Police officers are the first line of defense. They're the first people there when something goes wrong, and they do everything in their power to make sure civilians are safe. They respond to so many calls per day, and not all of them end well. Some of them are downright horrifying.
Police officers on Reddit share the scariest call they answered. Content has been edited for clarity.
Some Questions Will Never Be Answered
“I am interning with a Sheriff’s police department, so most of my time is spent on patrol.
We got called out to do a wellness check which the Deputy thought was going to be a piece of cake. We thought it was going to be a simple solution, like she was out of town or something. We get there and are met by the neighbors who told us the mail is piling up in the mailbox, and there are several untouched packages on the porch. We go up the house and the front door is unsecured, so we crack open the door a couple of inches. The Deputy calls inside, but the door won’t move anymore. The house was one of those split houses where the stairs meet at the front door and the upstairs and downstairs are offset, so we concluded there might be stuff behind the door. It’s about this time that the deputy tells me that she is a known hoarder and that could be why the door was stuck. He also mentions if we see flies on the inside of the windows she is most likely inside and deceased. As we walk around the side of the house we notice a lot of flies on the windows. The back door was locked and as we looked in we noticed bags on bags of garbage diapers and random junk all over the place.
We head back to the front and attempt to make entry. He pushes the door open, this time with more force, and from underneath I see a grease like liquid spreading out from under the door. The deputy stops, closes the door and calmly tells me that the lady was indeed dead, and wedged behind the door. From the dates of the packages, we concluded that she had been gone about two months. Once we did make entry into the house, I was allowed inside.
After two months she didn’t even look like a human corpse. Her skin and body had sagged and melted to the floor and her face…her face was all black and had been eaten to the bone by maggots. I’ll never forget the smell when the coroners moved her and she popped. It was like a physical presence. Whatever those people get paid to deal with that stuff, it’s not enough. The thing that really got to me though, was wondering if she had fallen down the stairs and died there, or if she fell and was unable to move and waited for help that would never come.”
“I Felt Different About This One”
“I got a report of a missing husband. He told his wife and family of 6 children he was going to get his tires changed, but never returned, and this was 12 hours ago. They had purchased another house in a neighboring community, and the relationship with the wife was under pressure, so the wife assumed he was staying at the other house, and claimed he would never kill himself.
The strange thing about this report though was that he emptied his personal bank account into his wife’s this morning as well. The wife explained this off saying they recently had a fight about finances, and he agreed he was bad at money and maybe they should just have a joint account she controls.
On a hunch, I asked his 14 year old boy if there were any areas in the mountains nearby his father enjoyed going, and the son identified a road about 10 miles away. It was nearing midnight, but I decided to drive to the top of this old and abandoned forest service road. As I drove through the snow and started to climb the road, I felt a gut feeling that I would 100% find this guy up there either thinking about or already acted out a suicide. The snow-laid gravel road had some sign of travel, but no real indication of how fresh the vehicle tracks could be. As I reached the top of the road after an hour of travel, I was honestly surprised that I did not find his black truck.
I spent the drive back down thinking about ‘gut-feelings’ and how they are unreliable, but that I somehow felt different about this one. As I traveled up the road, I did notice over a dozen smaller roads branching off, but they were not mapped, and I had already spent too much time on a single occurrence in a busy city with too few police officers. Nonetheless, I decided to check a single of these secondary roads, and about 3/4’s of the way down I picked a road at random to check, and sure enough my headlights lit up the back end of a black truck about 100 yards past the first corner. Even if I hadn’t memorized the licence plate beforehand, I wouldn’t have had to run it – it was clearly his. I radioed that I had found the truck, parked my vehicle, and traveled the 20 feet to his truck with my heart beating like I was doing it at a sprint rather than a normal walk.
What I found inside was a mess of brains and blood caused by a self-inflicted wound under the chin. I’ll save you from the description.
There was just something about that gut-feeling while traveling this abandoned and quiet mountain road, followed by a sense of being tricked by the gut-feeling, then finding out it was true by discovering such a gruesome scene, having to wait 3 hours next to his truck waiting for body removal, and then to end it all by having to go to the family who was expecting good news to deliver to them the worst news possible, that makes me feel creeped out to this day.”
“I Smiled, But It Killed Me Inside”
“I responded to a report of an unresponsive infant. When I arrived, all the family members were standing around casually in the front yard pointing into the house. I found the baby in the back room laying on her back on a bare mattress. I started CPR, but realised the baby was probably already deceased. We rushed her out to the arriving ambulance hoping they had a way to bring her back. I learned she was the mother’s second suspicious sudden infant death syndrome death, and I had her other children removed from her care. The difficult part was when I left the scene and went to the emergency room to see what came of the situation.
As I walked in and asked where she was, an emergency room nurse walked over to me and handed me the deceased baby swaddled in a blanket and told me to wait for someone to show me to the morgue. So I’m standing there in the emergency room in uniform holding what everyone thinks is a live infant, but rather, an infant corpse. Several people stop by wanting to see her and commenting on how cute it is to see an officer holding a baby. I just smiled, but it killed me inside. I was ushered back to the morgue after what felt like an eternity, and told I had to wait with the baby until the medical examiner arrived. They took the blankets off and laid her on a stainless steel gurney and left me alone with her again.
I lounged around the morgue for about an hour waiting. By the time I got home several hours after the end of my shift (because this call came out 15 minutes before the end of my 10 hour shift) I layed down on my bed and cried for a long time. My young daughter was in daycare, and my wife at work. I really needed to hold both of them, so the house felt incredibly empty. My daughter was only slightly older than the infant, and when I was looking at her earlier, I kept seeing my own daughter. I didn’t get any sleep at all before going back in for the next shift later that night.”
A Truly Despicable Act
“My dad worked in a precinct with one of highest crime rates in New York City. I think it had the highest murder rate during his years on the job. Anyway, he won’t tell us stories about what he’s seen because they’re mostly horrific and still give him nightmares almost 15 years off the job. However, I do remember he told us one story when he was really hammered.
A woman in her 20s walked into her apartment building late from work one night and was waiting for the elevator. It opened, and the only person in there was a creepy looking guy. Though apprehensive, she got in and pressed her floor number, but noticed that the basement button was pressed. Normally after 9 pm maintenance would lock the basement button to prevent random people from going down there and messing around with the equipment. I guess someone forgot to lock it. The creepy guy ended up taking her down there, tying her up, and assaulting and torturing her for HOURS. He then took her apartment key, went up to the floor she’d pressed when she’d first gotten into the elevator, tried every door until he found hers, and took her roommate (also a woman in her 20s) into the basement where he continued torturing and assaulting both of them until dawn. Maintenance found them that morning, and my dad was a responder.”
“His Life Flashes Before His Eyes
“My dad was a cop, and he always told me the calls he hated the most were people who were hammered out of their mind (because most inebriated people don’t want to see cops because that is usually bad news) and domestic calls. Well he was telling me this one story when he was a young cop he had a call for a domestic dispute. He goes up to the house and introduces himself and no answer. He then goes to the back of the house to see if he could see into the house. As he went to the back of the house, he saw a woman on the kitchen floor unconscious.
At this point he rushes into the sliding door that was in the back of the house to try and help the woman on the floor see if she’s still alive and to get medical help. He then tells me his life flashed before his eyes. It was such a simple thing to do, but he never did it; the first thing he should have done was to secure the house of any threats. Standing behind him was the husband, and he just cocked his weapon and put it up against his head. He then pleads with the guy, telling him that this domestic charge will be a much lesser sentence than killing a cop, and backup was on their way (which it wasn’t, he never called it in and rushed in to save the woman).
The guy ended up putting down his weapon and surrendering to the police that eventually came after my dad didn’t respond to the ‘check in calls’ from dispatch. He admits it was a very rookie mistake and a mistake he will never make again in his career. He still hates the sound of a weapon being cocked, and is very thankful to still be in this world.”
“I Don’t Know How She Survived”
“We (my partner and I) get a radio call of a welfare check. Ex-boyfriend called because he received texts from his ex stating she wished it would not have ended and she could no longer go on without him. We get to the place, knock, pound etc – no answer. We call (ex provided the number) and get an answer and a hang up, so we hear it from the outside window and know she is in there. We say we are going to break the door down if she doesn’t answer. Hear some slurred mess of speech. Door unlocks, but doesn’t open. We open the door to find a young woman wet, unclothed, pale as heck and swaying in one spot, her hands are bleeding. Call a rescue ambulance and she is off to the hospital.
Now to the creepy part; none of the lights would turn on, so we conduct a safety search and find candles lit in the bedroom and bathroom, on the walls were bible scriptures written in her blood and a tub of brown water (the water was mixed with old blood). I don’t know how she survived because that water was dark, she had been sitting in it for approximately three to four hours.”
He Got What He Deserved
“When my older brother was about 6 months old, my dad was a detective. He got a call to go to a house just around the corner from where we lived. When he got there, he found a mother and an 8 month old baby. The baby was screaming and crying and had a huge burn on its stomach. He took them to the hospital. On the way he found out the mother’s boyfriend had gotten mad at the baby, so he put a hot frying pan on top of it which pinned it to the ground. The mother heard the screaming but was too late. He said he’s never heard a baby cry like that before. The best part however was the boyfriend showed up to the hospital. He was this big tough biker looking guy so he had this mentality that no one would cross him.
Dad, being a detective, wasn’t in a police uniform so the guy didn’t expect him to do anything. When the guy got close enough (he was making a scene saying to give him his girlfriend and kid and started to get violent, even hurt a nurse’s wrist), my dad picked up a metal pan nearby and knocked him over the head. His head split open a bit so he needed stitches. The doctor was the same one who helped save the baby’s life. He was so mad at the guy that he didn’t give him an anesthetic or pain killer while stitching him up. The guy cried and screamed, saying it was cruelty. No one cared and no officer listened after seeing what he had done to the baby.”
No One Knew How To React
“During my time as a school resource officer, I was teaching a class on the rights and responsibilities of citizens when dealing with the police to a mixed class of 7th and 8th graders. The kids were super engaged and loving it!
One kid, who has major issues, mainly because his father was a boutique doctor and had him on hormone therapy to increase his height, raised his hand and asked, ‘What would happen if you were playing with a friend and tied them up, but not let them go…for a long time? And what if you liked watching them cry? And what it you tied up a stranger and watched them cry?’
These questions all happened in less than a few seconds, and the creepy part was not so much the questions, but how how he was asking them. He was clearly relating a fantasy and loved talking about it. There was lust in his voice, and the kid who was normally shy and lacked enthusiasm for pretty much everything was using his body to ask the questions, he became very animated. I immediately felt a gross feeling in my stomach and I caught a glimpse of the teacher who was also looking grossed out. Out of all the gross things I have encountered while on patrol, it was a question my an 8th grader that still creates a grossed out feeling every time I think about it. I would much rather do a welfare check at a house with too many flies on the windows than deal with that kid again.”
He Crossed The Line
“My dad became a cop back in the early ’70s in a small South Carolina town. One night he arrested a guy for something or other and it was found out that he had a few felony warrants out. My dad said the guy never struggled, fought, ran or anything and that all in all he was a decent enough guy that basically had the, ‘You got me,’ attitude about the whole thing.
For some reason, my dad had to take the guy to the hospital before he was locked up, and he was sitting up on a gurney with his hands cuffed behind his back just chit chatting away about stuff. The guy asked my dad if he had any kids and he replied that he had one boy (me about 3-5 years old or so) but he wanted another.
That’s when the guy dropped a bombshell; he said, ‘Good because as soon as I get out of prison I’m going to hunt down your children, cut their abdomens open and get it on with their guts.’
Without thinking, my dad said he backhanded the guy with a black jack in the face as hard as he could. He said the guy flew off the gurney backwards onto some chairs and he heard a bone-breaking crunch.
The guy was out cold for a while and when he woke up, he started screaming about suing and how his rights had been violated. A few days later, when the state police came to investigate, the witnesses, to a person, said that the guy fell off of the gurney and that’s how he ended up getting hurt.
I never did get split open and my guts are perfectly fine.”
Horrifying And Sad
“My girlfriend’s grandfather used to be a detective, and he tells a pretty terrifying story. When he was still pretty young, he got a call to an apartment building because a ‘monster’ was trying to get into someone’s apartment. The caller said that they had heard a shot, and then a while later something was pounding on their door. When they opened it, a monster was standing there and tried to get into their apartment. They kicked it out, and slammed the door. The caller also said that they had heard more screams from down the hall, so the monster may have been trying to get to other people.
When my girlfriend’s grandfather got to the building, he found a man shambling around inside covered in blood. He got the guy turned around and realized that he had found his ‘monster.’ The guy had attempted to commit suicide by putting a weapon under his chin and firing upwards. However, he had messed the angle up and blown off his jaw and part of his nose, but he was still alive and in extreme shock. He had been walking around the building knocking on doors, trying to get someone to help him, but his grisly visage had terrified everyone, so they kept slamming the door in his face.”
“No One Else Was In There”
“I hear the other guy on my beat get dispatched to a well being check of an elderly lady. After a few minutes the guy asks for a supervisor. A few minutes later they dispatch me to the lady’s house. I get there and the supervisor asks me to climb in through an unsecured window at the back of the house because I’m of smaller stature. I get to the window and tell it’s to the bedroom. I can hear a loud television on in another room and I can tell it’s Fox news. I yell out, ‘Police, does anyone need help?!’ as I climb in through the window.
I hear an old raspy voice call, ‘Heeeeere.’
I run out of the bedroom down the hall to to where I heard the voice call from. From the living room, I see a lady laying face down in the dining room area. I call out for her, ‘Ma’am did you fall? Where are you hurt?’ I run to her and she is not moving, I touch her hand and it is ice cold. She’s dead, been so for a few days. I unlock the door and let the supervisor and other officer in. I tell them I heard a voice and we need to check the whole house. No one else was in there. I know the TV was on but I could tell it was the news and heard the voice over it.”
“The Crispy Critter” Broke Her
“My aunty was a police officer for something like 25 years. She saw a lot of really messed up stuff, especially when she was stationed out in the country and got called to the farmer suicides (death by farm equipment is not pretty), but the creepiest was the thing that triggered her nervous breakdown. This happened about 10 years ago. A guy had walked into a busy restaurant, ranting and raving and threatening to set himself on fire.
By the time she and the other cops sent out got there, he’d already doused himself in petrol and was holding a lighter, threatening to spark it if the cops got close. The stand off lasted for a couple hours, just when they were going to get the jump on him, he set himself alight. The fire extinguisher at the place was faulty, so she pretty much had to watch the guy burn alive.
As I mentioned earlier, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and she had a complete nervous break down, needed to live in in-patient for a while. She now calls this guy The Crispy Critter and writes a lot of poetry about him. She’s kind of vague but the impression I get is she thinks his spirit got transferred into her somehow.”