23 Garbage Men Describe The Wildest Stuff They Found

Shared bytiorted726:

I was a mechanic on garbage trucks for a big city. For four years, we had to dump full trucks on the ground twice and spread the load looking for a body. I found one once. I chose not to look at it; I think that was the right move.

According toMoosepondvacation:

A former Sanitation Department Supervisor called me frantic after an explosion in the truck hopper. No one got hurt, thankfully. I called the fire department and police; they always respond to fire calls. They watched the house because the guy was cooking meth. He threw away some ingredients. The pressure from the compaction caused it to burst. The best part? The guy sat outside watching TV in a bathrobe. He got dressed and came out. When they took him away, he had [hard substances] in his pants. He apparently never owned pants without [substances] in the pockets.

Redditor londongarbagemansaid:

I brought brass WWI and WWII grave marker medallions to the police. I found them in the recycle bins. I hope they go back where they belong.

This one is fromweedandguitars:

I managed garbage men in Oakland. We often found dead animals, remnants of big weed harvests, and weapons. Once, we found a rejected prosthetic limb.

The FBI regularly has a trash company pick up the trash of someone under investigation so they can search it.

I worked in the trash/recycling industry for several years. I recall a guy at a metal recycling center trying to sell bronze grave headstones. They hauled him in.

Redditor 98FordContouradded:

I work sanitation in NYC. I see everything imaginable. Dead dogs and cats get thrown out daily trash. We just take them; the police do not get called. One time, my partner and I saw heavy blood leak from trash bags we put in the truck. We called our supervisor. He looked and said keep going. Anything could have caused it. I also see much drug paraphernalia. Thousands of plastic bags, scales, and white "powder" litter the area. One event stays with me. My partner and I got called somewhere far from our route. We met our supervisor there. I asked him what happened. He pointed to a tree we stood near. He told me to look up. I looked. A huge mass hung in the tree, about twenty feet up. I could not see what it was, but it was dark and about three by three feet. It was a large pile of dead rats tied together. Police and fire showed up five minutes later. The fire department used a ladder to reach the branch and cut it down. When it hit the ground, the smell was terrible. We, the police, and the fire department backed away fast. My partner and I grabbed it and put it in the truck. There were fifty to seventy-five dead rats in that thing. We asked the police what it was. They said it was likely a form of religious sacrifice. I have worked for sanitation fourteen years. That was the nastiest thing I have ever seen. I will never forget the smell. It was probably about ninety degrees that day. God knows how long that thing stayed there.

As stated by steve2058:

I never found body parts in thirty-five years. However, the ATF asked me to pick up trash from one home. I went around the corner and let the "Special Agent in Charge" take the trash bags into his black Chrysler 300 undercover car. This happened for several weeks straight. I never found out what they sought.

From Redditor mvincent17781:

I worked at a landfill for one summer. I did not find anything gross. But I found a choir book from 1864 in a box in the dumpster. I took that for myself.

Shared by Slambusher:

I ran a large trash hauling company in south Georgia for three years. Innumerable sketchy things are thrown away. I cannot tell you how many times hospitals dumped bio waste to save disposal fees. It got so bad the landfill reported them. Those are just the ones we saw; I do not know how many were missed.

WalMart and other retailers throw away too many good things. People return items for scratches, and they discard them because they won't sell. Tools, TVs, computers, clothes, toys—some even out of the box. All in working condition, they write it off to dispose of it.

Contributed by theoptionexplicit:

This happened in the 90s. My friend's dad found a big sack of arcade tokens. The tokens were mostly standard back then. My friend was in heaven.

According to GoodnightKevin:

My father-in-law is a bin man in Northern Ireland. He always brings home things he finds on his rounds. Most recently, he brought home a Tag Heuer watch and more iPhones than you could count.

A guy keeps a huge jar of coins. The guys he works with dump any loose change or notes they find into it. They split the money at Christmas.

This is from YouKnowABitJonSnow:

A friend whose dad was a garbage man once told me about finding an engagement ring and condoms in a small disposable bag. He always wanted the story behind it.

Added by Redditor VoiceCrack:

I worked as a summer student at a landfill, directing traffic. A customer asked to dig a hole for something to be buried. He drove an all-black Cadillac with tinted windows and nice rims. The slow driver operator did not want to dig because it needed machine switching. So, he offered the animal pit instead. Expecting a dead body, I watched him throw out what looked like a book. He drove off. I held my breath and looked into the animal pit. I found a family photo album with a knife stuck in the middle. It still makes me uneasy.

By Redditor hothotsauce:

A college classmate worked summers at his uncle's dump on Staten Island. He hated the job but three months paid for a year of school tuition and living. He found a human finger once. He found lots of bodily waste in containers. He found bags of brand new (possibly unsold) clothing.

He also earned $20 per big black garbage bag to separate recyclables. He insisted the smell and sight were not worth the money. I do not know how many he got in a day.

From an anonymous Redditor:

My dad drove a recycling truck. He found much stuff on his routes. I never asked him what the craziest thing was, but one thing he told me a long time ago stays in my mind.

He heard something in a garbage bag at one stop. He saw the bag move. He ripped it open and found a kitten. He took the kitten. He put it in his lunch box, leaving it open. He does not know how young the animal was. This memory is very old; it is the only part he recalls. He did not bring it to a shelter, a vet, or a friend. He does not know the outcome.

He rescued an animal on the job before. This story is related to the one above but not the main issue. When his dad drove a cab, a man got in with a bag and told him to drive to the canal. Along the way, his dad saw cats in the bag, meowing. He stopped the car and told the man to leave the bag and get out. The man planned to drop the cats in the canal. His dad brought the cats home and found homes for all of them.

Shared bySesstuna:

He made an account just to share this story his old man has told him for as long as he can remember.

When his dad was young and he was a baby, he worked at Silver State Disposal in Nevada. They lived in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas, until mid-1988. He avoided a serious problem by moving east a month before the PEPCON explosion.

My old man worked as a diesel mechanic there. On days collectors missed, he took overtime to help with collection.

One morning, he earned time and a half collecting in a large development with very high-end homes. He always states the next part exactly this way:

I found a leg in the fourth trash can I opened. I thought someone threw out a prosthetic; it did not look real. I found her head ten minutes later and realized I had thrown away a severed leg.

The truck driver called the dispatcher. The dispatcher contacted the police and sent more teams to search the trash cans. Seven items were found: the dad found the right leg and head, a torso, two arms, the left leg, and a stray breast.

My old man found a severed head.

Update: He spoke briefly with his dad via text. His dad mentioned a police officer on the scene found a decaying leg and vomited everywhere. He says the head belonged to an Asian female and was covered in "whorish makeup." He will visit this weekend and update if anything new happens.

They find cadavers in Las Vegas trash cans often. The latest one happened about three months ago. CSI gets these stories from no creative writing.

According toHiFiMetal64:

I run the town's transfer station and recycling center. The amount of good or new stuff I see thrown out daily is insane. I collect and fix antique radios; a Thomas Edison phonograph from 1906 was a personal favorite. I have a 55" Samsung in my living room. A work guy wanted a smart TV and just threw out the old one. Some guy couldn't sell his trailer, so I got it. Mechanical and electrical know-how saves you money. I never bought lawn mowers, snow blowers, weed whackers, or even shovels or garden tools. Microwaves die? One shows up at work in days. It sounds bad, but when a parent dies, they just bring everything to the dump.

Redditor MasterPipadded:

I picked up many things. I made about $400 a month selling scrap aluminum, brass, and copper until they cracked down.

I got a 32-inch flat screen. The sound cable was unplugged inside the TV. Fixing took five minutes. It worked perfectly. A remote came too! Haha. I bought new shoes, lamps, vacuums that clogged, fans, tools—all kinds of stuff. Then I found the craziest thing: a cardboard box (I often looked in boxes when scrapping) with several deflated used dolls. The worst part? I knew the man from the late 70s who lived there. I never looked at him the same way again, lol.

This one was added byPhantom Scarecrow:

Weirdest- A whole, skinned sheep head. A GIGANTIC, filthy adult toy. Entire rooms filled with furniture. (We called them "Move-out piles" because it looked like people moved out and just threw everything away.) Eighteen large trash bags of name-brand clothing, from the same house, three weeks straight (18 each week).

Coolest—a big box of brand-new Rolling Rock Beer embossed metal signs. I sold them on Ebay for almost $400. Two beautiful 1950s pastel sewing machines, one turquoise, one coral pink, along with all their parts. Twelve working VCRs (this was in 2002; DVD players were taking over).

My loader found two antique baseball cards a month before I started driving. They were small ones from cigarette packs and were worth thousands of dollars. He found them in the hopper, so he never knew which house they came from, and no one ever claimed them.

Redditor GolfPr0added:

In my youth, I owned a large waste hauling company. I have tons of stories from a 20-year career.

When I started, I ran routes if someone needed off or was sick. One night, I ran our front end loader, dumping a McDonald's at 2:30 AM. I opened the gate, climbed back into my truck, and began raising the can to dump it. A very surprised homeless guy jumped out of the container. A half-second delay, and I would have missed him; he would have been out of my sight, dumped, and compacted. We hauled chicken farms and butcher shops, so dead animals were always a problem. Dumping 40 cubic yards of dead chickens started the day.

Free Stuff: We did much specialty work. One time, we got a contract to remove 20 trailer loads of leather furniture because some pieces had mold. Everyone at work that day got a free leather sofa and loveseat. We also hauled a national coffee roaster. FDA is harsh. So we got good packaged coffee constantly. If the shrink wrap was damaged, they threw out the whole skid. I don't think we ever paid for coffee. Almost daily, someone brought in something. We also handled all USPS locations. If you wrote "return to sender" on most items, they put it in the dumpster. I had over 10,000 CDs from Columbia House at one time.

We handle many estate cleanups after parents pass away. Parents usually keep everything, thinking their kids will want it later, but they do not. By the time mom and dad die, the kids are around 60 and have everything they need. They just throw out much good stuff. While dumping a load one day, a small wooden box opened. It held about 50 silver dollars from 1922. I still use one today to mark my golf ball.

Contributed by angrymom789:

I clean banks and clinics. Banks throw away Canadian and Mexican coins, hundreds of them daily. Maybe they hate Canadians and Mexicans? They also discard client data: names, addresses, driver's license copies, and SSNs. That is insane. Why throw that away without shredding it? I shred it for them. Clinics discard medical equipment when they get new items. They threw away a heart rate monitor that was not old. They also discarded used medications, not even expired ones. They even threw away a mini-fridge; I use it now.

By Redditor Adski673:

I worked at my local recycling plant. I sorted different materials into different bins on a fast conveyor belt. Most people do not know what can and cannot be recycled, so we often found much trash to sort through.

We often found dead pets, money, dirty needles, and half-eaten food, including a whole turkey that was thrown out.

We found the best thing: an old, unexploded grenade. The whole plant shut down until the bomb squad arrived. They took the grenade to the tip—massive piles of rubbish—and blew it up. Rubbish chunks scattered everywhere. The smell was awful; it will last longer than religion.

Up2KnowGoodsaid:

I was a sanitary engineer in the early 90s. A regular stop was a vet clinic. We arrived one hot summer day and found a DEAD HORSE on top of the dumpster. We said, "Screw that, we aren't taking a horse!" We pushed the corpse off the dumpster, emptied the container, and continued our work. The next week, we returned to the vet and found the horse inside the dumpster. It was bloated like a creepy version of itself. Because it was in the dumpster, we took it. We emptied the dumpster into the hopper and started compacting the corpse. Suddenly, there was a POP, followed by a juicy gurgling sound. For a moment, it rained horse gore; I swear it blocked the sun. This remains the most disgusting event of my life.

TL;DR Packed a large, bloated horse. The pressure while compacting caused an explosion of horse gore.

From Darkpasta:

My good friend, who worked at a recycling plant, found an Enigma machine. The [Third Reich] used this encryption device. It cost about 10,000 dollars.

He also found the wooden box for another one; it had been used as a bait box.

Edit: He still has it, along with both wooden boxes. I will not help sell them.