Professional Investigators Describe The Creepiest Things They've Ever Found Searching Houses

From user phormix:

This wasn't mine, but an EMT friend gave it to me. It feels nasty, maybe not creepy, but it makes my hair stand up thinking about it.

The apartment manager entered one lower unit in a nearby city to check a bad smell. People nearby complained. Seeing what happened, he called the ambulance.

First responders arrived, including the EMT friend. A lady sat on the couch. Something squirmy was happening under her pants. They checked her, removed the undergarments. Maggots fell out. Her private parts were covered in them.

The individual had a serious substance abuse issue. She poked needles into her vagina, causing an infection. This led to rotting flesh. Flies arrived, then maggots. She was not dead; drugs kept her from seeing she was rotting from the waist down.

From user catattackjack:

I worked as a constable in an inner-city suburb of Queensland for my first year. About 40% of that area's population lived in government housing for criminals and those released from mental health centers.

A man we met decided to destroy things in his unit one afternoon. He started kicking through lattice, throwing pot plants at passersby, stealing shoes, and smashing car windows.

After fifteen minutes of chaos, he ran out of energy and returned to his unit. We found him there and he started screaming and bashing his head and face into any surface or object. Eventually, we got a van with a pod and secured him. Then, we went back into the house to find out what happened.

The house was a mess. He fit two Coles trolleys inside, using them as furniture. The whole place smelled like rotting food and waste. On the coffee table sat scribbled notes of curses (he lacked mental function) and a wooden box.

The wooden box held about 100 small, sealed bags. More than half the bags contained brown, grainy organic material. The others held clear, crystal-like stuff. The brown bags were organized by size, smallest to largest staples.

Local people used various methods to get high. We saw strange things people consumed. We do not recognize these bags, but we suspect they are some kind of narcotic. We examine these bags and their contents. We test them if needed; I take one bag, empty it, and check it better.

These brown samples have color flecks and tiny hair-like strands, common in plant derivatives. I have never seen this before. I hold it, talking to my partner, suggesting it might be coarse hash derivative or a byproduct. Khat? That explains why this guy went wild.

A dog unit officer arrives and assists the arrest. He sees the scene, looks at the coffee table, looks at the bags, looks at me holding the contents in my palm. He immediately says, "That guy got golden staph; he's been collecting scabs...."

This guy picked at a golden staph infection on his leg. He collected the scabs, organized them from smallest to largest, and then ate them. The small yellow crystals? That was snot and crust from his nose. Same goal.

From user imcodefour:

We went to an apartment that was a local drug den. A female we knew called, saying the male renter had been assaulted and she had fled. We arrived; the door was bolted shut. I kicked the door repeatedly; it would not open. Later, we learned the drug team searched the apartment a couple of weeks prior. Afterward, the tenants reinforced the door jamb with a metal plate. It took me twenty-two kicks before I broke the deadbolt in half, sending it flying across the room to hit the wall. We entered, guns drawn, and began clearing the apartment.

This place felt like where a lot of meth was made. It was dark. Swastikas, 666, upside-down pentagrams were painted on the wall. Faces with their eyes crossed out hung on the wall. Baby dolls had their eyes scratched out with Xs. As we cleared the first room, we saw blood. First on the bed, then a trail on the floor leading to the back room. The layout was odd: one main room, a back room that was more of a hallway, and a bathroom at the end of that hall. We followed the blood trail to the bathroom door. The renter's dog was there, shaking hard and urinating all over the floor, terrified. As we neared, the dog became aggressive because it was scared.

I moved through the dog and entered the bathroom. There, I found the renter hunched in the shower, bleeding from his face, hands gripping his cheeks. He tried hard to speak, begging us not to harm his dog. Blood dripped from his mouth; I could not understand him. Then I saw what had happened. Two men with a hammer had dislocated his jaw on both sides; it hung there. As he pleaded, he could only try to talk by flicking his blood-covered tongue into the word pattern because his jaw wouldn't work.

User submitted.Yurei2.:

My aunt works as a police dispatcher. Usually, she takes public calls and has an officer respond. One day, she covered the station's radio because the regular guy was sick. This made her the main link for the police radio network, taking calls from officers in the field and sending backup.

She listened to four cops talking in a panic as two squad cars arrived for a reported murder (the caller was sure multiple killers were involved). The victim's meat was cut into one-inch cubes, like they planned to fry it or make kebabs. They disassembled the whole corpse that way. Bones were cut into neat inch segments; organs were removed and separated; they were organized. One officer panicked and yelled something like, 'This is OCD movie monster bullshit.'

I cannot recall the exact quote, sadly. I doubt my aunt remembers it. She thought they were joking until they called a hazmat crew for the body.

User submitted.sdcinerama.:

This one is from an MP friend, so take it with a grain of salt.

My friend was on duty officer one night. He had to answer serious events.

One night, a fire alarm went off, and he and several MPs rolled on it. It was a real fire (false alarms happen often). The source was an officer's apartment and... the officer.

The investigation showed the officer filled a bathtub with fuel and field manuals, planning to commit suicide by sitting in the tub and lighting the fuel. After a few seconds, he changed his mind and ran from the tub to his apartment door before death took him. Responding MPs found his burned remains and the bits of flesh falling off as he ran for the door.

User submitted.alanamablamaspama.:

Not a cop, but I worked with Adult Protective Services and sometimes cops.

The place smelled awful. An elderly lady lay dead, sitting up on the couch. She had had a watery bowel movement at the time of death, apparently. That smell was not the only problem. Dozens of buckets of feces filled every room of the house. One officer lacked a face mask. He nearly vomited every time he coughed or sneezed from the dust and the stench.

The elderly lady lived with some of her brothers. Homeless people squatting in the backyard called the police after seeing the brothers leave, though they had not seen the lady for days. The smell coming from the house also raised alarms.

User provided.MidwintersTomb.:

My mother worked for a police department. I hung out there when I was home sick from school. This old man walked to the corner gas station daily for smokes and coffee. The attendant called for a wellness check after she noticed she hadn't seen him for two weeks in the summer. Cops went, knocked, smelled something, opened the door, walked in, and instantly came out vomiting from the smell. They returned later with respirators, trash bags, and snow shovels to clean up the sludge that was the old man.

User provided.CoGa.:

Not a cop, but a fire investigator. We worked a scene where two kids died after a space heater caught fire. The dad played poker down the street, and the mom was with another man. The fire department cleaned the scene, and we entered afterward. While sifting through the ashes for space heater parts, we found the two-year-old's foot. This happened after dark; we could barely see, using flashlights. It felt creepy.

User provided.MaxTitration16.:

My first dead guy stayed in his house for almost a week during a hot July with no A/C...

Your skin becomes clear, and you see everything. He popped when the funeral home came for him. Yes, he popped. Some people do not mind this. I do not. This is the only part of the job that bothers me.

User provided.RogueSock.:

Friend is a cop: A wellness check called in. They went in—smelled terribly—and found a large dead man, shirtless, sitting in his front room in a lawn chair watching TV. He set up an industrial space heater behind the chair, running it at full power. Because of the heat, and other things, he had 'merged' through the back of that lawn chair.

User provided.throoowah.:

My dad answered a call at an apartment on the 23rd floor. He walked in and saw blood everywhere. Pools covered the floor; spatter stained the walls and ceiling, smearing everything. He moved further in and found a woman crumpled on the floor, badly beaten, and the partner stood by an open window. My dad tried to talk to the man, to get him to come with, but the man turned, stepped out the window, and fell 70 meters to his death.

User submitted this.M7z:

My dad was a cop in a small mountain town. He told us stories. One story was this couple hiking in the back woods, miles from people. They found a tree over a cliff edge and saw a body hanging from it. Search and Rescue arrived to pull the dead man out; he had been missing for a year. He had a terminal illness and chose to hang himself on a stunning cliffside view in the middle of nowhere. What he missed was that after he died, a crow nested in his chest. For nearly a year, he became a hanging corpse birdhouse. Dad said the coroner was surprised when he removed the body and a family of birds flew out of his shirt.