A man travels to another state to visit some agricultural museum. Upon arrival it is quite late so he ends up at an old family owned inn. While looking around, it seems quite decent and he decides to check out a room. As he unpacks various things and looks around the room, he begins to notice several things. Predominantly, the abundance of potatoes: potato soup for dinner, potato smudge marks on the walls in the hallway and even a grotesque Potato Head man in the game closet in his room. He decides that it's fine, however, and goes to bed.
He wakes up sometime during the night by some sounds in the hall. (I'm gonna speed through this part a little to be concise). He discovers green shoots creeping up the hall along the walls and towards him. He decides to run to his room to escape but it is too late: the potato shoots have closed up his window. His only escape now is the roof/attic entrance he saw before in the closet. He climbs up using the ledges in the closet and is about to escape when the shoots from the Potato Head toy spring from the top shelf of the closet, tripping him and sending him hurtling into the waiting shoots below. As the shoots dig into his skin he feels only a brief moment of pain before he feels no pain at all. Even time is almost non-existent now.
After some unknown time a family ends up in the inn and he feels full pain as a child stabs the various limbs of the Potato Head toy into him. Several more unknown years pass before another man just like him happens upon the main character. Now he waits for the fall of night before springing into action.
If you didn't realize what had happened at the end, basically he got turned into a potato as well and is waiting for another unlucky visitor to repeat the process once again.
I have scoured the internet for this story but I haven't been able to find any hint of it. I heard this story on the radio.
potato hotel "short story"
, the first two results were links back to this question. The third result was a Wikipedia entry for Subsoil. – Strawberry Sep 26 '19 at 8:33