The Hall Of Shame
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“I deliver pizza. The creepiest thing I ever saw was a corridor in a house lined with pictures/painting of crying children. Just…why?
Another customer had an almost naked life-sized world of Warcraft character right behind the door. I jumped the first few times I went to his place.”
Just Another Farm House
“I used to do estimates for a solar energy company. One house I went to in Pennsylvania was an old 1800’s farmhouse. People who lived there seemed normal other than a bunch of clutter all around.
That quickly changed…
I asked to see their breaker panel in the basement and was led down a winding, skinny staircase to a dirt floor basement with no ventilation (doors, windows) and no less than 100+ rabbits. IN CAGES. FLOOR TO CEILING. ENTIRE PERIMETER OF THE BASEMENT. I kid you not. Felt like I was breathing through a straw because of the ammonia from the rabbit feces that was covering the floor. Asked if they breed and sell rabbits or something and he answered, ‘Kinda’
I’m positive that was their main food source for the family and rabbit was on the menu every night of the week.”
Family Portraits Done Right
“I’m not the one entering homes, but we recently underwent renovations at my family home.
When I was 18, my parents commissioned a painting for me that was meant to showcase my love for a certain video game series. (It’s tradition to get a portrait done when we hit 18 in my family.)
The painting turned out horrifically – a very realistic version of my face plastered on an anime-style body next to the main character of the series, who was also in an anime style (it was based on key art from the series). Worst of all, this painting is like 1.5 meters tall and hanging on the wall that is immediately facing the door. I can’t take it down lest I offend my parents, as they don’t think it looks ‘THAT bad.’
I’m pretty sure I scared the guy for life. That, or they think I’m obsessed/in love with a cartoon.”
Staying Professional Is Key
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“A family friend is a realtor. She usually shows upscale homes to upper-class families on the east coast.
She was showing a couple a house and the husband asked if there was a basement. This wasn’t part of the planned tour because the owners listed it as ‘unfinished’.
Our friend told them that the house did indeed have a basement and agreed to show it with the warning that it was unfinished.
Upon getting to the basement, she was mortified. It turns out that the current owners shot adult videos in the basement, so it was outfitted with a whipping station, cages, machines and toys, the whole 9 yards.
The couple nodded and politely asked to return to the tour to see the rest of the house. The friend now requests to inspect every inch of every house before showing it to potential buyers.”
How Could Anyone Let Things Get This Bad?!
“I’m a Code Enforcement Officer for my city and recently I responded to a complaint about a house that had dead rats all over the outside. According to the complaint, it was so bad, you could see rats crawling in the yard and through the windows.
We get a lot of people complaining about rats and RARELY is it an actual rat problem. Usually, it’s just mice.
I had already issued orders on this house for something else and had been in contact with the owner. When I went to speak with her previously, I was nearly knocked off the porch by the smell on her, but I couldn’t see anything inside the house, and I can’t write a violation notice on a person’s hygiene.
Well, I went back to investigate to claim of dead rats outside in the yard, and sure enough, there were at least four of them just in the front yard. Based on this, the smell, and complaints from the neighbors and even a police officer, I probably could have obtained a search warrant, but I decided to contact the owner and see if she would let me in. I had asked once before and she said no, but it was worth a shot.
When I called her, she said that she was having a problem with her roommate, and wasn’t spending much time there anymore. She asked if I could do anything to help get him out of the house. I told her that I couldn’t help her evict anyone, but if the sanitary conditions inside were as bad as I suspected, my inspection might result in him being vacated. I asked what the inside of the house was like, and she said that the floors in the kitchen were just bad and needed to be replaced. But still, she agreed to let me in.
A few days later, I showed up with my supervisor and a city police officer (her roommate had a violent criminal record). We went inside, partially at the roommate’s request because he had the nerve to call in a complaint on her. What we found was a house that I now call ‘The Jumanji House’ because it looks like we interrupted a game. The rat infestation was so bad, I observed multiple of them running around, one even brushed passed my boot. Anyone who knows about vermin and pests can attest to the fact that an infestation has to be VERY bad to even see one in the daytime. The carpets and floor were covered in rat droppings and dog poop. The floor in the kitchen was indeed bad, so bad that they had to move the fridge into the living room to stop it from sinking into the basement.
At one point, the roommate was showing us around and as he entered one of the bedrooms, he stopped short and looked at us and said, ‘Oh. Um, this looks bad.’ My supervisor and I just looked at each other, wondering what in the world could be in there that was any worse than the rest of the house – perhaps a portal to the underworld?! There was a freshly killed rat on a dresser that he hadn’t yet tossed out the window.
Yeah, we vacated them immediately.”
He’d Seen “Nightmare Fuel” Before, But This Was On Another Level
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“I’ve seen some stuff, literally, that’s my job. I work in the ‘affordable housing’ industry. I’ve seen all manner of shocking, terrible, sad, roach and bedbug invested nightmare fuel. I’ve seen hoarders who lost pets until they rotted in their homes. People who poop in buckets cut into their forsaken couch, cause they can’t be bothered to get up. I’ve walked in and found long dead people bloated and rotting into the carpet, their liquids literally running down the walls after they melted. Like I said, I’ve seen it all.
But most disturbing? I’m gonna go with the DIY dungeon with a homemade strap on, made with a bicycle inner tube, another strapon made from sheetrock bolts. DIY style pulley system, swing etc.. There was stuff all over, toys and actual poop. On the floor and toys. There were prices written on the walls for things actions like a ‘three-way with mom.’ Yeah, you read that correctly. Did I mention that they were selling out their own three kids?
So we, of course, called the cops, they photoed the horror show, but they never got all of them. They had run. They found two of the younger girls at school and put them in foster care.
That one haunts me. More than the gross ones, it’s the ones where kids live in the world their parents made, it’s so unfair.
It sucks to work in an industry that is jam-packed with the worst kind of people. But every now and then, I meet someone the system was built for, a kid going to college, people handed keys to a safe clean place after living in a shelter and it makes it worth it.”
The Horrors Of That Dishwasher Would Never Be Forgotten
“I worked for a beach house rental company when I was in college. Part of my job was to go inspect houses to make sure that everyone had left before the cleaners came.
There was this one house. The renters had left on Friday but because of some holiday, cleaners weren’t going to be there until Monday.
I walked into the house on Monday morning and was hit in the face with something pungent and wrong.
The smell was incredibly strong. Whatever was there had been there a couple of days. It was the kind of organic rot that doesn’t just happen overnight. I looked all over the house. I couldn’t find anything out of sorts. The house was, actually, remarkably clean. I went into the kitchen and the smell is strongest there, but I couldn’t find its source. The refrigerator was empty and clean, the garbage cans had been emptied, and I couldn’t figure out where this awful smell of death was coming from.
Then I opened the dishwasher. And the smell was so bad that I almost threw up and passed out.
So, here’s the thing. There used to be this trendy life hack thing where you could essentially steam fish in the dishwasher. What you do is you take a piece of fish and you wrap it in foil and you put it in the dishwasher on the top rack and you run it on a cycle without detergent. And the heat from the steam and hot water cooks the fish.
Welp, these geniuses decided that they were going to do that, but with crabs. So they jammed about three dozen live crabs into the dishwasher and then filled the detergent tray with Old Bay seasoning.
They must have been out of their minds when they tried this. And it didn’t work. Worse, once they realize that the dishwasher wasn’t hot enough to cook or even kill all the crabs, they gave up. But they didn’t take any of the crabs out of the dishwasher.
In any event, they let the things sit there. And sit there. And sit there. Nobody cleaned it out, despite the smell that was growing in the house.
I’ll never forget that smell.
Clever idea. Absolutely atrocious execution.”
The Smell Was All They Needed
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“I’m a handyman. I’ve seen a few exhibitionists, plenty of filthy/stinky tenants, some people’s plumbing backed up and it looked like their bathtub was filled with refried beans.
The thing that sticks out the most was this small studio apartment on the 3rd floor of this building. The Smell…oh my god, that smell. I can’t even describe it other than it made me never want to smell anything again as long as I lived.
In the kitchenette, there was some brown substance running down all of the cabinets. The dirty dishes looked like they’d been sitting there for centuries. The bathroom appeared as though someone had explosive diarrhea and just stood in the doorway facing the toilet and let go a literal blast out of their butt that resulted in what the great philosopher Michael Jackson would call ‘Doodoo feces thrown all over the walls.’
Next to the bed, there were some gnarly fingernail clippings next to a jumbo tub of Vaseline and a Men’s Fitness Magazine.
I’m not a small man. I had my 300lb self-doing all the running from the 3rd floor down the truck to get tools/materials that we needed to get out of that horrible sliver of dirt on earth as soon as possible without having to spend much time inside of there. It was by far the most disgusting place I’d ever been in. We reported it to the property manager and the person was evicted. I can only imagine he was severely mentally ill.”
The House Was Horrifying, But The Homeowner Was Worse
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“I was doing home inspections for a FEMA contractor in Texas and had made an appointment for an inspection through a third party because the guy wouldn’t receive phone calls from unknown numbers. The friend I spoke with assured me that the property was not an abandoned warehouse and that the guy lived in the part that used to be a dojo. A time was set.
I arrived at the crumbling building and knocked on the open door. I could see that it was packed to the ceiling with boxes full of stuff. The entire place had flooded about five inches, enough to make everything soggy and moldy. This was weeks after the event and no attempt had been made to move or shift any of it. I could hear movement in the far back but there was no answer, even when I called out. I backed away to wait near the car and called the friend, who then called the guy living there. He assured me that his friend was there and waiting for me to come in. I entered just as a 50-60 something-year-old dude came out of a back room in a teeny-tiny towel. He was soaking wet and smirking at me, one lazy eye wandering around. He wanted to start the interview portion of the inspection like that. I asked him to get dressed and he left the door halfway open while he did, making sure to flash his junk at the door.
I proceeded with the inspection and interview and he tried to touch me every chance he gets. If I handed him a stylus for signing, he made sure his soft baby-fat fingers were caressing me. I look like a stereotypical angry flannel-wearing lesbian, but he was not deterred. I hurried through the walk-through and found out that he doesn’t own, he just rents, and only occupies a room the size of a walk-in closet, and none of his stuff has been affected. He ‘wanted his government check and someone to talk to because he gets…lonely.’ Imagine him saying this and stroking his thighs.
As I left, he offers me lots of drinks that he had pre-poured before I arrived, ready to go, just to be neighborly. He would even let me use his favorite glass.
I booked it the heck out of there. I’ve done inspections in the absolute worst parts of Miami, and this is still the creepiest and most terrible experience I’ve had in someone’s home. It was all behavior that could be explained away as ‘accidental,’ but it was deliberate pervy nonsense and if I had taken that roofied drink, I’m pretty sure I would still be chained up in one of the back rooms.”
All The Good Intentions Gone Wrong
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“It wasn’t really strange so much as it was outright funny. I cleaned the AC ducts for a bit and saw the insides of lots of houses. We got to this guy’s house and the dude seemed blazed out of his mind. His eyes were incredibly red, he kept smacking his lips and he was eating from a seemingly bottomless bag of chips the entire time we were there. I was taking the grates off the ducts when I got to the last one right above the TV.
I unscrewed the covers, slid it off and what do I see inside his duct? A pipe.
Dude stored his pipe inside the AC ducts. Wanting to keep professional, I took the pipe out and rested it on the table as he was coming into the room. He said, ‘Oh dang man. My bad. I didn’t want you guys to see that when you got here so I hid it up there.’ I had a lot of internal questions for the guy like, why would you hide a pipe in your AC duct when you’re getting your AC duct cleaned. Or, why didn’t you just put it somewhere we wouldn’t be, like in your closet or something? I just laughed, told him not to worry about it and cleaned his ducts. I think I freaked the poor guy out though because I heard him rummaging around his bedroom for a few minutes then caught a massive whiff of weed (presumably him trying to relocate his stash out of paranoia) and he seemed really on edge the rest of the time we were there. None of us even considered calling the cops but if we told him that, it might have made him sketch out more.”
Completely Savage TV Installation
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“I used to install cable for Comcast.
The one I will always remember is the time I witnessed a married couple completely fall apart. It started off normal until the wife logged into the computer to test the internet for me. When I told her to type in the router login, she had her own so it started with ASUS or something similar. Well, when she typed ‘AS’ into the search bar, the Ashley Madison website popped up in the auto fill. She flipped out and clicked it. Her moron husband actually saved his login to Chrome so she popped in and immediately found a ton of pics he had been sending people.
Welp, she went nuclear and started packing his stuff up. Meanwhile, she told me she wanted to change the order and had me install X1 HD boxes in all the rooms with DVR’s and a full package. I’m talking adult channels, foreign channels even those stupid subscription services they offer on Comcast now like the AMC plus thing.
Basically, she told me to ‘mess with him, he’s gonna be paying for this from now on so imma get mine.’ Of course, I don’t care because that just makes the job last longer but also keeps me off the road on a rainy day, which is great for me. So I ran all the wires and got the boxes all set up and guess what happens? The husband showed up right when as I finished. So she went off on him, threw the printed out copies of messages she’d found at him, and shouted, ‘Why are you sending that little thing around online? It’s not impressive at all!’
She told him to grab all his stuff and that she’d already been corresponding with a lawyer. The dude was crying on the couch, begging her to let him stay as I was giving her step by step instructions on how to use her new voice remote. Every couple minutes, she would tell him to shut up because she wanted to know how to use it, plus his crying was messing up the mic in the remote and wouldn’t understand what we were saying.
Yeah, that was a fun day.”
No Wonder The Previous Cleaners Left
“I’m a maid for a franchise company. We’re small and take what we can get.
A lady called us and asked for our service. She fired her last cleaners and no one had been in there for a month. She also had two cats who roamed free in the house. Pretty standard stuff.
When we were inquiring about why she fired her last crew (for our safety; it was because of a restraining order against the owner from the cleaners before) she mentioned it was because they kept breaking stuff. Okay fair. She mentioned she had a lot of nicknacks that she worried about, so just dust around them. We clocked this in as a 9 hour clean (4.5 hours for two cleaners). You can probably see where this is going.
Now my fellow maid had already gotten started for three hours by the time I got there and she was still in the same room she was when she started.
Holy Christ, guys, this house.
I entered and gasped. Shelves FILLED with antiques. Tables everywhere, stacked with books, and you guessed it, fragile items. Glass, china, etc. She had like this taxidermy owl collection right in front of you when you entered and they just stared at you as if they were like ‘I know man. It’s crazy here.’ My favorite was the stair rail to the upstairs. At the base (you know that final wood pillar at the end of the stairs toward the end) there was a cherub lamp precariously balancing. I almost knocked it over five times while I was there. There was a pedestal in her ‘library’ room that was probably 7ft in the air, wobbly, with a huge china vase wiggling on top of it. It was like that all over the house. The cats were running everywhere avoiding me and my partner. It took us seven hours, both of us (14 man hours) to dust this house without breaking anything.
Yeah, no wonder your cleaners broke stuff.
Honestly, it was probably the cat’s fault. There was shattered glass everywhere.”
This Posh Couple Had A Lot Of…Interesting Quirks
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“Decades ago, I worked for an office equipment company. One day I had to go pick up a photocopier from the ultra-posh home of a married pair of mental health professionals that had canceled their lease. When we arrived to pick it up, both of these psychologists started in about how they knew that the machine was transmitting copies of every document they scanned back to the government of Czechoslovakia (where they had emigrated from) and that they were going to sue us and/or initiate a human rights tribunal for the betrayal.
…But that wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was the art on the walls. The copier was located on the second floor, and we had to bring it down the stairs to the foyer, past an enormous oil painting which they were very concerned that we not inadvertently damage.
While we moved this enormous piece of 1990s technology down the stairs using a clunky powered stair-dolly, they hovered around us enumerating the many ways we would regret any damage we caused to this life-sized head-to-toe nude portrait in oil of their teen-aged daughter, in faux-classical style, beside the stump of a tree. Particularly troubling was the way they elaborated on the theme of how they would be furious if any harm came to the painting – not because of any intrinsic value of the object itself, but because their daughter was the most beautiful woman in creation, combining the very best features of both of them into a package that was universally desirable, regardless of the viewers’ gender.
It didn’t take much longer than half-an-hour from start to finish, but everything that was heard and seen made me deeply worried that their opulent lifestyle was furnished entirely (I assume) from the compensation they received by giving mental health advice to people who needed it.”