I recently came across this Reddit thread asking, “Redditors who clean up crime scenes – what’s the most bizarre thing you’ve witnessed?” And the submissions were SHOCKING. Here’s what people said:
Just a heads up: some of these stories can be quite gruesome. And some stories deal with topics like drug use and suicide.
1.
“I occasionally work on the weekends for a funeral home; it’s decent money for what is essentially two hours of call-out work when their normal staff is off. Last year, I was called in at around 5 in the morning. A 30-something-year-old guy had killed himself (shot himself) in a pretty small two-bedroom apartment. That wasn’t the bizarre part at all, since I’ve seen it before on call-outs. What was bizarre was what was in the apartment. Literally thousands of documents, piled on the floor, on a desk, on shelves, of people’s financial information. Credit card statements, bank statements, personal data, etc. Probably 3,000 folders with all this stuff in it.”
“Even where there weren’t piles of folders, there were just loose papers, magnetic cards, surveillance cameras; it was just the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.
And of course, some of these documents and folders had blood and brains spattered all over them, but it didn’t matter to me, since the detective on scene had said it was fine to take the body. The police had to clear a path by collecting the papers from the route we would take from the door to the apartment to where he was.
A couple of months later, it came out that the guy had over a million dollars in cash and bitcoin. Apparently, the state police were onto him.”
2.
“My worst one was a lady who committed suicide by immolation in her basement. When I got to the scene, the body had already been removed, but there was a clear pattern on the floor where she had died. An empty can of gasoline was nearby. Her glasses were gently placed on top of the water heater. On a table were several ritualistic books. Some passages were highlighted, involving ‘ridding yourself of the darkness by performing the flame ritual’ and other culty stuff.”
“So, to perform the act, she removed her glasses and placed them on the water heater. She doused herself in gasoline and set herself on fire. You could see that she ran around the room, bumping into things and knocking things over, before finally falling down at the center of the room, meeting her fate.”
3.
“I interned at a small town morgue and mostly did boring paperwork and cleanup throughout the day, until one fateful Tuesday, both my bosses decided they’d let me tag along to help transport the deceased. Bizarre is an understatement as to what we saw when we pulled up. It looked like white smoke was coming out of the home’s front door, but the fire department was nowhere to be seen, and there was no sign of a fire. All of the people that would step out of the house had white stuff all over them.”
“The entire inside of the home was covered in flour.
It was thrown against the walls, poured all over the floor, tables, and chairs, and even on the TV, and there were even patches of flour on the ceiling where someone took fistfuls and tried to cover the damn light fixtures.
I didn’t go through the entire house, but every room I looked in as we went to the bathroom, where the deceased was found, was also covered in flour.
Whatever you’re imagining, multiply that by ten. I couldn’t tell you the color of a single thing in that house. We eventually were handed masks because it was becoming difficult to breathe. Anytime we’d turn around or take a step, it’d send clouds of flour into the air. Empty flour bags are thrown everywhere.
In case anyone is curious, the deceased was a middle-aged woman. I overheard an officer tell my boss to wait before collecting the body (I think they were calling in a different investigator?). They originally assumed the death was natural because she had heart problems (not sure how they knew this), but the condition of the home suggested someone was attempting to cover up a crime.”
4.
“I don’t clean up crime scenes, but my parents did when I was a kid. There was a gun-inflicted suicide, and they got called in, so they went to clean and whatever. They got home late that night, brought the shop vac in, and told me not to touch it. I asked them why, and they informed me that it contained some brain matter from cleaning earlier. This is something I won’t forget. We had some poor guys’ brain pieces in our industrial vacuum, sitting in our den.”
5.
“Someone called 911, reporting a stench in a flat below them. EMTs and the like showed up and found a guy who had been left in the apartment for a couple of weeks. The guy had drunk Drano, the drain unclogger stuff. There was a trail of blood leading across the bedroom, and his body was crouched in a corner. Both his hands were at his side, but it looked like he had a hand coming out of his throat. It was his digestive organs that had essentially exploded out of his mouth when it came into contact with the Drano.”
6.
“My roommate used to clean up crime scenes and all that. He said the worst was the autoerotic asphyxiation guy who died with his dick in his hand. Well, rigamortis kicked in, and this guy’s hand muscles clamped down on his unit, hard. My roommate and two other crew members were on scene to clean it. Well, because the deceased had clamped down on his unit with the strength of a lobster claw once he was moved, apparently, his dick kind of exploded like an overfilled blood sausage, spraying everyone with specifically dick blood. From what I understand, the blood was trapped from flowing back into the circulatory system by the lobster grip. And due to how long the guy had been hanging there, it apparently became very veiny and engorged with blood. Gross image made worse by a bursting peen. Surprisingly, that wasn’t the event that got the roommate to quit either. This is just the most shocking.”
7.
“I used to do CSI work and was an autopsy tech, so I would both go to the scene, investigate, bring the body back to the morgue, and help with the autopsy. Anyway, this person murdered their spouse, stuffed the body into a fridge, and buried it in the woods. When you have a body exposed to the elements, you have ‘normal’ decomposition to look forward to, such as insects, bloating/gases, skin coming off, bones showing, etc. Once you’ve seen a few, you know that this kind of decomp/state of the body is normal and what to expect. There are varying levels of stuff you deal with, but it’s all within an expected spectrum of the job. Hope that makes sense. However, in this case, this person was sealed in, so you didn’t have any of that. They were essentially stewing in there for almost a year.”
“Oh, my GOD. The smell…I’ll never, ever forget the smell. I’ve dealt with bodies in various stages of death and decomposition, but holy shit, this was on 10 other levels. Now the morgue has HVAC, air filters/fresheners, and all that, but they weren’t effective at all for the smell. It was so bad I gagged (which I’ve never done before) and almost threw up in my mask. It was the purest, worst, most concentrated, extremely pungent ammonia smell you could think of. I had never smelled anything like that in my career at that point. The smell stuck to us too, on our skin, for about a week, no matter how hard I scrubbed. I can still smell it if I think about it. The texture of the body didn’t help either…it was so slippery and wet that flecks of the ammonia fluid splashed onto my skin. It was the worst autopsy of my life. It took about three hours because we kept having to take breaks, and the body was difficult to work on because it was so fragile.”
8.
“I don’t clean them for a living, but I had to clean a few apartments when my uncle managed an apartment complex. We had one tenant overdose on heroin. He sat there for roughly three weeks before anyone noticed the smell. They took his body and left it to us to clean up. The dude vomited on the CEILING. There were little dry droplets of vomit all over the ceiling right above where he died and to top it off he basically liquified and left a puddle of gut juices on the concrete foundation underneath the carpet. I thought that shit was left to a professional team, but I guess it’s optional, and if you don’t want to pay for it, you can scoop the brains and blood up yourself?”
9.
“I used to work in forensics as well as assisting the medical examiner who did the autopsies. I’ve seen a guy who completely castrated his entire package. He then proceeded to stuff the entire package into his mouth and down his throat. He then slit his own throat. Did all of this with a cheap kitchen knife in his shower.”
10.
“Hoarders are a lot more common than they really should be, first of all. And it’s never a clean hoard. It’s piles of junk covered in several types of urine, shit, and vomit. Molds I’ve never seen before, and probably insects that haven’t even been discovered yet. I understand when the emergency services don’t want to be in that kind of house longer than they have to, but I’ll never forget having to ask them to help me because I couldn’t distinguish what was actually the deceased, and what was just a pile of random shit that looked more human than the deceased did.”
“People will warn you bodies will bloat, and touching them the wrong way will make them leak. But the image you’re conjuring up doesn’t even hold a light to what it can be like. Insects skittering when you delicately lift a deceased onto your cot, because one wrong move and they will start oozing.
Oh, and the ones who had pets that were so desperate they had to eat their owner. Staring into the eyes of a big, brown-eyed mutt who is happy to finally receive human contact, and all you can think about is how the deceased is missing their entire face. Poor things were just hungry, but it’s unsettling.”
11.
“I clean up biohazard material (dead bodies) for my company on occasion because I’m one of the only two that’s certified. My coworker and I went into a house to clean a body, but the boss failed to mention that the person had been dead for two weeks. Okay, whatever, I can deal with that. We walked to the house, and not only could you smell it from the start of the driveway, but all the windows were black. We assumed there were blackout curtains. We suited up and went into the house, which was… Relatively clean given the circumstances. We knew he died in the bathroom, so we made our way upstairs and followed the flies.”
“So… You know how flies swarm decaying things? Yeah, it wasn’t blackout curtains in the bathroom. The windows were caked in so many flies that sunlight couldn’t come in. My boss also failed to mention that he died in the bathtub. You hear about bloating, but do you know what happens when a body sits in a bathtub for two weeks, soaking up all that water? It explodes.
The entrails and remains of this… Soup was all over the table, the walls, the door… It was everywhere. There was no water in the bathtub, just this sickly pink colored stew. That was the most disgusting cleanup I’ve ever done. I can’t even imagine what it sounded like when that happened.”
12.
“My dad used to clean up crime and trauma scenes about 10 years ago and said he had to clean up a suicide one time, where he found bits of brain on top of a ceiling fan. He thought that was the worst of it until they moved a TV stand and found a nose behind it.”
13.
“My best friend used to have this job. They found a guy’s full, intact mustache across the room after he shot himself. One guy tried to kill himself by shooting his stomach with a small-caliber pistol; he didn’t die immediately, so he wrote tons of stuff on the walls with his blood.”
14.
“Crime scene cleaner here. A man shot himself in his garage. I’ll never forget needing to use pliers to pull teeth and skull fragments out of the drywall behind where he sat, or that blood and brain managed to make their way more than 50 feet across the garage.”
“Most disturbing, though, was his pickup. We chose to take it to our company wash bay to pressure wash it and make sure it was as clean as possible. I cleaned it myself and was satisfied that I had done a good job. Inspected for blood and couldn’t find anything, so I began driving it back to the owner’s garage.
On the way back, a light drizzle began, and I switched on the wipers. Imagine my horror as a chunk of brain streaks across my newly cleaned windshield! I pulled over quickly and cleaned it up, but it still makes me sick to think what would have happened if it hadn’t rained that day.”
15.
“A family friend removes the deceased from their homes since they own their own funeral home. They said that the weirdest thing they saw was a woman lying face up in a tub and a man lying on top of her. When she took them apart, she knew why they were like that. Basically, the guy came in and just stabbed her several times, put her in the tub, and placed the knife in her hands while he jumped on top of her and stabbed himself either in the chest or abdomen and bled out.”
16.
“I was at a scene recently where someone jumped off a balcony onto the street below. The balconies on the second and third floors extend farther than those on the others. The person left pieces of themselves on the third floor, and the rest of them continued down to the second floor.”
17.
“One time, we found this guy dead in his home in the corner of the living room, tucked around the couch with no clothes on. There was human feces spread everywhere across the house, on the floors, furniture, walls, everywhere. Along with masses of liquor bottles and glass everywhere. He had massive GI issues along with drinking himself to death. Don’t know what was worse, the smell or the scene.”
18.
“I was dispatched to a vehicle vs. pedestrian call a couple of months ago, and when we arrived on scene, it was like something out of a movie. A man was running across a fairly busy four-lane road and was hit by a car traveling about 55mph. After his head went through the windshield of the first vehicle, he was then thrown into the opposite lane and was run over and dragged about 20 yards by another vehicle. Once the coroner was on scene with traffic investigations, we proceeded to pick up his organs bit by bit. It was a fantastic anatomy lesson.”
19.
Lastly, “We get the man into the bag so the crime scene can take their photos. In the nearby toilet, we discover even more blood. Possibly up to at least a third of this gentleman’s entire volume of blood in the john. It was just around that exact moment when another patrol officer was perusing around the residence when he started to find random objects covered in fecal matter. Eventually, he found more objects with a mix of fecal matter and blood. It then hit us just exactly what we were dealing with — extreme violent sodomy with foreign objects. Most of the objects were ‘reasonable,’ I suppose, smaller objects resembling the phallic shape, TV remotes, things of that sort. Well, three of the objects that stuck out when they were discovered make this story.”
“The first was a broom. Sure, you think, kinda skinny, right? Can’t be THAT bad. Well, it was the depth of the grip of it that we were concerned about. This man definitely had his bowel perforated by how deep this thing went. The second object of note was a baseball bat, its contact end. Again, pretty deep, but significantly wider in girth. The final and most stand-out of the objects was a guitar. A really nice Stratocaster, too. The tuning end of a guitar. The tuning knobs were all covered in a thick paste of fecal matter and blood.
At autopsy, the findings were obvious. However, what I had to do was something I’ll never forget. After the primary evisceration was complete, the doctor wanted to completely excise the rectum. So I had to don a chainmail glove and, after rolling this poor guy onto his side, press inside his abdominal cavity to press his rectum out towards his anus so the doctor could pull it taut enough to cut out. After she had his guy’s rectum out, which resembled one of those jelly-filled toys that when you hold them, they kinda fall inside themselves and through your hands (my ’80s/’90s friends should recall these guys). We then cut it lengthwise to unfold the rectal tissue into a large rectangle and assess the extent of the internal lacerations. Needless to say, deep, extensive, and numerous.
So, that’s the story about how I had to cut out a guy’s butthole, for science, medicine, and law.”
Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
Are you a crime scene cleaner? What’s the most bizarre thing you’ve ever seen? Leave a comment. Or if you prefer to remain anonymous, leave a submission in the form below.
