I don't know if you have seen the relatively mundane film The Beach starring a much younger Leo DiCaprio but in that film there is a person that he encounters in his guesthouse named "Daffy" that has truly lost the plot and just wrecks the guesthouse that they are both staying in before committing suicide in it.
While my experience isn't quite that bad it is pretty damn crazy.
The Beach takes place in Thailand (and it riddled with geographical inaccuracies) but mine takes place in Venezuela before the country totally fell apart. I checked into a cheap guesthouse that was around $2 a night and the people in it were a lot like the backpackers you would meet in any backpacking location in the world - a nice mish-mash of nationalities that are sitting around drinking beer and sharing the stories of their travels - which is the best part of backpacking. I still keep in touch with 2 of the people that I met during that part of my trip and this was nearly 20 years ago.
I think we are kept close by our shared story of craziness that happened that night.
I don't recall the guy's name, but he showed signs of being a bit "eccentric" even during the day. He was frequently shirtless even though were were not near a beach and he wore these star-shaped sunglasses unironically that looked like something Elton John would wear on stage.
So he was a bit "off" but I gotta tell ya, you are going to meet some strange people if you go backpacking, that is just part of it. Mostly they don't end up getting violent though.
In the middle of the night I, and I presume everyone else staying in our 10-room guesthouse started hearing banging noises that progressively got louder. You tend to "mind your business" when you are staying abroad so I never even ventured out of my room and just hoped that it would calm down after a while, which it did.
Then the noises started being accompanies by screams and punches as this lunatic, who we had had beers with that afternoon, starts to try (and succeed in some cases) to kick the doors in of all the guests that are staying there. He's shouting things like "Fuck all of you!" and there was one Dutch guy who was staying with his children, who I could hear crying, that came out of his room and said "what are you doing? I have kids in here!" and this briefly placated the madman for about half an hour.
The crazy thing is that the owners never came and did anything about it. We would later discover that they do not live on site, and there was actually no night time security of any sort. We were on our own.
Thankfully, Mr. McCrazy was not armed, nor was a particularly big guy so eventually myself and several of the other guests charged the dude in the hallway and pinned him down while one of the other guests repeatedly called the owners (using their Lonely Planet listed number) until they eventually sleepily answered. It took about an hour of us taking turns lying on top of this guy before the owners and the police turned up to arrest the guy.
In the end the owner was mortified and gave us all our rooms for free and arranged free breakfast for us the following day. The guesthouse was really cheap so even though several doors were destroyed and his room was annihilated, he only managed to cause about $300 worth of damage.
We all stayed a few more nights and were constantly in fear that he would return for revenge. The owner stayed in a cot on the ground floor until we were assured that he had been charged and we received news that he was going to be deported.
As it turns out he was a son of a very wealthy Swedish family and was schizophrenic and bi-polar. One of those guys that if he takes his meds, he is fine, but if he decides not to, he turns into an animal.
This is one of the downsides to budget traveling and I am not trying to turn anyone off to the experience just because of this isolated incident. I have been backpacking for 20 years and there are only a handful of stories like this. It does happen though and provided no one gets hurt - and we didn't - you now have a mutual story that will last a lifetime. This shows because I talk to 2 of the people I met that day and night today, I would say at least once a week.