The story that made me say “Jesus Christ” out loud came from a guy who cleans up after people jump in front of trains. They found a body with no head and searched everywhere for the rest of it. In the autopsy room, they saw a tuft of hair poking out from where the head should have been and realized the man had hit the train head-on, his skull driven down through his neck and into his chest cavity. I’m not on a cleanup crew, but I attend scenes.
An old gentleman had died in the bath. The top half of his body was swollen and puffy while his legs and lower torso had essentially melted away, creating a horrendous soup casserole mix in the tub. The coroners had to sift through the water to find his liver, which had come loose. During the autopsy, his testicles were so swollen they had to prick them just to drain the fluid out.
The smell is the worst part. It sticks to your clothes, and when you come back to the office, everyone can smell it on you before you even say a word. I remember reading about a hospital orderly who got arrested for necrophilia. His wife turned him in because he’d come home smelling foul, and she couldn’t take it anymore.
Not my experience, but a friend of the family who was a first responder told me about a teenage couple driving over a hundred miles an hour down a country road in Wisconsin at night. The boy was driving and wearing his seatbelt. The girl in the passenger seat wasn’t. He lost control and slammed into a tree.
Our friend arrived first and found the girl thrown through the windshield, in pieces up in the branches. The driver, still belted in, was nearly decapitated, only a strip of neck flesh holding his head on. The force of the impact had driven the seatbelt across his chest and sliced his head clean off. My little brother crashed into a tree as a suicide attempt at a hundred miles an hour.
They used the jaws of life to pull him out, and somehow he walked away with little to no permanent damage. I hope he never forgets how lucky he is. I definitely won’t. My dad’s friend is a cop in a rural area, and he loves telling my dad about the messed-up stuff he’s come across.
One time he got called to an apartment where a large group of people were crying and coughing. It was a family cleaning up after a shotgun suicide of a relative. That’s when I learned that in small towns, it’s often up to the next of kin to handle the aftermath. There are no specialized crews coming in for that.
It’s the majority of the time, and it’s heartbreaking. When I was in prison, we took classes on AIDS prevention and substance abuse. One morning, a guest speaker came in, a normal-looking guy who told us he’d never been an addict, had a family, a steady job, and volunteered as an EMT. He was mostly tasked with cleaning up car crashes.
He told us about a routine call where he and his partner were cleaning up a serious wreck, someone who’d wrapped their truck around a tree. He was scrubbing blood out of the passenger side floorboards when his hand slipped and he faceplanted straight into a puddle of blood. He knew immediately he had it in his mouth and all over his face, maybe even his eyes. Worst case scenario: the driver was HIV-positive or had some form of hepatitis, and he got infected.
His wife left him soon after, told everyone his father was gay, and the whole family harassed him relentlessly. His life was ruined. He stuck around to answer a few questions, but not many were asked. No happy ending.
Sometimes life just sucks. I was interning with the forensics unit on my first real crime scene. A guy found out his boyfriend was cheating and flew into a jealous rage. He stabbed him to death with the handle of a frying pan, chased him through the house, and finished him off in the bathtub where he stabbed him an estimated two hundred more times.
His head was a ruin of pulp and bone shards. The guy I was working with had me dig bits of skull out of the drain with tweezers. This isn’t my job, but I can tell you for certain I’d never do it. My best friend and I grew up together.
When we were eighteen, we were about to go our separate ways, me joining the Marines, him off to university. Right before I shipped out, he surprised me by dropping out and coming along. I wish he never had. When we got out, he seemed fine, his usual self.
We’d had hard times and confided in each other, but other than that, totally normal. One day he begged me to go see a movie with him, The Last Witch Hunter, because we were both snobs for Vin Diesel. The next morning, he made his father and me breakfast, walked out to his truck, and put a hollow-point . 45 through his head.
After the paramedics left, one of them being my current stepfather, someone had to clean out his truck. I’d seen human brains before, but I’d never felt them, and I’ll never forget it, either. Exactly like Jell-O, mixed with fragments of skull and blood splatter all over the right side. I’ll never forget holding his empty head in my hands.
My mom used to do cleanup for a well-known cleaning company, and she was the only one certified for hazmat. They handled jobs for the county sheriff’s department. The one that stuck with her was in the back of a police cruiser. They described him as a rim head, so tweaked out of his mind that he kept rubbing his face back and forth across the dividing glass until he wore it off from ear to ear.
I saw the pictures nearly ten years ago, and it still haunts me. Not my story, but my former boss’s. His wife is a mortician, and he does death scene cleanup on the side. He said the worst was cleaning up after a homeless man snuck into an industrial building, climbed to the top of a set of seldom-used stairs, and passed away.
The stairs and landings were metal grating. About two weeks later, someone noticed the rancid smell, opened the door, and found the remains of the man had liquefied and dripped down four stories of stairs. In Florida, bodies decompose fast, a good stench within forty-eight to seventy-two hours. And once you walk away from that smell, it doesn’t matter, because it’s all you can smell for days.
It gives me anxiety, so I end up wearing so much perfume just to try to smell anything else, and I always apologize to my coworkers for the rest of the shift. A trick someone taught me: tape a cotton ball dusted with peppermint or eucalyptus oil under your nose, and another one in your shirt pocket. Police detective here. In a rural area, a guy died in his yard in July, and it was eight days before anyone found him.
He was partially liquefied, flies everywhere, and the stench was nasty. Knowing where those flies had been before they landed on your face didn’t help. We had to shovel him into a bag wearing gas masks. Liquid people are quite toxic.
I was a tow truck driver, and the worst are motorcycle accidents. I’ve seen some messed-up car accidents, but I’ve seen motorcyclists spread out several dozen yards across the pavement. Once I found a guy dead in his apartment, been there for weeks. We had to process the scene, including rolling him over for pictures.
He was literally a dark green glob starting to liquefy into the carpet and walls. Rolling him over was like grabbing a three-hundred-twenty-pound ball of goo. I wore two gloves on each hand and could still feel everything. And if you die with your dogs in the room and enough time passes, they will eat exposed skin, usually your face.
I remember ending up on a graphic subreddit by accident once, and the post was of a woman who died at home and her dog chewed her face off. I used to do auto detailing in college for a car dealership. I was scrubbing the floor of a car, and no matter what I did, the water kept a red tint. I pulled the seats and found about an inch of dried, crusted blood and what I guessed was brain matter and skull fragments.
Turns out it was a suicide car the dealership bought at auction. It had been detailed before being sold, but they never pulled the seats. We called the cops to confirm it was logged, then shipped the car back. The dealership lost money on it but wanted it as far from their lot as possible.
Search and rescue personnel here. Working in Las Vegas, we see a ton of messed-up stuff. Chances are high that if we’re looking for a missing person, we’ll find an unrelated subject. Worst one: we were deployed to find a female stuffed in a suitcase.
After we recovered her, the coroner said it was the wrong female in a suitcase, and we were sent back out to find the right one. Though we aren’t a cleanup crew, we often handle body recovery. The coroner’s office does the packaging, law enforcement does the investigation, and we carry them out solemnly. Everyone needs to come home eventually.
There’s someone out there who cares for them. My dad was a coroner’s assistant in the late seventies, early eighties, and he had some crazy stories. The one that stuck, and probably caused most of his PTSD, was a car full of drunk teenagers on prom night struck by a train. The car ignited, and he could smell them burning.
They were barely identifiable, and he had to help move their cooked bodies. Those kids were about the same age as my older brothers at the time. Just hearing the story scared the crap out of me, and I have never, and will never, drive drunk. Funny paramedic story.
A woman called 999, said she thought her father was dead. The call handler advised CPR, but she said it was too late. The crew arrived, spoke to the daughter, who was upset, and entered the property to find effectively a skeleton on the kitchen floor. Her story was that she was estranged, lived overseas, and normally only sent Christmas cards.
After two years of no cards and no answer on the phone, she flew home and found him dead. Third-hand tale from a night shift chat, so I can’t confirm all the details, but it makes for a sad story. That man was so alone no one found him for two years. A friend of mine is a cop.
He told me about a guy found dead in his kitchen, naked, with the stove and heater on. They assumed he was just cooking naked, as we all do from time to time. When they lifted him to turn him over, his you-know-what had melted to the kitchen floor. As they pulled him up, it stretched off the floor like a rubber band and released, slingshotting back to his body.
It sounded absolutely disgusting as he described it. Police officer here. I attended a scene where a guy went to his ex’s house, walked in, and murdered her, her mother, and her teenage son. It was clear from the scene he’d gone in with a rifle and shot all three, and that the son had tried to crawl to a phone in the kitchen.
He then went out to his car, grabbed a shotgun, and pumped a slug through each of their heads before putting one in his own. The son was in high school, headed for college football. His girlfriend was supposed to be at the house that day but had last-minute issues with a family illness. I’ve cleaned up crime scenes for fifteen years, so I have dozens of stories.
One: an older lady committed suicide by taping a plastic bag over her head and handcuffing her hands behind her back. She had a little dog she didn’t want to be lonely, so she poisoned its water first. There were a few water bottles on the counter, but one had a capital letter P written on the cap with a Sharpie. I assume that’s where she mixed the poison.
Two: a woman started her car in the garage and climbed into the trunk. It was an older model without a safety release. By the time her family found her, the car had run out of gas and the fumes had dissipated. It took them a while.
I figured she’d made the attempt before, changed her mind, and by getting in the trunk, she couldn’t stop herself. Three: in an extended stay hotel, a guy slit his wrists in the bathtub. I found blood on the handle of the refrigerator, opened it, and from the blood, it looked like he’d made himself a hot dog before he died. I guess he got hungry.
Four: on two separate occasions, I’ve found the left half of a nose from shotgun suicides, perfectly split down the middle. One had part of the upper lip and mustache still attached. Five: kids are often the most disturbing. A three-month-old kicked to death after the mom had her throat slit.
A five-year-old who got his head crushed in a townhouse elevator. Six: a woman in government housing died and her dog fed off her for days. There were bloody paw prints all over the house, on the windowsill and blinds where he barked at people passing by, and a trail to the toilet where he got water. Seven: another woman died and wasn’t found for days, but her three- or four-year-old granddaughter and dog were still in the house.
The little girl knew enough to pull the dog food bag out of the pantry to feed the dog and was able to reach some crackers to feed herself. I worked in CSI in Mexico. Once we went to a safe house where police found fourteen people who’d been tortured and executed. You could smell the iron from the entrance.
Inside, there were two women with broomsticks taped into them. Upstairs, they found a woman tied to the toilet, dead of dehydration, having urinated and defecated on herself for days. It was evident they’d violated and beaten her before turning her into a toilet. One room had five shackles on the wall with a metal bucket of water in the center.
Those five died of hunger and beatings. The sickest part was in the backyard, a windowless warehouse with several bodies that had their faces and hands removed. It was like watching a horror movie. That’s the narco in those places.
How could you bring yourself to begin something like that, let alone see it through? At that point, it’s no longer about drugs or money. You’re just an absolute sick freak. Third-hand account: a forensic cleaner was cleaning up a murder kitchen in a big house when the police returned midway through.
They silently alerted her that the suspect was still on the property, then made a show of leaving but didn’t really. The cleaner calmly finished up and left. The police found the guy in the air duct with the murder weapon. He’d been watching her the whole time.
My job puts me in touch with coroners. Here are a couple of stories they told me. A woman killed herself in her own home using a complicated homemade mechanical setup she engineered herself, resulting in a lot of blood splatter. Bless her good heart and careful planning, because when she was found, they discovered she’d laid out everything on masses of waterproof sheeting so the cleanup team had an easier task.
Nothing stained the walls or floor because everything was covered, even pinned to the walls. Another suicide by drowning: upon examining the body, they found a ziplock bag tightly wrapped in a pocket with the suicide note, fifty pounds in cash, and a note to the coast guard apologizing for the unpleasant task and asking them to enjoy a drink on him as a last nice thing he could do for someone. I’m not in cleanup, but I had to clean up my father’s brains and blood from the room he killed himself in. The people who came before didn’t do a thorough job.
There were red streaks down the hallway walls where the blood-soaked bed had been taken out. The walls were clean until nearly the roof, where you could see splatters. I found a piece of rotted brain stuck to the top of the curtain rails. There was also a smell we believed came from blood soaking into the wooden floors, so we had to replace them.
This was relayed to me by a friend who’s a Riverside County Sheriff. He did a welfare check on an elderly woman who’d passed away in her sleep under an electric blanket about ten days before they found her. Her skin peeled off with the blanket. A medical team witnessed a person wrapped in cloth with an electrode in his butt and the other connected to a generator battery.
He was charred inside, his butt melted, and there was waste oozing out. He was having some kind of kink play, but I guess the partner wanted him dead. Makes you wonder where that fine line is between enjoying electrical play and getting fried so bad you die. My dad’s friend worked as an ambulance medic and came across a motorcycle accident.
The biker said he felt fine apart from his stomach hurting where he’d hit the handlebar. When he undid his leather jacket, his intestines fell out. He died. My dad had to clean up a murder-suicide.
The guy spread his blood all over the place and had a projector screening a fake movie cover of him and his wife called The Betrayal. My dad used to attend suicides on the railway. People hit by trains at high speed. He said there would be bits everywhere.
He shoveled them into bin bags, usually three bags’ worth. He said birds would fly down, pick bits of flesh up, and fly off with them to eat. I remember being in a restaurant once and my dad saying he had this bloke’s head on a shovel, asking the table next to us to keep it down, please. It’s always the kids.
I work cleanup in a big city, and the worst one I came across was recent. A guy killed his wife and two daughters with a shotgun. Having to go through the family home, seeing photos of the family together, and then having to pick them up and clean it up.
Nothing really messes with me anymore, but this freaked me out.