One of the risks that you take when you are booking a hotel room is that you will end up staying in a creepy hotel. Since there is no way that you can check out the place ahead of time you are really going to have to rely on the hotels website as well as any reviews that you can find. This will reduce the risk but there are of course no guarantees.
The best thing that you can do to avoid a creepy hotel is to stick to the major chains. There are several large hotel chains that operate around the world; in general as long as you stick to one of them you will be fine. They usually have a pretty high standard and they are pretty rigorous about making sure that all of their hotels stick to that standard. The downside of this approach is that you will almost always end up paying more than you have to.
If you are looking to get the best deal on a hotel you may have to try one that is not part of a large chain. This is where avoiding a creepy one gets to be a bit more complicated. The best way to do it is to look for hotels using the large travel websites. In general these sites do make at least a bit of an effort to make sure that the hotels are up to a certain standard. In addition the really creepy ones generally are not big enough to do business with them. There is no guarantee of course but it is at least a way to reduce the chances that you will end up in a creepy hotel.
Looking at reviews of any of the hotels that you are considering is another way that you can make sure that you don't end up in a creepy hotel. There are lots of places online that you can look at reviews of hotels that you are considering. Like anything that you read online you will of course need to take anything that you read with a grain of salt. However based on the general tone you should be able to get a fairly good idea of the hotel.
Ultimately anytime that you book a hotel online you do run the risk that you will end up staying in a place that is a little bit creepy. There are ways that you can reduce the chances but nothing is fool proof. The only thing that will work for sure will be to not book a hotel ahead of time but rather find one when you arrive at your destination. The danger in this is that you will end up paying more than is necessary for a room, or worse that you will not be able to find a room at all.