just read the below and thought it was so interesting. I couldn’t do it professionally but am weirdly unsqueamish when there’s a job that’s got to be done. I just switch off, channel the “this sucks” and do it.
the worst was my elderly essentially bedridden mother ate some iffy shrimp and bad bad drama ensued. She called an ambulance, then me (and my sister). Minutes after we got there (my sister hanging way back because she can’t handle any kind of bodily fluids) the door rings and 5 absolutely gorgeous huge firemen storm in with me covered in waste and cleaning fluid (mom was fine, just not able to help herself). TL:dr never buy a used mattress.
The comedian Ryan Sickler has a podcast where he interviews regular people with wild stories. He’s had a Canadian guy on at least twice who is a crime scene cleaner (or just dead bodies) who tells some disgusting tales.
Crime scene adjacent…..cleaning up after a hoarder.
Years ago we had an elderly woman that lived behind us. We knew her just through a few hellos over the fence over the years. She had adult children that lived nearby and we saw them there regularly. Evidently her kids didn’t take that good care of her as her house was repossessed. After her eviction the bank hired a local hazardous cleaning company to clean out the house. Hazardous was the key ward on their truck. She was an unimaginable hoarder, like didn’t even take our trash. The cleaning crew came to our house to apologize because they were going to be filling both her back and front yard with all the shit he’d hoarded for probably 20 years. I shit you not, her backyard was a good 6-8 feet deep of just garbage. There was wildlife living in her basement and walls: racoons, rodents, rabbits, and somehow a duck. Not like some domesticated pet duck either, it simply flew off when shooed away from its nest it had built.
The cleaning crew had never seen anything like it. It took that crew another two weeks and I don’t know how many roll off dumpsters to clean up the outside. The inside they ended up having to strip the house down to the frame due to all the mold. Somehow the house eventually sold after we moved so I never got to know the new owners.
I felt like I needed to get my family a full range of vaccines before they could go back into our own backyard.
No, thank you. I think I have a reasonably strong stomach, but there are levels to the grossness and I don’t want to explore some of those more advanced levels if I don’t have to
Last year, I served as the executor for the estate of elderly family friend who died alone and wasn’t discovered for several weeks after he passed.
We hired a biohazard cleanup crew to deal with the bedroom after the human remains had been removed by the authorities. They not only had to remove the mattress and bed frame, they had to use a chainsaw to cut out part of the wood floor, because the body had started to…melt, for lack of a better term, and was permeating the floor. The odor was remarkable.
About 10 or 15 years ago I was outside and heard a gunshot. A few minutes later I saw a helicopter flying overhead. It turns out that a guy in the adjacent neighborhood had shot his wife and their dog. The guy was the son of some movie executive and his father had made a famous horror movie. Something like Friday the 13th or equivalent. I can’t find his name, so I can’t verify it.
The guy received something close to $640k a year in royalty checks from the movie. But apparently that wasn’t enough to pay for garbage pick-up. Instead of taking their garbage to the garbage can they put it in a back bedroom where it accumulated. There was a flea infestation among other things. The county (or someone) had to hire one of those clean-up crews with full hazmat suits.
AI helped me find the guy. It looks like his father was an actor in the movie Halloween. He played the unmasked Michael Myers. He served as the producer for the horror movie Beg in 2011
I was curious as to which house this occurred in. I looked it up and realized that the house is about 150 yards away, but across a fence. After seeing which one it is, I remembered a funny story.
My neighbor who lives close to that house told me that they woke up late one night a few years after the murder, and heard chanting in the backyard of that home. It makes me wonder if the people were worried about ghosts and had some kind of ritual to “cleanse” the house.
I’ve cleaned up behind a hoarder and I wiped my dad’s behind and held his talywacker for him to pee when he was at the end of his life so I’m pretty sure I could do this job but it would have to pay pretty durn good. It helps that I don’t have a sense of smell and an extremely weird sense of humor.
The only thing that ever kind of creeped me out was brushing my mom’s dentures after she had a heart transplant. The texture gave me cold chills.
It should be pointed out these guys are wearing full Hazmat suits for the real nasty stuff so they don’t smell taste or feel what they are cleaning, so if I could get around the sight of gross things I think I could do it.
I’m amongst those that generally don’t like messy fluids, blood, guts stuff…
Could never be a surgeon (sight of blood makes me queasy). Changed my kids diapers back in the day but the wife definitely did more of those than I did.
Having spent way too much time in nasty crime scenes, it was always the smell that did it for me. If the smell was tolerable, the gore didn’t bother me. Same with autopsies.
My wife’s best friend died alone in her apartment a couple of years ago. She was discovered a day or so after, but, the days leading up to her death were very grim.
My wife and her other friend, both nurses so not squeamish or unaccustomed to death, took it upon themselves to clean the apartment before family came in to retrieve belongings and keepsakes.
My wife had a very distant stare for a while afterwards. She said the worst part was the smell, and the flies. Swarms of flies.
That was good of your wife to do that for the family. A real mitzveh that saved the family trauma.
And yes … bugs invade quickly. A good reminder we are little more than skinsacks of meat. A meal fit for maggots. A comforting thought.
I’ve got some stories to tell ….my worst scene was an obese elderly lady who died on the toilet with the faucet running. She died around Thanksgiving and her family noticed her missing at Christmas. Thermostat set at 80 degrees. Water running for a month, flooding the entire house. Humidity like a swamp. When she died, she fell from the toilet to the floor, so she was half submerged. The memories are coming back and I’m gagging as I type. I’ll spare the details but it was bad.
Im in the construction industry and have done a lot of remediation projects. Luckily none involving a biological soul of human remains in a situation like that. I couldn’t imagine.
I remember being a kid and seeing a fresh raccoon carcass that was being devoured by maggots. They were just everywhere on it, in its mouth, it’s eyes. It dawned on me that we are the same as that raccoon - just a meat bag, and that would happen to us, too.
About 15 years ago I was the Director of Operations at a big manufacturing company. I had gone home for the night and got a call about 6:30 pm from the night shift machine shop supervisor. He was nearly hysterical, and that was very unusual for this guy. He finally managed to tell me that the production expediter, a kid that was only 26 years old and up and coming in the company, was in the offices restroom dead. I asked how he knew he was dead and all he could say was “it is very obvious.” I asked if 911 had been called and he said yes.
On with the pants and off to work 20 minutes away. I arrived with police, fire, and EMS on the scene. Cut to the end - The kid had suffered a very dramatic Elvis. While straining on the toilet his carotid artery had ruptured internal to the neck. For the few seconds he lived after the rupture he sprayed a large percentage of his blood volume all over the stall and the restroom.
I made all the management calls and no one answered - it was a Thursday night. They released the scene and removed the body about 1 am. I had sent the night shift home about 9 pm. Now I had to decide what to do about day shift. I made some calls after a google search and found a Crime Scene Cleaner that could do the job that night. He only took cash, so I went to the local Chase and pulled $2500 out of my personal account.
They took 4 hours and left about 6:30, just as day shift was coming in. You could not tell that anything had happened in the restroom. In case you are wondering, dayshift left as soon as they arrived, with only extremely critical staying.
Googling Crime Scene Cleanup at 1 am is not something you want to be able to put on a resume.
Before I read the posts on here, I was going to say yes.
I’m not great with needles, look away when I donate my own blood, and was hesitant when sticking others with IV fluids in combat lifesaver training. Glad to have never had to use the training.
Its a no from me, based on the posts on this thread.
