘It’s for guest privacy.’ And I was like, ‘I understand in the rooms, obviously, there shouldn’t be hotel cameras, but in the hallway?’ It is 2023. Holiday Inn needs to get with the program.”
Before leaving, the cops checked the hotel to ensure there was no one threatening there. They advised Holloway to sleep in another judge’s room, so she slept in a female judge’s room, which made her feel “a lot better.”
“Happened about a week ago, and I still don’t feel 100 percent OK,” Holloway claims. “So just please, especially ladies, please be safe.”
‘How are there no cameras in the hall?! That is crazy.’
Holloway’s two-part story has opened up a conversation about hotel room safety as a woman traveling alone and the trustworthiness of front desk workers as well.
“Be mindful of male desk clerks, one here in my city went into a guest’s room while she was asleep!” @glassmaddie cautioned.
“I travel with a portable door lock AND and alarm door stop,” @olive_chanels_mama shared.
“I live in Rochester, born and raised. Not all of Rochester is bad. There are lots of beautiful and safe places to stay,” @lisapmarzovilla wrote, to which Holloway replied, “I totally agree with that! You can’t say a whole city is bad/dangerous based off one bad experience. Your town I’m sure is lovely.”
A former hotel employee suggests that travelers, especially women traveling alone, invest in a door stopper to use in addition to the locks on your door, to charge items under your last name rather than the room number and to refrain storing your room key in the paper sleeve it comes in.
“Especially if you’re traveling alone, I highly recommend investing in a door stopper that’s small enough to fit in a purse, lightweight, and TSA-approved (meaning it can come on every trip with you),” Justin Aldrich wrote for Insider. “The most effective ones use the weight of the door and direct any force coming from the other side into the floor. As long as they’re fully tightened, they won’t wiggle loose.”
“If you truly feel at risk or just want to keep your information private, your entire profile can be accessed with your last name, meaning your room number won’t be overheard by everyone in the lobby,” Aldrich added. “A dropped key packet immediately gives the finder access to your space. But a random, unmarked key on the ground has no value besides the hotel name.”
In addition to these tips, remaining vigilant about your surroundings is always essential. Check your room intruders prior to settling down, Aldrich says, as “predators hiding under hotel beds until people fall asleep” is also something that’s happened.
In The Know by Yahoo reached out to the Holiday Inn for comment but has not heard back as of reporting.
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