"We couldn't believe our eyes."

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An echidna has made headlines after having a wild night at a New South Wales hotel, which resulted in a trashed room and an unhappy cleaner.

Picture this: you’re a cleaner at the Bendemeer Hotel in the New South Wales’ Northern Tablelands, you open the door of a hotel room only to find an absolute bombsite with torn up carpet, dirt all through the bed, and both the heater and fan knocked over.

Naturally, you’d assume you had just walked into the aftermath of a massive night at the local pub. But what if I told you nobody had ever checked into the room?

No, this isn’t the story of some sort of murder mystery you’d hear in your favourite true crime podcast. Instead, it’s the story of the echidna who trashed a hotel room and racked up thousands in damages.

According to the ABC, publican Leanne Summers couldn’t understand why the hotel room had been trashed when her cleaner informed her of the mess on an otherwise normal Sunday morning.

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“We started to try and piece together the puzzle of who had trashed our room,” Summers told the ABC. “There were no footprints.”

After taking the day to process the mess, she returned to the room on the Monday morning to find the culprit — a spiky and incredibly cute echidna — still snoozing under the bed.

It is estimated that the echidna spent 24-36 hours in the hotel room and racked up more than $3000 worth of damage.

While it was quite the effort to actually remove the native animal from the room, she was able to release him into the wild. “We couldn’t believe our eyes,” said Summers. “I said here, ‘Look we’ll grab these welding gloves’ and between the two of us — Robbie had to lift the bed up, I had to get underneath it and encourage the echidna to come out the side — and then we took him down and released him out in the paddock.”

I regret to admit that this echidna had a more exciting weekend than I did.

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