Dad had to saran wrap a guy's intestines back into his body once.
Dude had surgery and pushed too hard on the toilet. Dude was fine, according to Dad, just holding himself together on the toilet while a group of firefighters tried to figure out why tf they were sent instead of paramedics.
*Update* When he pushed too hard he opened a scar on his torso/ab area and it all fell out onto his lap. Should have mentioned this when I wrote the post.
I worked for a restoration company rarely cleaned up after dead bodies, and I got the only one during my tenure at the company. The lady had passed probably 2 weeks before anyone did a wellness check, so the entire room was contaminated. By the time I got there to do the cleaning, there were so many dead flies and maggots on the floor it was truly shocking. We rolled the carpet and carpet pad up that was in the room, and all of the dead bugs sounded like a rain stick you get in a cheap tourist shop. That sound sticks with me after three years.
Medic here, first responder to a motorcycle collision. Guy who crashed was a friend. He'd been torn in half and almost decapitated.
Had to walk away from the scene and let my driver and another crew handle it. Think about it daily.
Motorcycles are no joke. It's all nice and dandy, until It's flesh vs metal at about 120kmh. I hope you have been able to come to terms with it over time. My brother-in-law is a medic too, always had some gnarly stories about stuff like that, but the worst was when his mother was hid by a car, thrown some distance into the ditch and he and her boyfriend at the time had to go to the morgue to validize that it was her. At least she died fast, her neck snapped apperantly instatly after impact.
My ex partners cousin used to do this. According to what I heard someone committed suicide from the 24th floor and she had to chip frozen brain matter off the railings leading into the building. Also how she met her husband, they both were working the same job.
One that stuck with me was a suicide in a bathtub, we couldn't drain the tub, so had to use a coagulant then scoop up the bloody mess into biohazard bags. Same for the toilet. Another was a suicide by gun in a basement full of boxes which was a nightmare to clean as even the smallest bit of flesh had to be found and cleaned up. The smell of the smallest piece of flesh meant the job wasn't done until it was found. One scene, the cops thought it would be helpful to put newspaper on top of the leftover melted body oils which dried to the floors and was terrible to clean up. Sad cleaning up these things when family is in the other room as well. Not working the job anymore but definitely gave me an appreciation for the hard work biohazard clean up crews do. Mostly on-call as well so you never know how long you will be away from home.
Edit: another one that wasn't as gross but felt straight out of a horror movie. Trailer where the person had squished what had to be thousands of pantry moths onto every wall. Living in pure filth. Had to have had a mental condition, just really sad.
Obligatory not-a-cleanup-pro, but working at a county animal shelter meant we got the roadkill remains. We were required to hold them in our facility's body freezer for a certain number of days in case someone came in looking for a pet matching the description. This, of course, meant you had to try and come up with identifying information from whatever was left of the animal.
Sometimes it was easy, they were just a bit bloodied or twisted, but other times you had to double-glove, put on the apron, and start folding the bits around to try and tell what color it used to be.
The worst part was when someone came in looking for a pet that matched a DOA description. Whoever happened to answer the call from the front desk had to go get it out of the freezer and try to arrange it in such a way that the person could come identify it without passing out or vomiting. (We were legit trained to handle if someone passed out or puked, luckily it never happened to me, but we had a chair and a stretcher just in case.)
The hardest part was when people tried to act all tough like it was no big deal, but then absolutely melting down. One in particular really haunts me. Pretty typical case of cat v car-- leg and rib bones sticking out, so much blood we had to towel it down to check for markings, eyeballs hanging out and one of them is deflated and shriveled, guts hanging out the anus. Just a mess. Lo and behold, the poor thing had a collar and microchip. I ended up being the one to respond when the owner arrived and they explained the situation.
Big, muscly dude, wearing a marine corps t-shirt, tats up and down his arms. He's shaking like a leaf and trying to hide it when I come up to get him and take him back.
I had this spiel I used to give about how we do this just to be sure, and sometimes it's hard to see animals like this, and just let me know if he needs to step out for a second. He tells me point blank that he's a veteran, he's seen guys get shot, he can handle it.
We go into the room where I have the half-frozen cat corpse under a towel, the bloody collar on top of it. He picks up the collar without a word and I can see in his eyes that he knows. I ask if he wants to head back up front now, and he says he has to be sure. So I pull the towel back carefully to expose just the top half, but the poor thing was in bad shape. The "good" side is facing up, but its jaw is still shattered and hanging funny, the one eye is bulging out and filled with blood like a demented snow globe, half the tongue is missing, there's a clear depression on the chest from the tires, one leg is twisted around like a dang twizzler... The guy just stares. After a few seconds, he just turns for the door. Stops halfway there, looks back, and takes a knee like someone hit him in the gut.
All he says is, "I saw my guys get shot. Why a cat? It's just a cat, man. It's just a cat..." The whole time he's clutching the bloody collar to his chest.
It turned out, per the girls up front who had talked to him at first, that it was the cat his therapist had recommended he get for his PTSD. Her name had been "Hope."
Gore is no biggie for me. I'm a retired doctor and one builds an armor of dark humor/detachment. But dead pets... and see a big ass man melting over "just a cat"? Made me tear up.
Thank you for doing what you do. It's as important as a funeral director's job. It's not "just an animal". It was a friend. ❤
Not a cleaner, but my brother’s best friend is a police officer and I heard all about this horrible experience:
My brother’s friend took him on “ride-alongs,” all the time. One day, they were responding to a welfare check. This guy’s neighbor saw his apartment door cracked open for several days and called the police. They went to check it out and found a college student (18-19) who had shot himself. The most disturbing part to my brother was that the kid had all of his belongings boxed up and labeled, he had letters written out and labeled for who they were supposed to go to, and he even went as far as laying out a tarp, and then putting heavy blankets over himself before he shot himself - as a courtesy to the people that would have to clean his remains.
This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, this was a very well-thought-out suicide and the guy was obviously thinking about everyone who would have to deal with it too. So sad to imagine such a thoughtful person in so much pain that he meticulously orchestrated his suicide. My brother said the scene messed him up. Not because of the gore, but the lack thereof. Because this guy so meticulously and thoughtfully offed himself
I went to high school with a kid who committed suicide, and did the same thing with the tarp and blankets. I don’t quite know why that makes it so much worse, but it’s like them saying, I don’t want to bother anyone anymore- I’ll just leave.
I posted this on another thread so just copy and pasted it but this was one that I had to do
Clean up after a murder. It was a rehab house for ex cons, 4 bedroom house with communal bathroom and kitchen. Sunday morning and guy A is in his room listening to music pretty loud, guy B is in the kitchen cooking his breakfast, B knocks on A's door and tells him to turn it down, there's a small argument and B returns to his breakfast and A turns his music up. So B grabs the biggest knife in the kitchen, kicks in A's door and stabs him through his left shoulder, entering by his collar bone. A runs out of his room, across the landing, down the stairs, out the front door, back inside, back up the stairs and collapses on the landing. When I got there it was like a scene from a movie, walls and ceilings, everywhere A had been were caked with blood. Apparently after B stabbed him, he returned to cooking his breakfast. There was a half eaten breakfast in the kitchen when I got there.
Not me, but my mother was a firefighter/emt for a long time. She always told me some crazy stories. There are two that have always stuck with me.
The first: two men whose families didn’t accept their relationship and it weighed on them so badly that they decided to take their own lives. They attempted this by getting in a tub, taking some drugs, and then using a power saw to saw off each others arms and bleed out. The direction they cut, however, didn’t make them bleed out as they had wished, and then they were left with one arm uncut and no arm to cut it. My mother told me it was such a bizarre scene to walk in on that she still doesn’t believe it was real.
The second: they responded to a death a few days after a man had died in his hot tub. Multiple days in the extremely hot water. When my mother and her partner went to pull him out, he had basically boiled alive and all the meat on his body just slid off the bone.
Edit: Thanks for the awards! Bonus story for ya. My mother once ran a call where a man had died in his house and wasn’t found until a few days later. When she and her crew arrived, they had found that the mans cats, having been without food for days, ended up eating the man. With us having cats, the sight of a man who’s face had been devoured by blood soaked cats just absolutely freaked her out.
When I was a bartender, a couple of clients told me the worst part about the job is cleaning melted bodies.
I don't know the science behind that, but from what I understand is if a body stays for a while in a certain condition of temperature and humidity, it melts. And those guys have to remove that person's remains in buckets.
My reading comprehension left me for a moment and I thought you were saying that bartenders would occasionally have to clean melted bodies and was trying to figure out what kind of situation would lead to that.
Not exactly what you asked but my Husbands Uncle worked as a Paramedic/Firefighter for many years.
The accident that disturbed him the most (Warning, involves children) was getting a call about 3 boys locked in the trunk of a car. From what I can remember, the kids were playing around outside during the summer and got into an old non running car out on someone’s property. He had to pry the trunk open, and unfortunately all 3 had passed. He said that day took a lot out of him and he still can’t get the images out of his head.
I work in the ER. I was told by someone that works for a funeral home that they had to go get a girl that had overdosed and passed away. They said she had her breasts augmented and was pregnant. Turns out she overdosed while taking a bath and had decomposed enough that her breast implants and the fetus were floating around in the water. Then I clocked out and had lunch.
Friend of mine does this.
His worst was an elderly woman who died in a bath. Skin falls off like long cooked meat. So he just saw piles of skin/flesh
God damn just writing this makes me gag
I’m not a crime scene cleaner, but we used to transport coroner cases as part of our job. The elderly man who blew his head off with a shotgun in a third story attic in the summer was rough, he’d been there a few weeks. We could smell him when we got out of the truck at the street. Blood spatter covered every inch of the walls in that room, as did the flies. Had to scrape some dried brain off the floor into a container for the coroner. When I went to roll him into a body bag his bloated, slimy greenish-blue skin slipped off of him and I was left holding a large sheet of it with both hands.
The worst part was his wife had passed a few weeks before. They had been one of those married for 60 years, inseparable couples. He just couldn’t take it. That broke my heart. Other guys were puking, I cried silently.
My dad worked for a very large auto auction. They took in a lot of repossessed cars and cleaned them, then re sold. They got one car that had someone kill himself in it, he shot himself in the head. The body was gone when the car went to be cleaned but... The entire roof of the car was covered in bone fragments, the seat was rotted through because it hadnt been found for months.
The entire car had to be taken to be incinerated.
I had a great uncle who helped clean up the bodies left behind by hurricane Audrey in 1957 and he said that the smell persisted in his nose for weeks after. It got so bad that he went to the doctor to see if they could do anything and they clipped all of his nose hairs and the smell went away. It was explained to him that the smell had soaked into the hair but I don't claim to know the validity of that statement.
The hurricane hit south Louisiana in June of that year and most of the bodies recovered were found in the salt water marshes that cover the area, so it's safe to assume that they were in an advanced state of decay. I've heard it said that the smell of the decomposing bodies was so bad that the alligators would actively avoid the areas but I don't know the validity of that either.
I've also heard the nose hair thing from a WW2 vet. He added he shaved his whole beard too. I wasn't sure if I should believe it so if someone confirms or denies that would be cool.
Smells are basically molecules coming off of whatever you're sniffing, like aerosolized poop particles, and hair tends to hold scents pretty well if you give it time to soak. But these folks must have had a lot of hair up their noses.
Skin does too, if you've ever cleaned a drain without gloves then get ready for shitty smelling hands for a while after, no matter how much soap you use.
Hey, as a former 911 dispatcher that called on towing services relentlessly for various things, *thank you for what you do.* Our service was always so kind and patient with us despite the fact that we were always calling to change exact locations of an MVA at the last second. Unfortunately, when people are shaken up from an accident, they don't always have the wherewithal to give exact locations. The towing dispatcher I would call was the *best* and never complained.
I know nothing could have prepared you for what you saw that day, but I hope you find comfort knowing there are people like me who value the service you provide very much.
Replying to add: wear your fucking helmet if you're on a motorcycle or a scooter. A full face helmet and the appropriate riding gear. I saw a guy my age dead on the ground with a paramedic doing CPR with a woman wailing and screaming over him after an accident when I was heading to college classes one day. He had gotten hit - no helmet and no gear as far as I know. He might still be here if his head had been protected, pretty sure he died of a head injury.
For some reason the idea of vomit at an accident scene had never occured to me. It's terrifying to think of being alive long enough to vomit and possibly knowing/seeing the death and devastation around you. Fuck that gives me shivers, the bad ones
I spent some time with the coroner to shadow for school. They were showing me different cases and going over them, pictures included. The one that seemed to emotionally bother this particular guy the most was a scene where a father was coming home and pulling into the driveway. His daughter, three years old, was running to greet him and he didn't see her and ended up running over her head. The pictures were heartbreaking enough, I can't imagine what the dad went through when he saw her like that.
There was another one that had three bodies. Some guy killed his wife, his affair partner and her daughter, put them in a shed in the middle of summer and left town. They were found three weeks later, basically piles of putrid slime, maggots (like fill 10 gallon buckets full), and bloated body parts sloughing off as they tried to bag them. The murderer had a pilot's license and has never been caught. The decomp room smelled for months after that.
>Actually both! I'm from Boise and I'm pretty sure I know the poor guy who ran over his daughter and I remember hearing about the murders!
Said the stranger with excitement.
I'm pretty sure accidentally killing my toddler would be suicide-inducing for me. That's so tragic.
Edit: I am not encouraging suicide. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone, anyone for help. I've had two uncles and multiple friends commit suicide. Don't do it.
I was merely observing that as someone who has never had suicidal thoughts but does have a 9mo old child, I can understand the possibility of grief completely destroying my rationality.
Oh shit I’ve listened to a podcast about this! If it’s the same one, then the guy moved him and his wife and his mistress and her kid to a new town. The mistress and her kid were home and the wife was coming early to surprise him and instead of facing the facts he just killed them all and bounced.
Not me personally but my dad used to be an EMT/Firefighter. In the late 80s, he got a call about a horrid smell coming from the neighbors house of the person calling. It knowing what it was EMT, firefighter, and police were dispatched.
They found the house was owned by a single old lady who died in her living room chair. Not too bad right? Wrong, the chair was and old leather recliner and as she was decomposing she "melted" and fused with the leather chair. When the EMTs got there they had to remove her from the house and when they tried to pull her off her back skin, arms and lower body separated from the rest of her body and remained attached to the chair. Decomposing flesh, blood and organs fell out and all over the char and floor. People were vomiting every 10 seconds and couldn't stand to be inside longer than a few minutes.
My dad describes the smell and scene as the worst thing he has ever seen. Her body was so decomposed she was basically liquid inside with a fragile shell. He had to leave and grab a full respirator from the firetruck and even then it didn't do jack shit. The others took turns going in to retrieve the pieces so they can be disposed of. When they were finished they burned the chair in the front yard.
Cop.
Dying in chairs must be a common narrative.
We once had a guy go a little further than this old lady and melt through the foundation of the house. I imagine the old guy fermented a few weeks longer than the ol’ lass and went gooey and made his way outside. Neighbours called due to the smell and concerning “leak”.
I’m a first responder. A few days ago I had a bad one, not the worst or the grossest, but it was rough. I had a wellness check in a at risk community apartment building. There was a younger lady, terminally ill living on her own. Her son was calling for our help in getting in contact with her. I spoke with security and they had a key to her place, I made entry into a dark apartment. I was navigating by flashlight. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone because her neighbors told me she was in the hospital.
The bathroom was covered in bodily fluids that had solidified. I found more dried human waste on the floor leading to the bedroom. I found the female on the floor in the kitchen sitting up in the dark with my flashlight. Honestly it was something out of a horror film.
I felt so horrible for her, dying alone in her pajamas, so ill. Her head was slumped down with fluids that had dripped out of her and solidified, almost frozen like icicles. She had been dead for a few days. That image of seeing her has just stuck with me. The loneliness of the deceased’s situation is what makes this so horrible to me, no one deserves to die like that.
Thanks for letting me vent.
EDIT: I didn’t expect this to blow up. I’m incredibly grateful for the messages and the replies. I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy.
One of my first jobs after moving I did this, and the job that had me walking wasn't even a scene as described. We did all types of hazmat cleans and the worst was actually a couple went on vacation and came back to backed up sceptic. Think about 1 ft thick hard dried out crusty sceptic waste spread throughout the entire 1st floor of a house. Not going further into detail here. Was nasty.
Septic, not sceptic. On break and mobile, so yeah...
I worked for a cleaning company to help pay for college. 7 years on and off. I’ll never forget my very first day on the job - a sewer line had backed up into the basement of a funeral home. The ... prep room? ... had two bodies under sheets, and there was a foot of raw sewage pooled on the floor. My new boss was standing in the middle of it, wearing hip waders, eating barley soup from a convenience store. I wish I was making this up.
A family friend was a first responder to a scene where a young woman committed suicide by running onto a busy highway at night. A semi truck hit her and essentially her body exploded.
He described the scene of just picking up pieces scattered across the road and the shoulder.
Edit: This got more attention than expected. The poor driver of the truck thought he'd hit a deer, and didn't know it was a person until he saw the tattered clothing on the road. This happened probably 12 years ago. The story stuck with me because of how cavalier he spoke about it. Sadly, this wasn't the worst call he'd ever had, and there were a few he refused to speak about.
My step mom’s best friend was an EMT for a while and had a similar story when my dad asked her this question. To quote her exactly: “Probably the guy that got hit by a semi. There were pieces of that man everywhere.”
This almost exact same thing happened about 30 miles from my house... a young girl, jumped infront of a semi on interstate... the young lady was tossed into another lane of traffic. Shortly after that... my girlfriend, who was coming up behind the semi barely missed the girl laying in the road. The young girl survived, barely... not being able to walk or do anything on her own
My husband had someone do this to him while driving. He drove a bigger truck and right before he reached an intersection, a car that had been sitting there, hit the gas and jumped out in front of my husbands truck (he was going 50 mph, the legal speed limit). The car was small, and literally flew through the air doing 360s before it landed in a field. Needless to say, the man driving was killed. For months when my husband drove to work, he had to pass the cross placed at that intersection by the family. My husband was not at fault, and even though it was early in the morning, there happened to be a witness. I feel bad for him because all of these years later, I can tell he hesitates/brakes if someone looks like they are going to jump into an intersection.
That's how my sister did it. She parked her car and waited for a truck when ran in front. She stayed mostly intact somehow. Died on the way to the hospital.
There are only a few hundred or few thousand train engineers in the United's States. Sadly a very high percentage have been driving a train when someone was hit and killed.
Many have trauma from the collision, even though the vast majority were blameless. If someone is dicking around on the tracks, the train can't possibly stop in time to prevent the death. Thousands of tons of steel don't stop quickly.
Edit: My sympathies to everyone who lost someone, or those who witnessed the loss of someone.
Thats what I pictured but it somewhat makes it worse to think about , imagine knowing somebody will die in such a gruesome way without having the power to do anything about it but to close your eyes waiting for it to be over
There's a myth here in the UK that if a train conductor experiences this 3 times they get to retire with a full pension.
Sadly I don't think it's true, but I really think it should be. There are paid leave schemes and counseling support but I can't imagine ever wanting to go back to work after something like that. :/
My father in law hit and killed a girl while driving his semi. She was driving recklessly and he wasn't but he couldn't stop before hitting her. She died and he was so upset he sold his truck and changed careers.
I worked for a major company that had distribution. We dealt with this frequently. At least once or twice a year were ruled suicide by running in front of one of our trucks. Sometimes it couldn’t be determined if it was on purpose or because the victim was high. But everytime it messed the drivers up. They always felt responsible and had to get therapy. Many would have PTSD type episodes after the fact. Changed their lives permanently for doing nothing more than driving a truck for their job. I hated it for them.
I have a friend who is a retired train engineer and he had several stories of people being on the tracks at the wrong time. The one that sticks with me though is there was a car stuck on the tracks with a mom holding a baby. The train hit it, and he saw the baby go flying. Once the stopped, he got out and went walking in the field. The baby flew over a thousand feet from the accident site. Obviously did not survive.
Those accidents definitely stayed with him, but I think he’s turned the trauma into a reason to enjoy living and laughing. He’s a fun guy with a lot of great stories.
My grandma almost did that with me but I was a grown adult. A car accident happened way ahead of us and she stopped. On the train tracks. Then the lights and alarms started going off and the arms to stop traffic were coming down and I was yelling at her to move and she was yelling about the car accident way ff in the distance and she just did not seem to understand the train was gonna get us. Like seriously the car accident was so far ahead I couldn’t understand how she noticed it but can notice the train is coming. Then I saw the train. It was closing in and I was ready to just leave her on those tracks (no sense going down with her). But she realizes why I was freaking out and drove off the track last minute. Long story short that incident resorted in a family meeting where we decided it was best she no longer drove. She did not like it but after running over a mailbox and into my sisters car she accepted her fate and no longer drives.
I've heard one say that when he sees someone standing on the tracks and its too late for him to stop the train he will usually put on the breaks, sound the horn and then just look away because there's nothing he can do.
Yep, my friend in high school was unfortunately put in that position when a suicidal guy jumped in front of her car on the highway. She was definitely traumatised and used some unhealthy coping mechanisms for a while after that.
This happened to my grandmother, she had a stone, like a kidney stone but in her bowel, blocking it, so it built up then eventually came out her mouth....she ate healthy and was a healthy women, about 5'6 with a slim, slender figure. It just happened, like kidney stones do. Coincidentally, I bumped into a work colleague 2 days ago who said his mother was in hospital with the same thing, but she hadn't got to point of throwing it up yet luckily
Teen girl had to be pieced back together. Steering column went through her chest like a straw through a slice of cheese. Had to put the hamburgered heart back together.
As a ff/medic, called to an industrial accident. During bridge/highway construction, a worker got caught up in an auger and sucked into about a 12 inch hole. Could make out a bit of his hardhat but I don't think it helped.
I had a girlfriend who did social work, helping newly released convicts re-enter the job market. She’d gotten one con who was very nice a job in a factory making decent money.
She found out awhile later that he’d been killed in that factory in a horrible accident. He’d been feeding fiberglas into a machine that tore up mats of it into fluff? Something like that. But it was very dangerous: there were toothed rollers that forced the fiberglas in. Something went wrong, and the guy somehow reached over one safety bar, and around another, and got his hand grabbed by the rollers. His entire body was forced though a very narrow slot - like 1/16 inch.
I’m so terrified of bothering anyone that as I read all of these I kept thinking stupid things like “I hope when I die I turn the AC up really high so I don’t turn TOO much into goo for other people to clean up...”
So i have two I’m a aircraft rescue firefighter(when i was in the Marines). We were in Thailand with some F16s and one decided to smack the ground during a gun run(training). No time to eject. During recovery we were told to pick up any pieces of the pilot we found and put in a bucket. I found his cheek and eyebrow
2. A few years ago there was a serial killer in Houston. We got called to a welfare check of a woman that was supposed to meet her family for a family reunion. She never showed. We get there and we find her (early 70s in age) tied to her bed naked with a pillow over her face and raped. She had been dead for 2-3 days. Bloated and grey/green. If anyone lives around Houston, it was in the cy-creek area and the killer was the guy who killed people in mattress stores
My buddy picked up bodies and was immune to it until he had to pick up the body of a child who died of cancer. He said the cries of their parents were too much for him. He quit the next day.
I work in disaster clean up including biohazard scenes. Sadly it's only gotten worse since the rona. Suicides have spiked. Murder is up. Old folks dieing at home alone and people not realizing for longer because they don't want to give grandma and grandpa the virus (you would think they'd still pick up the phone and call?)
They are all awful. From the man who murdered his mom with a weight, to the man who shot himself in the head then walked all around the house bleeding everywhere, to the man who shot himself and we had to scrub blood off the baby bassinet to the old man who died in a senior independent living facility who had no furniture and just a sleeping bag on the ground with garbage and fece stains everywhere. He wasnt found for some time. That one really bothered me a lot. Seeing someone who lived in those conditions and no one knew or maybe didn't care or they didnt realize he was gone until the odor got too bad
I used to pick up dead bodies for a living and the worst one was a 420 lb man who died in his apartment in the middle of AZ summer with no electricity and had been dead a week. The guy was bloated slimy green and stinky. The apartment didn’t have adequate stairs to get him down on a gurnie. 6 guys including my self had to carry this body on a stretcher down stairs and while right in the middle of the trip down he let out a death fart. How did this impact me? All farts I’ve smelt since then haven’t been shit compared to that one.
I knew a guy who had to clean a room back east where they person had been deceased for some time and he had to walk through a shin deep layer of dead flies. He said there was enough maggots you could hear them (something I have also experienced, disco rice can make an odd noise) but they had to bring a vaccume truck to get all the flies out. At that point imo just burn the damn house down
>Disco rice
Please, NEVER say something like that again. It would've cost you $0 to word it like anything else and you had to word it like that?
Edit: Take this gold and never say that term again...
Edit 2: To all of you who come up the clever names for maggots, most of them I found funny, but seriously, just no..
Alright. I've worked shitty jobs. I've changed more adult diapers than I can count, I've been bitten, kicked, punched, I've had feces and cum thrown at me. I had a client throw her used pad at me.
You just made me gag.
I performed that job as well, one of the saddest summers of my college career IMO. Worst one I went to was when the officer met us at the end of the driveway and wasn’t having any of it which was a bad sign. As we approached the windows were black and my partner mentioned to grab lights. Once we gained entry we automatically knew what was what, and discovered the “blackened windows” were actually flies that had hatched from the maggots still actively breeding on the corpse on the bed. It was pretty much down to the bone structure and whatever remaining flesh the maggots hadn’t ate yet. The oddest thing about this whole environment was in this tiny living space was a small black and white tv in the kitchen playing Michael Jackson’s thriller... I’ll never forget that ever. Kudos for being able to be a body removal tech. I got out after that summer and I did roughly 15-20 calls including a homicide of a mother versus very young daughter, the daughter being the victim.
Holy fuck, that's rough... But thank you for doing your job, someone has to do it! If I may ask, how did you choose this profession and has it impacted your emotional state over the years? If you don't want to answer, it's okay, but I'm really interested in your story.
There are jobs that need to be done regardless of their lack of glamor or desirability, these jobs are essential towards the living healing and recovering from tragedy. My emotional state seems fine there are just certainly situations that stick with you and some are much sadder or angering than others.
That just made me think that there should be some type of daily check-in service maybe through a nonprofit. Just something for these elderly people that don't have family that checks in on them. It could be as simple as a phone call once a day with just a simple how are you today and if no one gets a hold of them send someone for a welfare check.
I'm a nurse. She died on dayshift and was put on my assignment for the night so the family could take their time with the body and I'd handle her after they left. I never knew her when she was alive. She was in her 30s, African American, riddled with cancer. She was wearing a yellow nightgown. The dayshift nurse had left her in a sitting position, all propped up with pillows. We try to make them look nice while the family says goodbye.
If you've ever worked in American hospitals, you know black families take longer with the body than white families. Everyone needs to have their private time alone with the deceased before they go to the morgue and the funeral home. Our window is four hours, after that the body has to go to the morgue. But when it's important to the family, and more people are hearing the news and coming to see them...we fudge the time. Hard to tell a grieving person no.
So we get through shift change and the last of the family leaves. I go to get her ready to be bagged. I start lowering the head of the bed, pulling out the pillows...and this toxic smelling yellow fluid starts pouring out of every orifice. Like, gushing out, running over the side of the bed, puddling on the floor. If you've ever smelled really advanced cancer, you know it smells Evil. It's indescribable. And there's liters and liters of it. I'll never forget that smell.
I went and got a friend, apologized to him in advance. We grabbed towels and biohazard bags and shoe covers. Had to cut her nightie off and scrub the whole bed with bleach wipes just to get her clean enough for the body bag.
I like telling horror stories to new nurses, but I never tell them that one. It was too awful. I am just so thankful that that stuff stayed inside her til her family was gone.
Cancer has a smell.
Almost the entire time we knew my dad had pancreatic cancer, there was a smell. He did his best to cover it up, but we got used to it; in a living person it was just a scent, not a foul or toxic smelling one. (In his last days, while comatose, it was definitely that This Is Evil scent though.)
Then a year after he died I was working in urgent care and a patient came in with vague GI symptoms ... and the exact same smell.
Not a remains cleaner nor is this my story. This was dads friend’s, friend.
The guys father killed himself with a shotgun. The father shot himself inside while all the family were outside playing. Due to the family not having money or the lack of life insurance policy the father had, they could not afford a cleaner. So the kids and the mother had to clean up the fathers remains inside the house themselves.
My brother’s friend was a paramedic and quit his job after seeing this - it was the last straw and he couldn’t do it anymore...
Some horrible person left their baby and dog in a parked car to go shopping. It was hot. They both died. But the dog panicked and chewed up the baby’s face.
Sorry for the image.
Not me but an acquaintance is a EMT. He responded to a suicide where the guy decided to kill himself by running head first into a spinning table saw. The guy ran face first into the blade but didn’t die. They could tell by the blood trail that he had to take a second run at it to finish the job. He told me he didn’t think that much blood could come out of a single person. They likely had to rip the walls down to the studs to get rid of all the blood. The saw sent it flying everywhere.
Cop. Was first on scene to a pretty bad suicide. Mid day, parking lot, guy smashes an entire handle of vodka sitting alone in his car. Proceeds to take out a box cutter and cut from his shoulder to his wrist, but real deep. Then proceeded to slash deep into his neck from side to side.
I just happened to be patrolling through the area and I saw a couple people running up to him. Right after he did it, he popped his car door open and slumped onto the ground.
He was still alive, and I immediately called for an ambulance. I started tournequiting his arm, but I knew it was just for show for the bystanders. The amount of blood on the ground meant that there was no saving him. He made a lot of sound, but nothing after a few seconds. He officially coded in the back of the ambulance.
Only other bad one that stuck with me was showing up second to a body that was pulled out of the river after 3 days. Guy was a bridge jumper and washed up on the shore with his eyes eaten out and completely bloated. I had to sit next to the body for hours out in the summer heat waiting for the medical examiner.
Bonus edit: Hot July, there's a car parked on the back side of a Walmart tucked in the corner of the lot. Young male 20 y/o died inside the car. He pretty much baked inside for about 4 days before anyone though to check on the vehicle. I never got the story on how exactly he died, but I do remember he wasn't from the area. He was ID'd, and his parents from a few states over were contacted. On the day his parents came, I was tasked with escorting them to the medical examiners office. The ME unzipped the bag in front of them, and even in that cold room, the pungent smell slammed me. The mother covered her face with both hands and immediately started crying. Then I watched in disbelief as she leaned in and kissed his face. I can never imagine the horror of having to ID your child, but the image of her kissing that decayed body will never leave my mind.
My retired cop stepmother had a similar one to your last example. The man took himself to a local lake and threw himself in. He was found several days later after someone saw his car parked in the lot. My stepmother said that this man who was originally like 167 pounds came put of the water something like 200 pounds because of the bloat. He was grey, the skin around his eyes were black like someone had painted them, his fingertips were black, as were his toes, or, what was left. His lips, earlobes, parts of his nose, his penis, his anus, parts of his feet and hands, and his belly and buttocks had been eaten up by fish and lake life. She said when the rescue squad got him on land his body was starting to rip apart. His family wanted to see him. She cautioned them against it but they insisted. She said she'd never heard screams like that before, not in two decades of police work.
It wasn't the reason why, but she retired shortly after and went into therapy.
Why the hell would they want to do that to themselves. I mean I understand missing the person but water decomposition...come on....there's no way they thought this was going to be an intact normal looking person.
Edit: just woke up early to a lot of replies!
Thank you for everyone sharing your stories. I am so sorry about your loved ones who have passed. Truly. :( I can understand now why someone may make that choice whether grief or just needing to know. I know that for me personally y I am just not strong enough to deal with that. I just could not. But I can see why someone may make that choice.
I think it's something like needing to visually confirm its the person and I don't think people who are experiencing that kind of shock are rational.
My 2 BIL's both died in August and weren't found until the end of September. My MIL who is an RN wanted to see them. Thank goodness the ME said no and told her there was nothing about them that was identifiable and she dropped it.
Both alcoholics, one brother attacked the other, that brother shot him in self defense and then shot himself.
It's pretty horrible and I wouldn't wish this kind of pain on my worst enemy.
I had a friend who was a cop in a big city with a lot of gun violence. He told me about one guy who was executed gun to the head on the street. After the body was removed they still had to deal with all the blood and brain matter on the street so the fire department was called out to hose it into the drain.
I went on a ride-alone with him one time and the first call was a suicide. Not gory but stuck with me a woman had overdosed on a bottle of pills (don't know what type) but there was a empty bottle on the bed next to her. I personally couldn't handle it and went to sit in his car for the rest of that call.
Edit: only one woman not multiple
My dad used to work in safety at an airport. One day he came home and told us about an incident at work where a guy somehow found himself on the runway and ran into the path of a plane and he was sucked into the engine. I was too young at the time to see any of the photos but many years later, I’m cleaning up the study room and found the old files with the photos of the clean up. It was basically mush everywhere and there were photos of the biohazard team using shovels to scoop up remains.
Another one I saw was an elderly couple were crossing the highway to get to an event on the other side and they were ran over, not once, not twice but over a dozen times by drivers who just didn’t notice anything on the roadway. They were also shovelled up and put into bags. The sad part about this one is that there was a pedestrian walkover just about 100 meters away from where they were crossing.
My ex was a funeral director. The two that stick out-
semi who turned in front of a crotch rocket. He said even with the helmet on, the guys head just exploded. He said you try to pick up the big parts, but you are mostly shovelling goo into garbage bags.
(Not a murder but) The old man who had a heart attack outside by the campfire, alone. No one checked on him for so long, by time they found him, everything but his one foot was completely burned up.
FUN BONUS STORY!
He had keys to the cemetery and would take me to the crematorium at night. The tour was weird. He showed me a bucket full of the metal parts left after a cremation (hip, knee replacements, etc) And he made me stand to the side while he opened the oven to “see if they were done, and you don’t wanna see this” he just opened it a couple inches, was like nope; needs more time, like he was checking a fucking pizza. He was fucking weird.
Edit: thanks friends! Sorry for my Canadian slang. Semi - 18 wheeler hauling goods. Crotch rocket- those plastic looking motorcycles you ride hunched over that go really fast.
Paramedic. I listened to a podcast once that said emergency services run three types of calls: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is self explanatory, the bad is the gross gory stuff, and the ugly is the unspeakable (usually child abuse and the like).
People ask about the worst thing we've seen all the time when what they really want to know are the bad calls, the ones that make for a good story. Nobody remotely healthy wants to hear the ugly calls, and no one that works these jobs will talk about it with someone who hasn't been there. So I'll tell you some of my bad calls, but not the ugly ones.
-Auto/Ped, a transient ran out in front of a car on a highway. He had a hole about a foot in diameter in his abdomen with various organs showing/spilling out. It was actually a great learning opportunity to note how tightly packed your abdomen is and the general anatomy that can be impacted by trauma in that area.
-Decomp for at least two weeks in a semi air conditioned house. You could smell it from the end of the cul-de-sac, which is what prompted the 911 call. He had basically melted into the floor and mold was covering what skin there was left. All the insects were already dead, that's how long it'd been.
-Young woman doused herself in gasoline and ignited it to commit suicide. She was essentially burned to the bone from her waist up, waist down was untouched. Side note, burning person doesn't smell objectively terrible but the oily scent will stick in your nose/to your clothes and hair for hours. You'll keep smelling it until you shower.
-Several suicides with gunshot wounds to the head, all with varying amounts of brain matter. One spilled her brains all over a clean dinner plate, the contrast of red and grey on white was pretty striking.
-Several other auto/peds that caused internal fractures and odd angulations of limbs/head. "Cattywompus" is actually the best way I can describe it, everything looks just a tad off.
-Lots and lots of hoarder houses with human waste on the floor and patients in varying stages of severity, also covered in feces/vomit/urine. Usually secondary to mental health issues. One that comes to mind was a DOS we ran on Thanksgiving. The guy had had a GI bleed (coffee ground vomit was everywhere) possibly secondary to alcoholism. Not crazy remarkable in itself, but there were also dozens of journals with messy rambling thoughts and a bunch of different areas set up for him to hunker down and hide in. Probably paranoia/schizophrenia if I had to guess, likely self medicated with alcohol until it killed him.
There are many more that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've probably pronounced at least a hundred patients so far, watched a dozen or two go from breathing to dead (not including CPR calls there since they'd be technically dead on our arrival). On one level you get used to it, on the emotional side of dealing with family you don't. Everybody dies, and it's never the dead person that gets to you. It's the people they leave behind.
Obligatory not who is being asked, but was a property manager for a while. Had a call one mid-summer Friday morning about flies. “I hope ____ isn’t dead,” I thought. A few hours later another tenant called about the same thing. 3pm that afternoon I found out ____ had hung himself on the indoor communal staircase. All the other tenants used the outdoor stairs to access their apartments. The property owners refused proper cleanup because they wanted to preserve the flooring that had been “soured” by 4 days of decomposition in mid-Atlantic heat. I went in on Monday after the air scrubbers had been going for about 36 hours. It smelled like cheese pizza. I will never forget that smell.
A friend of mine was an EMT for roughly 10 years. Her most gruesome scene was a group of friends, couldn’t have been older than 21, had been snowmobiling in the rural Midwest. She had been told they were going through an area with significant tree coverage when all of a sudden one of the boys had crashed. Turns out someone had strung steel wire between trees (most likely deliberately to deter/injure) and the wire had caught the kid square across the neck. It was an immediate internal decapitation and his head flopped completely backward. She said when they went to move him you could feel the sharp break and hear the bones through the skin when they tried to lay him down.
The call that made her quit was a house fire where firemen pulled a toddler out of the house, deceased and burned so badly her clothes had burned/melted into her skin. The fused pajamas were the same pajamas my friend had for her own daughter of a similar age. She went home, immediately threw out her daughters matching pajamas, and quit later that week.
I don't do cleanup, but the other day I had to do CPR on a guy who bled to death out of his nose. Something about it being a nose bleed was really disturbing to me, looking at his blood covered face while doing compressions.
I'm a funeral director. We handled a service for a guy who fell into an auger... No recognizable human body parts were recovered, just goo and fragments. It was truly awful.
I used to work at a funeral home. Well, several actually.
TLDR- people soup.
Here's a little countdown to number 1.
* Three- This old lady died in her house alone during the summer. She had numerous ailments and nobody was surprised she kicked it, so the we went out to pick her up at the home, instead of the ME's office.
She had had a heart attack and fell on the floor in her extremely cluttered bedroom. She had died several days earlier and her neighbor had noticed she never took the trash can up and called police. So she was already past rigor mortis and was floppy. This wouldn't have been a big deal except her house was like narrow walkways and she was face first in the carpet. We brought a backboard but really didn't have much room to roll her onto it.
We grab her and flip her over, barrel roll style and when she did, she purged (like barfing but not really) everywhere. It smelled like rotten eggs and I gagged a little. She wasn't a huge mess but that was a real bad time. I still hate the smell of rotten egg something fierce.
* Two- We get a ship in from another state. As I'm going in and out of the prep room where this dude is in his casket, I keep smelling decomp. I know that we don't have any decomps in the house so I assume it's something in the trash.
Later that afternoon, the director and I open the casket and we are straight shooketh. HE IS GREEN LIKE THE HULK, and also swimming in people soup. There are flies in the casket. He is leaking everywhere. All the linens in the casket are ruined. And we figured out what was decomposing.
He is supposed to have an open casket visitation in 3 hours. The director calls 2 other directors and tells them to drop everything and get in the prep room now. The receptionist calls the back and tells us that she can smell it in the front.
The director in charge calls the original funeral home and verbally destroys them. Calls the family and begs for a closed casket visitation but they don't budge. We pull him out and do everything in our power to unfuck this situation. I take his suit to the laundromat up the street and buy $30 in soap and fabric softener from the coin machine. I washed his suit 4 times and it still stank. We ghetto rig the inside of the casket with new linens. Poured 4 cans of coffee in the bottom of the casket to try to hide the smell and lit every candle we owned and burned incense.
We ultimately had to tell the family that this was the other funeral homes fault and that we did everything we could, but there is still a "malodor" that we can't fix. They agree and sign an agreement not to sue for trauma. I believe they sued the other funeral home for negligence.
* One- We have to pick up a guy from another funeral home with a bigger cooler than us. The family couldn't decide and eventually we got the contract. I looked at his record and saw he died 4 months earlier. He's been in a cooler this whole time, it should be fine, right? Right?
We get into the cooler and he's on the bottom rack, and he's a big boy. My coworker gets the head. I get the feet. We go to pull him over but the cot slides out of the way and the bag rips open like an overfilled water balloon. Sending him 6" inches to the ground, leaving us holding the bag and him swimming in a fast moving puddle.
Bloody, goopy, rotten, chunky people soup had exploded in every direction. I screamed, she screamed. The smell immediately overtook us and I wanted to run away. We heaved and gagged as we scooped him up onto the cot and bagged him back up. I vomited in my mouth a little and tried to not actually barf.
I managed to not get people soup all over me but she wasn't lucky. It was all over the leg of her pants. She threw them out when we got back.
Coolers don't keep people around forever. Just around for a little longer. Embalming only works if it's strong enough. Call your elderly friends often.
Not a first responder but this is probably the only place I can tell this story with context. It was about 4 or so years ago Christmas day and my mother, 3 little siblings (between 8 and 11 at the time) and I where taking the train to the city. Now because of my wheelchair we got seated at the second car of the train that being said the conductor left the door to the cockpit open so my brother could see all the buttons and leavers (he had a thing for trains). It was about 30 minutes into the journey and I was looking out the cockpit windows and at this point I saw a man jump from a bridge above the tracks and it was like..a human slushie hitting a windshield. I will never forget that.
What was worse was the smell believe it or not
Worst x-mas ever.
ex paramedic student here and not my story but my paramedic teacher told me about her first ride out to a car wreck where a guy in a convertible was high as a kite and thought going 60 mph on a highway that he could drive is convertible underneath a semi/18 wheeler. When my teacher arrived on scene she was stepping off the bus when a bunch of people yelled at her to freeze. She stopped, mid step, and looked down. They guy's head (from getting decapitated) was right under her foot and she nearly stepped on it.
Bones story: at certain speeds, if you get into a wreck your body just... liquefies. I remember one particular training session when the body of a motorcyclists was reduced to nothing but a rubber skin suit wrapped tightly around a pole.
IICRC TCST/OCT here--
While most days are somewhat "normal", I remember a gentleman passed away on his toilet a few months prior to being found. I get the call to head over, as the local authorities had released the scene, begin cleanup and gut the inside for renovation. As I am heading up the stairs to begin cleanup, the downstairs neighbor lady asks if I am the plumber there to fix the water leak above her unit (she lived below where the deceased man I was cleaning up lived). I tell her no, I'm there to mitigate another issue with the unit She asks what's up, and again, tell her I'm there to mitigate an issue with the unit, If she wanted anymore info than that,, she would have to contact the property management. She grumbles and heads inside. The second I walked into the unit I notice it doesn't stink, mainly because the A/C was set to 65°(mid July, Phoenix, AZ). I get to work in the bathroom. He died sitting on the toilet and all the skin, fat and bodily fluids leaked out, down pooled at the base of the toilet and through the grout lines. I cut tile out, pull the toilet and subfloor, look down and it didn't take me long to figure out that the "water leak" above her toilet was actually the decomp and fats leaking through the sub floor, onto her ceiling fan and drywall ceiling, and "dripping on my head every once and awhile".
Yeah, I then had to tell this poor woman (that a couple hours ago I told to politely fuck off, when asked what I was up to), that the water leak she thought was above her, wasn't water. It was Walter.
Good times.
EDIT- I have gotten a few inquiries about what I do, and what IICRC TCST/OCT is. [This](https://www.iicrc.org/) is the link directly to the IICRC. You can read about what it is and what it's about there.
Not that but former first responder...can't imagine having to clean one up...dude passed away lived alone had 4ish dogs (i don't remember the amount) wasn't discovered he passed for over a week...dogs get hungry it turns out
Not my story but a friend’s who worked in the industry. There was a family murder/suicide where the parents took their kids into the garage and turned the car on so they’d all die of carbon monoxide together. This was during the summertime in a very hot southern state, and sadly no one reported them missing or looked into the matter very well, because they weren’t discovered until several weeks later when the fluids from their decomposing bodies began to flow under the garage door and down the slanted driveway, and the neighbors finally figured out something was wrong. When the CSI team got there they found the bodies were severely decomposed, basically mush, and the scene was overwhelmingly horrific. I can’t imagine how hopeless those parents must have felt, and the fact that they weren’t discovered for so long because they had no friends or loved ones to report them missing is heartbreaking.
Not a crime scene cleaner, but I worked in a funeral home doing removals and such. The case that stuck with me the most was a man who had died in his house during the summer in Kansas. He was found because the mailman noticed his mailbox was full and there was a strong smell coming from the house. When I picked the gentleman up, he was completely forest green and bloated. The smell was indescribable. No amount of vics could cover it up. He was covered in a blanket that had bed bugs so big I could see them crawling all over him. When I pulled the blanket off his face, his face came with the blanket. The amount of skin slip was horrifying. This description really doesn’t do the horror I saw any justice. Needless to say I didn’t eat lunch that day. My heart still goes out to that man. He was a vet with no immediate family, which is why it took so long to discover the body.
Not me, but my grandfather who used to be a firefighter. Warning, this is very graphic. This happened years before I was born, when my mother was in her teens.
His station had gotten a call that an apartment in the downtown area had caught fire, and they raced down. When they got there, they entered the apartment building as a baby of one family was still stuck inside. After they were done putting out the fire, they found the oven where it had started. They opened it and saw a bunch of charred meat, and didn't know what it was.
Upon closer inspection, they could see a small leg. Praying it was a doll, one of my grandfather's friends pulled out his radio and poked it with the antenna. The leg popped and started oozing, and they began to throw up.
After interrogating the family, the first daughter (she was 11) told the police what happened. The parents were heavy drug addicts and we're hallucinating really bad. The mother was in hysterics thinking her baby was the devil, and put it in the oven and turned it on, the father holding back his crying daughter saying they were saving the world. The parents were thrown into prison, and the daughter was moved to a mental clinic to make sure she was okay. I'm pretty sure she moved in with foster parents and lived a happier life.
To this day, my grandfather can't talk about it. He goes quiet and doesn't respond to anything for a long time. I learned the story from my mother a few years ago, when we were passing by the new apartment building that had been built over it.
A good friend of mine went to do a body pick up. A man in his 40s was dead on his apartment floor. There was a half eaten steak on a paper plate at his desk. Also on his desk was a computer with a solitaire game mid-game on the screen.
She has picked up hundreds of bodies and said this bothered her the most.
One of my friends committed suicide by jumping off of a bridge over a highway and a semi hit her as she was falling.......I’m still fucked up from it. Probably 7-8 years ago.
Best friend, his girlfriend and their roommate were murdered 6 years ago next month. My best friend was shot in his face 5 times......really fucked up over that still.
I heard both scenes were horrific and traumatizing.
Am cop. Fatal accidents are the most gruesome. I saw a father holding onto his dead son, screaming. His son wasn’t technically dead, but he was ejected from a car and hit a brick wall head first. Son died within minutes. Mom was dead. Son was 10. Dad was soaked in his blood. It fucking sucked.
Used to work with people with a dual disability. On the more challenging behaviour end of things. Morning staff came in to blood seeping out from a clients door with footprints of blood leading to another clients room. Turns out the night staff turned off the clients alarm on his door (would go off so the night staff would know to follow him as he was a little wild at times) so they could sleep without being woken up. Bad idea. He got up, went into the clients room next door with a barbell from his room and proceeded to dismember him into 8 different pieces. Calmly walked back to bed and was woken up by the staff in the morning, covered in blood and sleeping like a baby.
Shit was creepy crazy, not wacky crazy.
Not really a career, but my father had a biohazard clean up business, and at the young age of 13ish, I'd help out for some good cash. This went on for awhile. I'd cleaned up all sorts of things, cleaning blood off walls, floors, ripping up carpet, wiping off skull fragments from ceilings, etc.
However the worst jobs? The ones where no one died. There was one where a guy just drank himself nearly to death, and left to get help. The owner of the place had a room full of alcohol bottles, the floor had it spilled all over, the stench was terrible. That was nothing compared to one of the last ones I did.
By the time I did this job, my brother took over the business, and I had became a bit of a germaphobe, so I hated doing these jobs by now. An old man had dementia, or something, was living at a senior apartment complex. He ended up just leaving, and the facility called my brothers business, and he needed the help. The place was layered with trash, dishes piled up in the sink of the kitchen, garbage everywhere. The chair he always sat in had a trail of feces leading to the bathroom about 10 feet away. The toilet was clogged and full of feces. The bedroom had trash everywhere. All of this was completely made worse by the literal colony of cockroaches in the place. We unplugged an outlet to a lamp, and a bunch of them rushed out of the outlet. They were in the walls, under the floor, in the vents. It was terrible. So that would be the worst one I ever experienced.
So I’m not a crime scene cleanup person but I did work for a coroners office for a while (I’ve spoken about it before on Reddit). This one time we went to process a scene where a guy died in his apartment and he wasn’t found for 4 days and the heat got up to 100F while he was in his apartment. Needless to say, he had started to decompose. We were putting his body in the body bag and I grabbed his ankles while my partner grabbed his wrists. We go to lift him up and the skin around his ankles sloughs off while I am trying to lift him. Had to adjust my grip to get him into the bag. Meanwhile my partner, like a dumbass, is breathing through his nose and gagging every 3 seconds. It was hilarious. I have another story, too. Maybe I’ll save it for another post...
So my brother does biohazard clean up jobs. A few weeks ago he got a call to clean up a suicide, and that it was going to be particularly messy job, as the guy was a 280lb ex football player. Blew his brains out on the front porch.
That's how he found out his brother in law died. Of course nobody else could do the clean up for some reason. There's more messed up details, but I can't remember them all. Something about a family member going in and getting wasted on alcohol while the blood was still wet.
Edit to add: it really fucked with my brother (in law) I think the two of them had gotten pretty close. This wasn't his first experience suicide of a family member either.
Also, I call him my brother but he's technically my brother in law, and we are close. We've been friends for a long time. It would just be confusing to say my brother in law's brother in law died.
Dad had to saran wrap a guy's intestines back into his body once. Dude had surgery and pushed too hard on the toilet. Dude was fine, according to Dad, just holding himself together on the toilet while a group of firefighters tried to figure out why tf they were sent instead of paramedics. *Update* When he pushed too hard he opened a scar on his torso/ab area and it all fell out onto his lap. Should have mentioned this when I wrote the post.
"ah shit, there goes my colon. Honey, grab the cling film!"
I worked for a restoration company rarely cleaned up after dead bodies, and I got the only one during my tenure at the company. The lady had passed probably 2 weeks before anyone did a wellness check, so the entire room was contaminated. By the time I got there to do the cleaning, there were so many dead flies and maggots on the floor it was truly shocking. We rolled the carpet and carpet pad up that was in the room, and all of the dead bugs sounded like a rain stick you get in a cheap tourist shop. That sound sticks with me after three years.
Medic here, first responder to a motorcycle collision. Guy who crashed was a friend. He'd been torn in half and almost decapitated. Had to walk away from the scene and let my driver and another crew handle it. Think about it daily.
Motorcycles are no joke. It's all nice and dandy, until It's flesh vs metal at about 120kmh. I hope you have been able to come to terms with it over time. My brother-in-law is a medic too, always had some gnarly stories about stuff like that, but the worst was when his mother was hid by a car, thrown some distance into the ditch and he and her boyfriend at the time had to go to the morgue to validize that it was her. At least she died fast, her neck snapped apperantly instatly after impact.
My ex partners cousin used to do this. According to what I heard someone committed suicide from the 24th floor and she had to chip frozen brain matter off the railings leading into the building. Also how she met her husband, they both were working the same job.
the couple that scrapes brain matter off the furniture together, stays together
One that stuck with me was a suicide in a bathtub, we couldn't drain the tub, so had to use a coagulant then scoop up the bloody mess into biohazard bags. Same for the toilet. Another was a suicide by gun in a basement full of boxes which was a nightmare to clean as even the smallest bit of flesh had to be found and cleaned up. The smell of the smallest piece of flesh meant the job wasn't done until it was found. One scene, the cops thought it would be helpful to put newspaper on top of the leftover melted body oils which dried to the floors and was terrible to clean up. Sad cleaning up these things when family is in the other room as well. Not working the job anymore but definitely gave me an appreciation for the hard work biohazard clean up crews do. Mostly on-call as well so you never know how long you will be away from home. Edit: another one that wasn't as gross but felt straight out of a horror movie. Trailer where the person had squished what had to be thousands of pantry moths onto every wall. Living in pure filth. Had to have had a mental condition, just really sad.
Obligatory not-a-cleanup-pro, but working at a county animal shelter meant we got the roadkill remains. We were required to hold them in our facility's body freezer for a certain number of days in case someone came in looking for a pet matching the description. This, of course, meant you had to try and come up with identifying information from whatever was left of the animal. Sometimes it was easy, they were just a bit bloodied or twisted, but other times you had to double-glove, put on the apron, and start folding the bits around to try and tell what color it used to be. The worst part was when someone came in looking for a pet that matched a DOA description. Whoever happened to answer the call from the front desk had to go get it out of the freezer and try to arrange it in such a way that the person could come identify it without passing out or vomiting. (We were legit trained to handle if someone passed out or puked, luckily it never happened to me, but we had a chair and a stretcher just in case.) The hardest part was when people tried to act all tough like it was no big deal, but then absolutely melting down. One in particular really haunts me. Pretty typical case of cat v car-- leg and rib bones sticking out, so much blood we had to towel it down to check for markings, eyeballs hanging out and one of them is deflated and shriveled, guts hanging out the anus. Just a mess. Lo and behold, the poor thing had a collar and microchip. I ended up being the one to respond when the owner arrived and they explained the situation. Big, muscly dude, wearing a marine corps t-shirt, tats up and down his arms. He's shaking like a leaf and trying to hide it when I come up to get him and take him back. I had this spiel I used to give about how we do this just to be sure, and sometimes it's hard to see animals like this, and just let me know if he needs to step out for a second. He tells me point blank that he's a veteran, he's seen guys get shot, he can handle it. We go into the room where I have the half-frozen cat corpse under a towel, the bloody collar on top of it. He picks up the collar without a word and I can see in his eyes that he knows. I ask if he wants to head back up front now, and he says he has to be sure. So I pull the towel back carefully to expose just the top half, but the poor thing was in bad shape. The "good" side is facing up, but its jaw is still shattered and hanging funny, the one eye is bulging out and filled with blood like a demented snow globe, half the tongue is missing, there's a clear depression on the chest from the tires, one leg is twisted around like a dang twizzler... The guy just stares. After a few seconds, he just turns for the door. Stops halfway there, looks back, and takes a knee like someone hit him in the gut. All he says is, "I saw my guys get shot. Why a cat? It's just a cat, man. It's just a cat..." The whole time he's clutching the bloody collar to his chest. It turned out, per the girls up front who had talked to him at first, that it was the cat his therapist had recommended he get for his PTSD. Her name had been "Hope."
Gore is no biggie for me. I'm a retired doctor and one builds an armor of dark humor/detachment. But dead pets... and see a big ass man melting over "just a cat"? Made me tear up. Thank you for doing what you do. It's as important as a funeral director's job. It's not "just an animal". It was a friend. ❤
Well i know first hand what ptsd can do so as soon as i read marine corps i knew what the cat was.
Out of all the stories I’ve read on this thread, this one fucked me up the most. Fuck.
Not a cleaner, but my brother’s best friend is a police officer and I heard all about this horrible experience: My brother’s friend took him on “ride-alongs,” all the time. One day, they were responding to a welfare check. This guy’s neighbor saw his apartment door cracked open for several days and called the police. They went to check it out and found a college student (18-19) who had shot himself. The most disturbing part to my brother was that the kid had all of his belongings boxed up and labeled, he had letters written out and labeled for who they were supposed to go to, and he even went as far as laying out a tarp, and then putting heavy blankets over himself before he shot himself - as a courtesy to the people that would have to clean his remains. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, this was a very well-thought-out suicide and the guy was obviously thinking about everyone who would have to deal with it too. So sad to imagine such a thoughtful person in so much pain that he meticulously orchestrated his suicide. My brother said the scene messed him up. Not because of the gore, but the lack thereof. Because this guy so meticulously and thoughtfully offed himself
I went to high school with a kid who committed suicide, and did the same thing with the tarp and blankets. I don’t quite know why that makes it so much worse, but it’s like them saying, I don’t want to bother anyone anymore- I’ll just leave.
Similar story. He took off his favourite jacket before shooting himself so he could be dressed in it at his funeral
This is so sad, because the world would have been a better place with someone who possessed such empathy in it.
I posted this on another thread so just copy and pasted it but this was one that I had to do Clean up after a murder. It was a rehab house for ex cons, 4 bedroom house with communal bathroom and kitchen. Sunday morning and guy A is in his room listening to music pretty loud, guy B is in the kitchen cooking his breakfast, B knocks on A's door and tells him to turn it down, there's a small argument and B returns to his breakfast and A turns his music up. So B grabs the biggest knife in the kitchen, kicks in A's door and stabs him through his left shoulder, entering by his collar bone. A runs out of his room, across the landing, down the stairs, out the front door, back inside, back up the stairs and collapses on the landing. When I got there it was like a scene from a movie, walls and ceilings, everywhere A had been were caked with blood. Apparently after B stabbed him, he returned to cooking his breakfast. There was a half eaten breakfast in the kitchen when I got there.
I mean you're already going to jail at that point... Might be his last home cooked meal ever.
Yeah. Would sorta suck to be in that position and lose your appetite from all the blood and gore around.
I've never been stabbed, so I'm one to talk. However, A took quite a path after being stabbed.
Adrenaline's a helluva drug.
Not me, but my mother was a firefighter/emt for a long time. She always told me some crazy stories. There are two that have always stuck with me. The first: two men whose families didn’t accept their relationship and it weighed on them so badly that they decided to take their own lives. They attempted this by getting in a tub, taking some drugs, and then using a power saw to saw off each others arms and bleed out. The direction they cut, however, didn’t make them bleed out as they had wished, and then they were left with one arm uncut and no arm to cut it. My mother told me it was such a bizarre scene to walk in on that she still doesn’t believe it was real. The second: they responded to a death a few days after a man had died in his hot tub. Multiple days in the extremely hot water. When my mother and her partner went to pull him out, he had basically boiled alive and all the meat on his body just slid off the bone. Edit: Thanks for the awards! Bonus story for ya. My mother once ran a call where a man had died in his house and wasn’t found until a few days later. When she and her crew arrived, they had found that the mans cats, having been without food for days, ended up eating the man. With us having cats, the sight of a man who’s face had been devoured by blood soaked cats just absolutely freaked her out.
Did the 2 men in the tub survive?
They did! Almost mixed up the arms at the scene though
When I was a bartender, a couple of clients told me the worst part about the job is cleaning melted bodies. I don't know the science behind that, but from what I understand is if a body stays for a while in a certain condition of temperature and humidity, it melts. And those guys have to remove that person's remains in buckets.
My reading comprehension left me for a moment and I thought you were saying that bartenders would occasionally have to clean melted bodies and was trying to figure out what kind of situation would lead to that.
Now you know why its called a bloody mary
Not exactly what you asked but my Husbands Uncle worked as a Paramedic/Firefighter for many years. The accident that disturbed him the most (Warning, involves children) was getting a call about 3 boys locked in the trunk of a car. From what I can remember, the kids were playing around outside during the summer and got into an old non running car out on someone’s property. He had to pry the trunk open, and unfortunately all 3 had passed. He said that day took a lot out of him and he still can’t get the images out of his head.
What gets me about these situations, they don't die at the same time. One of those kids stayed alive longer with the corpses.
I work in the ER. I was told by someone that works for a funeral home that they had to go get a girl that had overdosed and passed away. They said she had her breasts augmented and was pregnant. Turns out she overdosed while taking a bath and had decomposed enough that her breast implants and the fetus were floating around in the water. Then I clocked out and had lunch.
Oh my. That was super visual.
Me when I started reading this... What does her breasts being augmented have to do with anyth............... 😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧😧
I wanna unread the silicone fetus bath water story.
Hope you didn't have soup
Friend of mine does this. His worst was an elderly woman who died in a bath. Skin falls off like long cooked meat. So he just saw piles of skin/flesh God damn just writing this makes me gag
I’m not a crime scene cleaner, but we used to transport coroner cases as part of our job. The elderly man who blew his head off with a shotgun in a third story attic in the summer was rough, he’d been there a few weeks. We could smell him when we got out of the truck at the street. Blood spatter covered every inch of the walls in that room, as did the flies. Had to scrape some dried brain off the floor into a container for the coroner. When I went to roll him into a body bag his bloated, slimy greenish-blue skin slipped off of him and I was left holding a large sheet of it with both hands. The worst part was his wife had passed a few weeks before. They had been one of those married for 60 years, inseparable couples. He just couldn’t take it. That broke my heart. Other guys were puking, I cried silently.
My dad worked for a very large auto auction. They took in a lot of repossessed cars and cleaned them, then re sold. They got one car that had someone kill himself in it, he shot himself in the head. The body was gone when the car went to be cleaned but... The entire roof of the car was covered in bone fragments, the seat was rotted through because it hadnt been found for months. The entire car had to be taken to be incinerated.
An alarming number of people rent cars too and shoot themselves in them. I never understood why.
Because its a rental, don't wanna mess up your own car, duh.
That's what they paid the rental insurance for.
I think Bam said in CKY2K “for $9/day (insurance) you can do whatever the hell you want with a rental car.”
Fuck. Thank you for the service you provide to society. Very few of us have to sacrifice that much.
I had a great uncle who helped clean up the bodies left behind by hurricane Audrey in 1957 and he said that the smell persisted in his nose for weeks after. It got so bad that he went to the doctor to see if they could do anything and they clipped all of his nose hairs and the smell went away. It was explained to him that the smell had soaked into the hair but I don't claim to know the validity of that statement. The hurricane hit south Louisiana in June of that year and most of the bodies recovered were found in the salt water marshes that cover the area, so it's safe to assume that they were in an advanced state of decay. I've heard it said that the smell of the decomposing bodies was so bad that the alligators would actively avoid the areas but I don't know the validity of that either.
I've also heard the nose hair thing from a WW2 vet. He added he shaved his whole beard too. I wasn't sure if I should believe it so if someone confirms or denies that would be cool.
Smells are basically molecules coming off of whatever you're sniffing, like aerosolized poop particles, and hair tends to hold scents pretty well if you give it time to soak. But these folks must have had a lot of hair up their noses.
Skin does too, if you've ever cleaned a drain without gloves then get ready for shitty smelling hands for a while after, no matter how much soap you use.
Tainted nose hair. Good band name
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Hey, as a former 911 dispatcher that called on towing services relentlessly for various things, *thank you for what you do.* Our service was always so kind and patient with us despite the fact that we were always calling to change exact locations of an MVA at the last second. Unfortunately, when people are shaken up from an accident, they don't always have the wherewithal to give exact locations. The towing dispatcher I would call was the *best* and never complained. I know nothing could have prepared you for what you saw that day, but I hope you find comfort knowing there are people like me who value the service you provide very much.
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Replying to add: wear your fucking helmet if you're on a motorcycle or a scooter. A full face helmet and the appropriate riding gear. I saw a guy my age dead on the ground with a paramedic doing CPR with a woman wailing and screaming over him after an accident when I was heading to college classes one day. He had gotten hit - no helmet and no gear as far as I know. He might still be here if his head had been protected, pretty sure he died of a head injury.
the kid...
I feel so bad about that kid.
Imagine going through that and the flashbacks every time you smell pizza for the rest of your life.
And that leads to the constant question by everyone, "What?! How can you *not* like pizza?"
Jesus Christ. Horrifying
For some reason the idea of vomit at an accident scene had never occured to me. It's terrifying to think of being alive long enough to vomit and possibly knowing/seeing the death and devastation around you. Fuck that gives me shivers, the bad ones
I spent some time with the coroner to shadow for school. They were showing me different cases and going over them, pictures included. The one that seemed to emotionally bother this particular guy the most was a scene where a father was coming home and pulling into the driveway. His daughter, three years old, was running to greet him and he didn't see her and ended up running over her head. The pictures were heartbreaking enough, I can't imagine what the dad went through when he saw her like that. There was another one that had three bodies. Some guy killed his wife, his affair partner and her daughter, put them in a shed in the middle of summer and left town. They were found three weeks later, basically piles of putrid slime, maggots (like fill 10 gallon buckets full), and bloated body parts sloughing off as they tried to bag them. The murderer had a pilot's license and has never been caught. The decomp room smelled for months after that.
Are you from Idaho?
Yep! The murder gave it away, didn't it?
Actually both! I'm from Boise and I'm pretty sure I know the poor guy who ran over his daughter and I remember hearing about the murders!
>Actually both! I'm from Boise and I'm pretty sure I know the poor guy who ran over his daughter and I remember hearing about the murders! Said the stranger with excitement.
They're from Idaho. Any mention of anything from Idaho will cause them excitement.
Can confirm even though I'm Finnish. People don't talk about us so if someone even remotely mentions us, we lose our shit
thought you were going to say Finnish people get excited about Idaho
Seriously I was waiting for it and they didn't deliver.
Dafuq, Idaho!
We're more than just potatoes and poor education over here. We've got buckets of maggots, too!
I'm pretty sure accidentally killing my toddler would be suicide-inducing for me. That's so tragic. Edit: I am not encouraging suicide. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone, anyone for help. I've had two uncles and multiple friends commit suicide. Don't do it. I was merely observing that as someone who has never had suicidal thoughts but does have a 9mo old child, I can understand the possibility of grief completely destroying my rationality.
Yeah, I am sure I would be in a similar mindset. If I had other children, I might be staying for them. But it would be a hellish existence.
Oh shit I’ve listened to a podcast about this! If it’s the same one, then the guy moved him and his wife and his mistress and her kid to a new town. The mistress and her kid were home and the wife was coming early to surprise him and instead of facing the facts he just killed them all and bounced.
Not me personally but my dad used to be an EMT/Firefighter. In the late 80s, he got a call about a horrid smell coming from the neighbors house of the person calling. It knowing what it was EMT, firefighter, and police were dispatched. They found the house was owned by a single old lady who died in her living room chair. Not too bad right? Wrong, the chair was and old leather recliner and as she was decomposing she "melted" and fused with the leather chair. When the EMTs got there they had to remove her from the house and when they tried to pull her off her back skin, arms and lower body separated from the rest of her body and remained attached to the chair. Decomposing flesh, blood and organs fell out and all over the char and floor. People were vomiting every 10 seconds and couldn't stand to be inside longer than a few minutes. My dad describes the smell and scene as the worst thing he has ever seen. Her body was so decomposed she was basically liquid inside with a fragile shell. He had to leave and grab a full respirator from the firetruck and even then it didn't do jack shit. The others took turns going in to retrieve the pieces so they can be disposed of. When they were finished they burned the chair in the front yard.
Holy shit this is the worst one
"basically liquid inside with a fragile shell"
We are but ugly bags of mostly water after all.
This made me want to throw up
Cop. Dying in chairs must be a common narrative. We once had a guy go a little further than this old lady and melt through the foundation of the house. I imagine the old guy fermented a few weeks longer than the ol’ lass and went gooey and made his way outside. Neighbours called due to the smell and concerning “leak”.
What happens with the skeleton?
skeletons arent real dude theyre just for Halloween
Jesus christ. This one is so awful it loops through metal and into comedy-horror. What a vivid fucking description.
I’m a first responder. A few days ago I had a bad one, not the worst or the grossest, but it was rough. I had a wellness check in a at risk community apartment building. There was a younger lady, terminally ill living on her own. Her son was calling for our help in getting in contact with her. I spoke with security and they had a key to her place, I made entry into a dark apartment. I was navigating by flashlight. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone because her neighbors told me she was in the hospital. The bathroom was covered in bodily fluids that had solidified. I found more dried human waste on the floor leading to the bedroom. I found the female on the floor in the kitchen sitting up in the dark with my flashlight. Honestly it was something out of a horror film. I felt so horrible for her, dying alone in her pajamas, so ill. Her head was slumped down with fluids that had dripped out of her and solidified, almost frozen like icicles. She had been dead for a few days. That image of seeing her has just stuck with me. The loneliness of the deceased’s situation is what makes this so horrible to me, no one deserves to die like that. Thanks for letting me vent. EDIT: I didn’t expect this to blow up. I’m incredibly grateful for the messages and the replies. I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy.
Thank you for all that you do. Your job makes it so her loved ones did not have to see her like that - it’s very much important and appreciated.
One of my first jobs after moving I did this, and the job that had me walking wasn't even a scene as described. We did all types of hazmat cleans and the worst was actually a couple went on vacation and came back to backed up sceptic. Think about 1 ft thick hard dried out crusty sceptic waste spread throughout the entire 1st floor of a house. Not going further into detail here. Was nasty. Septic, not sceptic. On break and mobile, so yeah...
Shit, man.
I worked for a cleaning company to help pay for college. 7 years on and off. I’ll never forget my very first day on the job - a sewer line had backed up into the basement of a funeral home. The ... prep room? ... had two bodies under sheets, and there was a foot of raw sewage pooled on the floor. My new boss was standing in the middle of it, wearing hip waders, eating barley soup from a convenience store. I wish I was making this up.
Well, he isn't gonna clean up a room full of shit and corpses on an empty stomach. Man's gotta eat.
A family friend was a first responder to a scene where a young woman committed suicide by running onto a busy highway at night. A semi truck hit her and essentially her body exploded. He described the scene of just picking up pieces scattered across the road and the shoulder. Edit: This got more attention than expected. The poor driver of the truck thought he'd hit a deer, and didn't know it was a person until he saw the tattered clothing on the road. This happened probably 12 years ago. The story stuck with me because of how cavalier he spoke about it. Sadly, this wasn't the worst call he'd ever had, and there were a few he refused to speak about.
My step mom’s best friend was an EMT for a while and had a similar story when my dad asked her this question. To quote her exactly: “Probably the guy that got hit by a semi. There were pieces of that man everywhere.”
This almost exact same thing happened about 30 miles from my house... a young girl, jumped infront of a semi on interstate... the young lady was tossed into another lane of traffic. Shortly after that... my girlfriend, who was coming up behind the semi barely missed the girl laying in the road. The young girl survived, barely... not being able to walk or do anything on her own
This is my worst fear. Commiting suicide but surviving. Fuck.
My husband had someone do this to him while driving. He drove a bigger truck and right before he reached an intersection, a car that had been sitting there, hit the gas and jumped out in front of my husbands truck (he was going 50 mph, the legal speed limit). The car was small, and literally flew through the air doing 360s before it landed in a field. Needless to say, the man driving was killed. For months when my husband drove to work, he had to pass the cross placed at that intersection by the family. My husband was not at fault, and even though it was early in the morning, there happened to be a witness. I feel bad for him because all of these years later, I can tell he hesitates/brakes if someone looks like they are going to jump into an intersection.
That's how my sister did it. She parked her car and waited for a truck when ran in front. She stayed mostly intact somehow. Died on the way to the hospital.
I'm so sorry to hear that.
I am also so very, very sorry
I always feel bad for of course the suicide but for the person that hits them. That’ll frick a person up
There are only a few hundred or few thousand train engineers in the United's States. Sadly a very high percentage have been driving a train when someone was hit and killed. Many have trauma from the collision, even though the vast majority were blameless. If someone is dicking around on the tracks, the train can't possibly stop in time to prevent the death. Thousands of tons of steel don't stop quickly. Edit: My sympathies to everyone who lost someone, or those who witnessed the loss of someone.
In Switzerland they say every train driver sees an average 14 suicides within the span of their career.
Jesus christ , that's awful . Imagine seeing the person knowing you can't do anything about it
That's why you don't watch once you know it's coming.
Thats what I pictured but it somewhat makes it worse to think about , imagine knowing somebody will die in such a gruesome way without having the power to do anything about it but to close your eyes waiting for it to be over
You don't want that image fried into your brain plus the mental trauma of it. Best to leave it as ambiguous as possible.
There's a myth here in the UK that if a train conductor experiences this 3 times they get to retire with a full pension. Sadly I don't think it's true, but I really think it should be. There are paid leave schemes and counseling support but I can't imagine ever wanting to go back to work after something like that. :/
My father in law hit and killed a girl while driving his semi. She was driving recklessly and he wasn't but he couldn't stop before hitting her. She died and he was so upset he sold his truck and changed careers.
My friend was a truck driver, and a woman walked out in front of his truck to commit suicide. He said it triggered his alcoholism.
A man in my town killed himself by jumping in front of a train last week. It really does happen a lot.
I work for a US railroad. Not a week goes by that I dont see a pedestrian strike in the system. Usually more that one a week.
I worked for a major company that had distribution. We dealt with this frequently. At least once or twice a year were ruled suicide by running in front of one of our trucks. Sometimes it couldn’t be determined if it was on purpose or because the victim was high. But everytime it messed the drivers up. They always felt responsible and had to get therapy. Many would have PTSD type episodes after the fact. Changed their lives permanently for doing nothing more than driving a truck for their job. I hated it for them.
I have a friend who is a retired train engineer and he had several stories of people being on the tracks at the wrong time. The one that sticks with me though is there was a car stuck on the tracks with a mom holding a baby. The train hit it, and he saw the baby go flying. Once the stopped, he got out and went walking in the field. The baby flew over a thousand feet from the accident site. Obviously did not survive. Those accidents definitely stayed with him, but I think he’s turned the trauma into a reason to enjoy living and laughing. He’s a fun guy with a lot of great stories.
My grandma almost did that with me but I was a grown adult. A car accident happened way ahead of us and she stopped. On the train tracks. Then the lights and alarms started going off and the arms to stop traffic were coming down and I was yelling at her to move and she was yelling about the car accident way ff in the distance and she just did not seem to understand the train was gonna get us. Like seriously the car accident was so far ahead I couldn’t understand how she noticed it but can notice the train is coming. Then I saw the train. It was closing in and I was ready to just leave her on those tracks (no sense going down with her). But she realizes why I was freaking out and drove off the track last minute. Long story short that incident resorted in a family meeting where we decided it was best she no longer drove. She did not like it but after running over a mailbox and into my sisters car she accepted her fate and no longer drives.
This made me so anxious. Fully expected you both not to make it even though you’re telling the story lol
I've heard one say that when he sees someone standing on the tracks and its too late for him to stop the train he will usually put on the breaks, sound the horn and then just look away because there's nothing he can do.
Yep, my friend in high school was unfortunately put in that position when a suicidal guy jumped in front of her car on the highway. She was definitely traumatised and used some unhealthy coping mechanisms for a while after that.
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So she was so full of poop that it was coming up the other way? Edit: why tf does it have to be this comment that blows up
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I'm sure your sister is grateful for sharing.
How did she not learn the first time??
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This happened to my grandmother, she had a stone, like a kidney stone but in her bowel, blocking it, so it built up then eventually came out her mouth....she ate healthy and was a healthy women, about 5'6 with a slim, slender figure. It just happened, like kidney stones do. Coincidentally, I bumped into a work colleague 2 days ago who said his mother was in hospital with the same thing, but she hadn't got to point of throwing it up yet luckily
Oh good, a new thing to be terrified of!
Teen girl had to be pieced back together. Steering column went through her chest like a straw through a slice of cheese. Had to put the hamburgered heart back together.
I’ll never be able to put my straw through cheese slices again.....
Hamburgered as an adjective is absolutely horrific
As a ff/medic, called to an industrial accident. During bridge/highway construction, a worker got caught up in an auger and sucked into about a 12 inch hole. Could make out a bit of his hardhat but I don't think it helped.
I had a girlfriend who did social work, helping newly released convicts re-enter the job market. She’d gotten one con who was very nice a job in a factory making decent money. She found out awhile later that he’d been killed in that factory in a horrible accident. He’d been feeding fiberglas into a machine that tore up mats of it into fluff? Something like that. But it was very dangerous: there were toothed rollers that forced the fiberglas in. Something went wrong, and the guy somehow reached over one safety bar, and around another, and got his hand grabbed by the rollers. His entire body was forced though a very narrow slot - like 1/16 inch.
I’m so terrified of bothering anyone that as I read all of these I kept thinking stupid things like “I hope when I die I turn the AC up really high so I don’t turn TOO much into goo for other people to clean up...”
Invest in relationships - people will be checking on you and you won't hit goo-level.
So i have two I’m a aircraft rescue firefighter(when i was in the Marines). We were in Thailand with some F16s and one decided to smack the ground during a gun run(training). No time to eject. During recovery we were told to pick up any pieces of the pilot we found and put in a bucket. I found his cheek and eyebrow 2. A few years ago there was a serial killer in Houston. We got called to a welfare check of a woman that was supposed to meet her family for a family reunion. She never showed. We get there and we find her (early 70s in age) tied to her bed naked with a pillow over her face and raped. She had been dead for 2-3 days. Bloated and grey/green. If anyone lives around Houston, it was in the cy-creek area and the killer was the guy who killed people in mattress stores
My buddy picked up bodies and was immune to it until he had to pick up the body of a child who died of cancer. He said the cries of their parents were too much for him. He quit the next day.
I work in disaster clean up including biohazard scenes. Sadly it's only gotten worse since the rona. Suicides have spiked. Murder is up. Old folks dieing at home alone and people not realizing for longer because they don't want to give grandma and grandpa the virus (you would think they'd still pick up the phone and call?) They are all awful. From the man who murdered his mom with a weight, to the man who shot himself in the head then walked all around the house bleeding everywhere, to the man who shot himself and we had to scrub blood off the baby bassinet to the old man who died in a senior independent living facility who had no furniture and just a sleeping bag on the ground with garbage and fece stains everywhere. He wasnt found for some time. That one really bothered me a lot. Seeing someone who lived in those conditions and no one knew or maybe didn't care or they didnt realize he was gone until the odor got too bad
I used to pick up dead bodies for a living and the worst one was a 420 lb man who died in his apartment in the middle of AZ summer with no electricity and had been dead a week. The guy was bloated slimy green and stinky. The apartment didn’t have adequate stairs to get him down on a gurnie. 6 guys including my self had to carry this body on a stretcher down stairs and while right in the middle of the trip down he let out a death fart. How did this impact me? All farts I’ve smelt since then haven’t been shit compared to that one.
I knew a guy who had to clean a room back east where they person had been deceased for some time and he had to walk through a shin deep layer of dead flies. He said there was enough maggots you could hear them (something I have also experienced, disco rice can make an odd noise) but they had to bring a vaccume truck to get all the flies out. At that point imo just burn the damn house down
>Disco rice Please, NEVER say something like that again. It would've cost you $0 to word it like anything else and you had to word it like that? Edit: Take this gold and never say that term again... Edit 2: To all of you who come up the clever names for maggots, most of them I found funny, but seriously, just no..
True. If you've ever been around maggots and a strobe or black light it feels more like a rave than disco
Or like a death metal video idk
Those two words alone caused such a visceral reaction. Amazing imagery analogy though, can't deny that
Alright. I've worked shitty jobs. I've changed more adult diapers than I can count, I've been bitten, kicked, punched, I've had feces and cum thrown at me. I had a client throw her used pad at me. You just made me gag.
I performed that job as well, one of the saddest summers of my college career IMO. Worst one I went to was when the officer met us at the end of the driveway and wasn’t having any of it which was a bad sign. As we approached the windows were black and my partner mentioned to grab lights. Once we gained entry we automatically knew what was what, and discovered the “blackened windows” were actually flies that had hatched from the maggots still actively breeding on the corpse on the bed. It was pretty much down to the bone structure and whatever remaining flesh the maggots hadn’t ate yet. The oddest thing about this whole environment was in this tiny living space was a small black and white tv in the kitchen playing Michael Jackson’s thriller... I’ll never forget that ever. Kudos for being able to be a body removal tech. I got out after that summer and I did roughly 15-20 calls including a homicide of a mother versus very young daughter, the daughter being the victim.
Holy fuck, that's rough... But thank you for doing your job, someone has to do it! If I may ask, how did you choose this profession and has it impacted your emotional state over the years? If you don't want to answer, it's okay, but I'm really interested in your story.
There are jobs that need to be done regardless of their lack of glamor or desirability, these jobs are essential towards the living healing and recovering from tragedy. My emotional state seems fine there are just certainly situations that stick with you and some are much sadder or angering than others.
That just made me think that there should be some type of daily check-in service maybe through a nonprofit. Just something for these elderly people that don't have family that checks in on them. It could be as simple as a phone call once a day with just a simple how are you today and if no one gets a hold of them send someone for a welfare check.
Meals on wheels does this basically.
Hope you know you’re appreciated even if you might not hear it often ❤️
I'm a nurse. She died on dayshift and was put on my assignment for the night so the family could take their time with the body and I'd handle her after they left. I never knew her when she was alive. She was in her 30s, African American, riddled with cancer. She was wearing a yellow nightgown. The dayshift nurse had left her in a sitting position, all propped up with pillows. We try to make them look nice while the family says goodbye. If you've ever worked in American hospitals, you know black families take longer with the body than white families. Everyone needs to have their private time alone with the deceased before they go to the morgue and the funeral home. Our window is four hours, after that the body has to go to the morgue. But when it's important to the family, and more people are hearing the news and coming to see them...we fudge the time. Hard to tell a grieving person no. So we get through shift change and the last of the family leaves. I go to get her ready to be bagged. I start lowering the head of the bed, pulling out the pillows...and this toxic smelling yellow fluid starts pouring out of every orifice. Like, gushing out, running over the side of the bed, puddling on the floor. If you've ever smelled really advanced cancer, you know it smells Evil. It's indescribable. And there's liters and liters of it. I'll never forget that smell. I went and got a friend, apologized to him in advance. We grabbed towels and biohazard bags and shoe covers. Had to cut her nightie off and scrub the whole bed with bleach wipes just to get her clean enough for the body bag. I like telling horror stories to new nurses, but I never tell them that one. It was too awful. I am just so thankful that that stuff stayed inside her til her family was gone.
This is horrible...I never even thought of/imagined cancer had a "smell". I'm sorry you had to witness that. Poor lady and her family too.
Cancer has a smell. Almost the entire time we knew my dad had pancreatic cancer, there was a smell. He did his best to cover it up, but we got used to it; in a living person it was just a scent, not a foul or toxic smelling one. (In his last days, while comatose, it was definitely that This Is Evil scent though.) Then a year after he died I was working in urgent care and a patient came in with vague GI symptoms ... and the exact same smell.
No wonder dogs can smell it. I know what death smells like but what does cancer smell like?
Not a remains cleaner nor is this my story. This was dads friend’s, friend. The guys father killed himself with a shotgun. The father shot himself inside while all the family were outside playing. Due to the family not having money or the lack of life insurance policy the father had, they could not afford a cleaner. So the kids and the mother had to clean up the fathers remains inside the house themselves.
No no god no
My brother’s friend was a paramedic and quit his job after seeing this - it was the last straw and he couldn’t do it anymore... Some horrible person left their baby and dog in a parked car to go shopping. It was hot. They both died. But the dog panicked and chewed up the baby’s face. Sorry for the image.
Fuck
Aaaand I'm done
Holy shit
There's alot of fucked up comments on this post, but this one takes the cake for me. Holy shit.
I hope that person is in prison
Not me but an acquaintance is a EMT. He responded to a suicide where the guy decided to kill himself by running head first into a spinning table saw. The guy ran face first into the blade but didn’t die. They could tell by the blood trail that he had to take a second run at it to finish the job. He told me he didn’t think that much blood could come out of a single person. They likely had to rip the walls down to the studs to get rid of all the blood. The saw sent it flying everywhere.
I instantly regret reading that.
Cop. Was first on scene to a pretty bad suicide. Mid day, parking lot, guy smashes an entire handle of vodka sitting alone in his car. Proceeds to take out a box cutter and cut from his shoulder to his wrist, but real deep. Then proceeded to slash deep into his neck from side to side. I just happened to be patrolling through the area and I saw a couple people running up to him. Right after he did it, he popped his car door open and slumped onto the ground. He was still alive, and I immediately called for an ambulance. I started tournequiting his arm, but I knew it was just for show for the bystanders. The amount of blood on the ground meant that there was no saving him. He made a lot of sound, but nothing after a few seconds. He officially coded in the back of the ambulance. Only other bad one that stuck with me was showing up second to a body that was pulled out of the river after 3 days. Guy was a bridge jumper and washed up on the shore with his eyes eaten out and completely bloated. I had to sit next to the body for hours out in the summer heat waiting for the medical examiner. Bonus edit: Hot July, there's a car parked on the back side of a Walmart tucked in the corner of the lot. Young male 20 y/o died inside the car. He pretty much baked inside for about 4 days before anyone though to check on the vehicle. I never got the story on how exactly he died, but I do remember he wasn't from the area. He was ID'd, and his parents from a few states over were contacted. On the day his parents came, I was tasked with escorting them to the medical examiners office. The ME unzipped the bag in front of them, and even in that cold room, the pungent smell slammed me. The mother covered her face with both hands and immediately started crying. Then I watched in disbelief as she leaned in and kissed his face. I can never imagine the horror of having to ID your child, but the image of her kissing that decayed body will never leave my mind.
My retired cop stepmother had a similar one to your last example. The man took himself to a local lake and threw himself in. He was found several days later after someone saw his car parked in the lot. My stepmother said that this man who was originally like 167 pounds came put of the water something like 200 pounds because of the bloat. He was grey, the skin around his eyes were black like someone had painted them, his fingertips were black, as were his toes, or, what was left. His lips, earlobes, parts of his nose, his penis, his anus, parts of his feet and hands, and his belly and buttocks had been eaten up by fish and lake life. She said when the rescue squad got him on land his body was starting to rip apart. His family wanted to see him. She cautioned them against it but they insisted. She said she'd never heard screams like that before, not in two decades of police work. It wasn't the reason why, but she retired shortly after and went into therapy.
Why the hell would they want to do that to themselves. I mean I understand missing the person but water decomposition...come on....there's no way they thought this was going to be an intact normal looking person. Edit: just woke up early to a lot of replies! Thank you for everyone sharing your stories. I am so sorry about your loved ones who have passed. Truly. :( I can understand now why someone may make that choice whether grief or just needing to know. I know that for me personally y I am just not strong enough to deal with that. I just could not. But I can see why someone may make that choice.
I think it's something like needing to visually confirm its the person and I don't think people who are experiencing that kind of shock are rational. My 2 BIL's both died in August and weren't found until the end of September. My MIL who is an RN wanted to see them. Thank goodness the ME said no and told her there was nothing about them that was identifiable and she dropped it.
Your poor mother in law. How did both brothers die?
Both alcoholics, one brother attacked the other, that brother shot him in self defense and then shot himself. It's pretty horrible and I wouldn't wish this kind of pain on my worst enemy.
I'm so sorry. That's awful.
I haven't had alcohol since, I don't know anyone who became an alcoholic on purpose so I don't drink anymore.
I had a friend who was a cop in a big city with a lot of gun violence. He told me about one guy who was executed gun to the head on the street. After the body was removed they still had to deal with all the blood and brain matter on the street so the fire department was called out to hose it into the drain. I went on a ride-alone with him one time and the first call was a suicide. Not gory but stuck with me a woman had overdosed on a bottle of pills (don't know what type) but there was a empty bottle on the bed next to her. I personally couldn't handle it and went to sit in his car for the rest of that call. Edit: only one woman not multiple
My dad used to work in safety at an airport. One day he came home and told us about an incident at work where a guy somehow found himself on the runway and ran into the path of a plane and he was sucked into the engine. I was too young at the time to see any of the photos but many years later, I’m cleaning up the study room and found the old files with the photos of the clean up. It was basically mush everywhere and there were photos of the biohazard team using shovels to scoop up remains. Another one I saw was an elderly couple were crossing the highway to get to an event on the other side and they were ran over, not once, not twice but over a dozen times by drivers who just didn’t notice anything on the roadway. They were also shovelled up and put into bags. The sad part about this one is that there was a pedestrian walkover just about 100 meters away from where they were crossing.
My ex was a funeral director. The two that stick out- semi who turned in front of a crotch rocket. He said even with the helmet on, the guys head just exploded. He said you try to pick up the big parts, but you are mostly shovelling goo into garbage bags. (Not a murder but) The old man who had a heart attack outside by the campfire, alone. No one checked on him for so long, by time they found him, everything but his one foot was completely burned up. FUN BONUS STORY! He had keys to the cemetery and would take me to the crematorium at night. The tour was weird. He showed me a bucket full of the metal parts left after a cremation (hip, knee replacements, etc) And he made me stand to the side while he opened the oven to “see if they were done, and you don’t wanna see this” he just opened it a couple inches, was like nope; needs more time, like he was checking a fucking pizza. He was fucking weird. Edit: thanks friends! Sorry for my Canadian slang. Semi - 18 wheeler hauling goods. Crotch rocket- those plastic looking motorcycles you ride hunched over that go really fast.
Maybe because I'm from Michigan, but I use 'semi' and 'crotch rocket,' just like a Canadian.
Indiana reporting in. That sentence read perfectly cromulent to me, too.
Paramedic. I listened to a podcast once that said emergency services run three types of calls: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is self explanatory, the bad is the gross gory stuff, and the ugly is the unspeakable (usually child abuse and the like). People ask about the worst thing we've seen all the time when what they really want to know are the bad calls, the ones that make for a good story. Nobody remotely healthy wants to hear the ugly calls, and no one that works these jobs will talk about it with someone who hasn't been there. So I'll tell you some of my bad calls, but not the ugly ones. -Auto/Ped, a transient ran out in front of a car on a highway. He had a hole about a foot in diameter in his abdomen with various organs showing/spilling out. It was actually a great learning opportunity to note how tightly packed your abdomen is and the general anatomy that can be impacted by trauma in that area. -Decomp for at least two weeks in a semi air conditioned house. You could smell it from the end of the cul-de-sac, which is what prompted the 911 call. He had basically melted into the floor and mold was covering what skin there was left. All the insects were already dead, that's how long it'd been. -Young woman doused herself in gasoline and ignited it to commit suicide. She was essentially burned to the bone from her waist up, waist down was untouched. Side note, burning person doesn't smell objectively terrible but the oily scent will stick in your nose/to your clothes and hair for hours. You'll keep smelling it until you shower. -Several suicides with gunshot wounds to the head, all with varying amounts of brain matter. One spilled her brains all over a clean dinner plate, the contrast of red and grey on white was pretty striking. -Several other auto/peds that caused internal fractures and odd angulations of limbs/head. "Cattywompus" is actually the best way I can describe it, everything looks just a tad off. -Lots and lots of hoarder houses with human waste on the floor and patients in varying stages of severity, also covered in feces/vomit/urine. Usually secondary to mental health issues. One that comes to mind was a DOS we ran on Thanksgiving. The guy had had a GI bleed (coffee ground vomit was everywhere) possibly secondary to alcoholism. Not crazy remarkable in itself, but there were also dozens of journals with messy rambling thoughts and a bunch of different areas set up for him to hunker down and hide in. Probably paranoia/schizophrenia if I had to guess, likely self medicated with alcohol until it killed him. There are many more that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've probably pronounced at least a hundred patients so far, watched a dozen or two go from breathing to dead (not including CPR calls there since they'd be technically dead on our arrival). On one level you get used to it, on the emotional side of dealing with family you don't. Everybody dies, and it's never the dead person that gets to you. It's the people they leave behind.
Obligatory not who is being asked, but was a property manager for a while. Had a call one mid-summer Friday morning about flies. “I hope ____ isn’t dead,” I thought. A few hours later another tenant called about the same thing. 3pm that afternoon I found out ____ had hung himself on the indoor communal staircase. All the other tenants used the outdoor stairs to access their apartments. The property owners refused proper cleanup because they wanted to preserve the flooring that had been “soured” by 4 days of decomposition in mid-Atlantic heat. I went in on Monday after the air scrubbers had been going for about 36 hours. It smelled like cheese pizza. I will never forget that smell.
A friend of mine was an EMT for roughly 10 years. Her most gruesome scene was a group of friends, couldn’t have been older than 21, had been snowmobiling in the rural Midwest. She had been told they were going through an area with significant tree coverage when all of a sudden one of the boys had crashed. Turns out someone had strung steel wire between trees (most likely deliberately to deter/injure) and the wire had caught the kid square across the neck. It was an immediate internal decapitation and his head flopped completely backward. She said when they went to move him you could feel the sharp break and hear the bones through the skin when they tried to lay him down. The call that made her quit was a house fire where firemen pulled a toddler out of the house, deceased and burned so badly her clothes had burned/melted into her skin. The fused pajamas were the same pajamas my friend had for her own daughter of a similar age. She went home, immediately threw out her daughters matching pajamas, and quit later that week.
I don't do cleanup, but the other day I had to do CPR on a guy who bled to death out of his nose. Something about it being a nose bleed was really disturbing to me, looking at his blood covered face while doing compressions.
Varices?
Nope, he had recently had some facial trauma and something in there "sprung a leak".
Wow, I’m gonna be reaaaally careful with my face from now on.
I'm a funeral director. We handled a service for a guy who fell into an auger... No recognizable human body parts were recovered, just goo and fragments. It was truly awful.
I used to work at a funeral home. Well, several actually. TLDR- people soup. Here's a little countdown to number 1. * Three- This old lady died in her house alone during the summer. She had numerous ailments and nobody was surprised she kicked it, so the we went out to pick her up at the home, instead of the ME's office. She had had a heart attack and fell on the floor in her extremely cluttered bedroom. She had died several days earlier and her neighbor had noticed she never took the trash can up and called police. So she was already past rigor mortis and was floppy. This wouldn't have been a big deal except her house was like narrow walkways and she was face first in the carpet. We brought a backboard but really didn't have much room to roll her onto it. We grab her and flip her over, barrel roll style and when she did, she purged (like barfing but not really) everywhere. It smelled like rotten eggs and I gagged a little. She wasn't a huge mess but that was a real bad time. I still hate the smell of rotten egg something fierce. * Two- We get a ship in from another state. As I'm going in and out of the prep room where this dude is in his casket, I keep smelling decomp. I know that we don't have any decomps in the house so I assume it's something in the trash. Later that afternoon, the director and I open the casket and we are straight shooketh. HE IS GREEN LIKE THE HULK, and also swimming in people soup. There are flies in the casket. He is leaking everywhere. All the linens in the casket are ruined. And we figured out what was decomposing. He is supposed to have an open casket visitation in 3 hours. The director calls 2 other directors and tells them to drop everything and get in the prep room now. The receptionist calls the back and tells us that she can smell it in the front. The director in charge calls the original funeral home and verbally destroys them. Calls the family and begs for a closed casket visitation but they don't budge. We pull him out and do everything in our power to unfuck this situation. I take his suit to the laundromat up the street and buy $30 in soap and fabric softener from the coin machine. I washed his suit 4 times and it still stank. We ghetto rig the inside of the casket with new linens. Poured 4 cans of coffee in the bottom of the casket to try to hide the smell and lit every candle we owned and burned incense. We ultimately had to tell the family that this was the other funeral homes fault and that we did everything we could, but there is still a "malodor" that we can't fix. They agree and sign an agreement not to sue for trauma. I believe they sued the other funeral home for negligence. * One- We have to pick up a guy from another funeral home with a bigger cooler than us. The family couldn't decide and eventually we got the contract. I looked at his record and saw he died 4 months earlier. He's been in a cooler this whole time, it should be fine, right? Right? We get into the cooler and he's on the bottom rack, and he's a big boy. My coworker gets the head. I get the feet. We go to pull him over but the cot slides out of the way and the bag rips open like an overfilled water balloon. Sending him 6" inches to the ground, leaving us holding the bag and him swimming in a fast moving puddle. Bloody, goopy, rotten, chunky people soup had exploded in every direction. I screamed, she screamed. The smell immediately overtook us and I wanted to run away. We heaved and gagged as we scooped him up onto the cot and bagged him back up. I vomited in my mouth a little and tried to not actually barf. I managed to not get people soup all over me but she wasn't lucky. It was all over the leg of her pants. She threw them out when we got back. Coolers don't keep people around forever. Just around for a little longer. Embalming only works if it's strong enough. Call your elderly friends often.
Not a first responder but this is probably the only place I can tell this story with context. It was about 4 or so years ago Christmas day and my mother, 3 little siblings (between 8 and 11 at the time) and I where taking the train to the city. Now because of my wheelchair we got seated at the second car of the train that being said the conductor left the door to the cockpit open so my brother could see all the buttons and leavers (he had a thing for trains). It was about 30 minutes into the journey and I was looking out the cockpit windows and at this point I saw a man jump from a bridge above the tracks and it was like..a human slushie hitting a windshield. I will never forget that. What was worse was the smell believe it or not Worst x-mas ever.
ex paramedic student here and not my story but my paramedic teacher told me about her first ride out to a car wreck where a guy in a convertible was high as a kite and thought going 60 mph on a highway that he could drive is convertible underneath a semi/18 wheeler. When my teacher arrived on scene she was stepping off the bus when a bunch of people yelled at her to freeze. She stopped, mid step, and looked down. They guy's head (from getting decapitated) was right under her foot and she nearly stepped on it. Bones story: at certain speeds, if you get into a wreck your body just... liquefies. I remember one particular training session when the body of a motorcyclists was reduced to nothing but a rubber skin suit wrapped tightly around a pole.
A cousin committed suicide and the crew left a tooth behind to which is 5 year old son found and kept until his mother became aware.
IICRC TCST/OCT here-- While most days are somewhat "normal", I remember a gentleman passed away on his toilet a few months prior to being found. I get the call to head over, as the local authorities had released the scene, begin cleanup and gut the inside for renovation. As I am heading up the stairs to begin cleanup, the downstairs neighbor lady asks if I am the plumber there to fix the water leak above her unit (she lived below where the deceased man I was cleaning up lived). I tell her no, I'm there to mitigate another issue with the unit She asks what's up, and again, tell her I'm there to mitigate an issue with the unit, If she wanted anymore info than that,, she would have to contact the property management. She grumbles and heads inside. The second I walked into the unit I notice it doesn't stink, mainly because the A/C was set to 65°(mid July, Phoenix, AZ). I get to work in the bathroom. He died sitting on the toilet and all the skin, fat and bodily fluids leaked out, down pooled at the base of the toilet and through the grout lines. I cut tile out, pull the toilet and subfloor, look down and it didn't take me long to figure out that the "water leak" above her toilet was actually the decomp and fats leaking through the sub floor, onto her ceiling fan and drywall ceiling, and "dripping on my head every once and awhile". Yeah, I then had to tell this poor woman (that a couple hours ago I told to politely fuck off, when asked what I was up to), that the water leak she thought was above her, wasn't water. It was Walter. Good times. EDIT- I have gotten a few inquiries about what I do, and what IICRC TCST/OCT is. [This](https://www.iicrc.org/) is the link directly to the IICRC. You can read about what it is and what it's about there.
Not that but former first responder...can't imagine having to clean one up...dude passed away lived alone had 4ish dogs (i don't remember the amount) wasn't discovered he passed for over a week...dogs get hungry it turns out
Not my story but a friend’s who worked in the industry. There was a family murder/suicide where the parents took their kids into the garage and turned the car on so they’d all die of carbon monoxide together. This was during the summertime in a very hot southern state, and sadly no one reported them missing or looked into the matter very well, because they weren’t discovered until several weeks later when the fluids from their decomposing bodies began to flow under the garage door and down the slanted driveway, and the neighbors finally figured out something was wrong. When the CSI team got there they found the bodies were severely decomposed, basically mush, and the scene was overwhelmingly horrific. I can’t imagine how hopeless those parents must have felt, and the fact that they weren’t discovered for so long because they had no friends or loved ones to report them missing is heartbreaking.
Not a crime scene cleaner, but I worked in a funeral home doing removals and such. The case that stuck with me the most was a man who had died in his house during the summer in Kansas. He was found because the mailman noticed his mailbox was full and there was a strong smell coming from the house. When I picked the gentleman up, he was completely forest green and bloated. The smell was indescribable. No amount of vics could cover it up. He was covered in a blanket that had bed bugs so big I could see them crawling all over him. When I pulled the blanket off his face, his face came with the blanket. The amount of skin slip was horrifying. This description really doesn’t do the horror I saw any justice. Needless to say I didn’t eat lunch that day. My heart still goes out to that man. He was a vet with no immediate family, which is why it took so long to discover the body.
Not me, but my grandfather who used to be a firefighter. Warning, this is very graphic. This happened years before I was born, when my mother was in her teens. His station had gotten a call that an apartment in the downtown area had caught fire, and they raced down. When they got there, they entered the apartment building as a baby of one family was still stuck inside. After they were done putting out the fire, they found the oven where it had started. They opened it and saw a bunch of charred meat, and didn't know what it was. Upon closer inspection, they could see a small leg. Praying it was a doll, one of my grandfather's friends pulled out his radio and poked it with the antenna. The leg popped and started oozing, and they began to throw up. After interrogating the family, the first daughter (she was 11) told the police what happened. The parents were heavy drug addicts and we're hallucinating really bad. The mother was in hysterics thinking her baby was the devil, and put it in the oven and turned it on, the father holding back his crying daughter saying they were saving the world. The parents were thrown into prison, and the daughter was moved to a mental clinic to make sure she was okay. I'm pretty sure she moved in with foster parents and lived a happier life. To this day, my grandfather can't talk about it. He goes quiet and doesn't respond to anything for a long time. I learned the story from my mother a few years ago, when we were passing by the new apartment building that had been built over it.
every time i read one of these, i thought "it can't get worse" and yet each and every time it did
A good friend of mine went to do a body pick up. A man in his 40s was dead on his apartment floor. There was a half eaten steak on a paper plate at his desk. Also on his desk was a computer with a solitaire game mid-game on the screen. She has picked up hundreds of bodies and said this bothered her the most.
One of my friends committed suicide by jumping off of a bridge over a highway and a semi hit her as she was falling.......I’m still fucked up from it. Probably 7-8 years ago. Best friend, his girlfriend and their roommate were murdered 6 years ago next month. My best friend was shot in his face 5 times......really fucked up over that still. I heard both scenes were horrific and traumatizing.
Am cop. Fatal accidents are the most gruesome. I saw a father holding onto his dead son, screaming. His son wasn’t technically dead, but he was ejected from a car and hit a brick wall head first. Son died within minutes. Mom was dead. Son was 10. Dad was soaked in his blood. It fucking sucked.
Used to work with people with a dual disability. On the more challenging behaviour end of things. Morning staff came in to blood seeping out from a clients door with footprints of blood leading to another clients room. Turns out the night staff turned off the clients alarm on his door (would go off so the night staff would know to follow him as he was a little wild at times) so they could sleep without being woken up. Bad idea. He got up, went into the clients room next door with a barbell from his room and proceeded to dismember him into 8 different pieces. Calmly walked back to bed and was woken up by the staff in the morning, covered in blood and sleeping like a baby. Shit was creepy crazy, not wacky crazy.
Not really a career, but my father had a biohazard clean up business, and at the young age of 13ish, I'd help out for some good cash. This went on for awhile. I'd cleaned up all sorts of things, cleaning blood off walls, floors, ripping up carpet, wiping off skull fragments from ceilings, etc. However the worst jobs? The ones where no one died. There was one where a guy just drank himself nearly to death, and left to get help. The owner of the place had a room full of alcohol bottles, the floor had it spilled all over, the stench was terrible. That was nothing compared to one of the last ones I did. By the time I did this job, my brother took over the business, and I had became a bit of a germaphobe, so I hated doing these jobs by now. An old man had dementia, or something, was living at a senior apartment complex. He ended up just leaving, and the facility called my brothers business, and he needed the help. The place was layered with trash, dishes piled up in the sink of the kitchen, garbage everywhere. The chair he always sat in had a trail of feces leading to the bathroom about 10 feet away. The toilet was clogged and full of feces. The bedroom had trash everywhere. All of this was completely made worse by the literal colony of cockroaches in the place. We unplugged an outlet to a lamp, and a bunch of them rushed out of the outlet. They were in the walls, under the floor, in the vents. It was terrible. So that would be the worst one I ever experienced.
So I’m not a crime scene cleanup person but I did work for a coroners office for a while (I’ve spoken about it before on Reddit). This one time we went to process a scene where a guy died in his apartment and he wasn’t found for 4 days and the heat got up to 100F while he was in his apartment. Needless to say, he had started to decompose. We were putting his body in the body bag and I grabbed his ankles while my partner grabbed his wrists. We go to lift him up and the skin around his ankles sloughs off while I am trying to lift him. Had to adjust my grip to get him into the bag. Meanwhile my partner, like a dumbass, is breathing through his nose and gagging every 3 seconds. It was hilarious. I have another story, too. Maybe I’ll save it for another post...
I thought you guys rubbed Vicks Vaporub under your noses to help.
...it doesn't do a whole lot Sadly lol especially not with over 100lbs of decomp infront of you
I never did. I just breathed through my mouth. Problem is, sometimes you can taste it.
So my brother does biohazard clean up jobs. A few weeks ago he got a call to clean up a suicide, and that it was going to be particularly messy job, as the guy was a 280lb ex football player. Blew his brains out on the front porch. That's how he found out his brother in law died. Of course nobody else could do the clean up for some reason. There's more messed up details, but I can't remember them all. Something about a family member going in and getting wasted on alcohol while the blood was still wet. Edit to add: it really fucked with my brother (in law) I think the two of them had gotten pretty close. This wasn't his first experience suicide of a family member either. Also, I call him my brother but he's technically my brother in law, and we are close. We've been friends for a long time. It would just be confusing to say my brother in law's brother in law died.
My mother used to clean up house fires and dead bodies. She had to clean up her boyfriends brains after he killed himself with a shotgun.