Whether it's fixing pipes, installing cable, or setting up new furniture, it's always a bizarre dynamic to have a total stranger poking around your house. But as weird as it may be for you, it can be just as uncomfortable for the worker. Especially if your house is covered in bugs, garbage, or decaying animal corpses.
Here, workers who have to go into strangers' homes for their job reveal their most disturbing experiences.
(Comments have been edited for clarity)
The Doll House
“I work as a cable installer, so I’ve seen a lot of crazy things. The one that has stuck with me the most was a customer who had her whole house filled with dolls. Dolls in the bathroom, dolls in the kitchen, the bedrooms, everywhere. Everything from old antique dolls to newer dolls. What made it even more awkward was that she talked in a fake childish voice, wore an extreme amount of makeup, and had bright blue hair. She told me that she kicked her son and husband out of the house because they did not show enough appreciation for her dolls. She would never make eye contact with me and would not let go of the small doll in her hand. Apparently, all the dolls had names. There were thousands of dolls everywhere. The lady was actually very kind though. She wanted me to pick out a doll to take home before I left, but I politely declined.”
The Roach Apocalypse
“I worked in pest control for a couple years right after college and have been to a couple houses that stood out. One was an older house that had been split into two apartments, one above the other. The upstairs tenants had been fighting a roach problem for several months with no luck, so the landlord decided to treat the entire house. Turns out the girl living in the lower apartment had two large dogs and stored their dry food in a large wooden bin. Now dry dog food is like prime rib for roaches, and with a large food supply, the roach population had exploded. We decided to ‘nuke’ the apartment by sealing it up and gassing it with a fogger that you set up and leave on until it’s emptied about a quart’s worth of oily pesticide. The chemicals would seep into the walls and ceiling, killing everything, and then we’d go in and retrieve the device 24 hours later.
The next day, the roach apocalypse had left about three inches of dead roaches throughout the entire kitchen where the dog food bins were kept. And then about six inches or more in the areas next to the walls.”
A Very Paranoid Customer
“I deliver food for a restaurant and one time I pulled up to the gate of this house. The resident told me to just come inside and deliver the food since she was in a wheelchair. Alright, cool. Not a problem. I get to the door and I discover a biometric fingerprint scanner that unlocks the door, along with a camera. I press the doorbell and the resident opens the door from inside. I take the food to her in her living room and as I look around, this lady has an electronic code lock installed on her fridge, pantry, and the back door to go outside is card-accessed only. The garage door is quadruple bolt locked and the windows have window-sized garage doors on the inside. I hurried up outta there and told my manager to never put me on delivery runs again.”
A Very Specific Kind Of “Collector”
“I used to clean windows. We would go to our client’s homes in teams of two. One person would clean the inside, and one would clean the outside. We were finished working on this house way out in the country, and I cleaned the outside, so I didn’t get to see the inside. My coworker told me that the homeowner was this WW2 memorabilia collector, and had a bunch of historic weapons and artifacts of history on display. He then proceeded to show me pictures he took of this guy’s ‘collection’ only for me to notice that the guy didn’t have just a WW2 memorabilia collection on display, but a full-on Neo-Nazi shrine, complete with a giant Swastika banner, SS Helmets, and German weapons hanging on the wall. It had candles burning underneath. I don’t know how my coworker didn’t realize what he was looking at.”
The Man Who Didn’t Answer The Door
“My grandfather runs a secondhand furniture store and arrived at a house to pick up a wardrobe he previously agreed to buy. He rang the doorbell several times but nobody answered. So my granddad looked through the window of the house, trying to see if he could get the attention of anybody who could let him inside. While looking through the window, he saw the very same wardrobe that he was there to collect tipped over onto the floor. He started to get suspicious and called the number that the person selling the wardrobe gave to him. It happened to be the daughter of the owner of the house.
She explained that her father must have left the house without telling her and that she and her husband and her brother would be right over to let my grandfather in and take payment for the wardrobe. They arrived and opened the door, entering before my grandfather. Before he could even step foot in the house, the daughter started screaming and ran down the street. Either the brother or husband came out and told my granddad that the wardrobe had fallen on top of the owner of the house and that he wasn’t breathing.
My granddad decided that he would give them space to deal with what had happened and that if they wanted him to come back and get the wardrobe another day he’d happily do it. Luckily, he never actually saw the whole body, just the feet hanging out into the corridor. He’s 76 and has seen some stuff in his time, but he describes this as the most unnerved he’s ever felt. For all he knew at the time, somebody could have pushed that wardrobe onto the guy and killed him. It turns out the guy had a heart attack and grabbed onto the closest thing to him (which was apparently the wardrobe), and at some point, he must have lost his balance and brought the whole thing down on top of him. Just goes to show that anything can happen.”
“We Had To Take Turns Going In Because Of The Smell”
“I’m a police officer. About a year ago we got a call for a burglary in progress. The reporting party believed she heard footsteps downstairs and said she should be the only person home. We get there and the front door is open. We establish a perimeter around the house and send three officers inside to start clearing it. They go in, then come back out. Go in again, come out again. This repeats for about 15 minutes. Each time they do one new room and come out again. I’m on the perimeter, wondering why it’s taking so long. The supervisor calls me and says he needs me to come to the front door. Turns out they’ve been rotating officers because the house smells so bad that nobody can stand being in there for more than a minute or so. Eventually, they clear the lower levels, and now it’s me and another officer’s turn to go upstairs and get to the reporting party’s room, clear it, and then bring her outside.
Now, I’ve been doing this job seven years, so I’ve been inside some disgusting houses. I’ve smelled bodies that have been rotting for weeks. I thought I was prepared for anything. I thought the other officers had to be overreacting. I go in, prepared for the worst, but I was totally unprepared. The place was FILTHY – a hoarder’s nightmare. There was a path through literal piles of trash, waist-deep to get to the living room, where there was an opening with a badly-stained reclining chair. Above the recliner was a stain on the ceiling – more on that later. Beyond the recliner was even more trash leading to the stairs. The smell was indescribable – I have a strong stomach but I was dry heaving. The other officer literally looked green. As we pushed our way through the trash we saw rotting and nearly-skeletal remains of what used to be a dog in the next room over.
We finally made it to the stairs where the trash stopped, but things didn’t get easier. The best way to describe the staircase is to compare it to the room in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with all the bugs. I hate bugs and almost tapped out at that point, but felt that I had to push on to save face. We made it up the stairs, and thank God there were only two rooms, one of which was locked and looked like it hadn’t been opened in a while. The other belonged to the reporting party, so we knocked and she opened. To say her room was unexpected would be the understatement of the year: it was IMMACULATE. Bed made, no trash anywhere, modern electronics, etc. It didn’t jive at all with the rest of the house. We had her come outside with us.
Turns out the reporting party had been renting a room in this house for a few months. She rented it because it was significantly cheaper than any other room she could find, but then couldn’t figure out how to get out of her lease because the landlord had committed suicide a few weeks earlier. Here’s the worst part: remember the stained recliner I mentioned before? The owner SHOT HIMSELF IN IT. The stain on the ceiling was his blood and brain matter, which never got cleaned. The rotting dog was his dog that must have starved to death after he died. Nobody in his family came to clean up, and this poor (slightly strange, to be fair) 22-year-old girl was still living there, basically just closing her eyes and running through the house to get to and from her room every day. We told her, for her own health if nothing else, she needed to get out of that house ASAP.
It was the strangest, grossest thing I’d ever seen. I still shudder.”
“I Kept Doing My Job, Not Thinking About It”
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“I recently worked in an apartment, doing water damage repairs in the floors. When I tried to contact the owner so I could get in, he never answered. So I went to his door and knocked, still no answer. I asked the downstairs neighbor if he had a spare key for the door upstairs, which he did. So I finally got in, and there was this weird smell. Not a bad smell, necessarily. Just weird. I didn’t think much more of it and just started repairing the floors. Two days later, I got a call from my boss telling me the smell I was smelling had gotten so bad that the owner downstairs could smell it. It turns out the guy living upstairs had hung himself in the bedroom, right beside the bathroom where I was working.”
We Don’t Understand How They Were Able To Live In Those Conditions
“My parents used to have a rental, and once rented to a single mother and her teenaged daughter. They stopped paying, so we kicked them out. They took off the night before, leaving the majority of their belongings behind.
When we first stepped into the place, a haze instantly sprung up, knee high. And not just where we were stepping, but across the entire floor.
It was a visibly dark haze. Of FLEAS.
We instantly evacuated, and luckily enough my father had two ‘bunny suits’ – used for large-scale spray painting – that left only the hands and face exposed. We all stripped and hosed down. While my brother and I waited in the vehicle, my father and mother did an inspection of the house wearing the bunny suits. When they came back out, they were almost black from the knees down.
Shortly before the place was fumigated (and the pest guy also beat a hasty retreat to put on his own suit), we found a few kittens under a sofa. They had ginger fur…and black skin. They were taken by the SPCA and we never did hear if they survived or not.
What I can’t understand is how a woman and her teenage daughter managed to live in a place like that. Their mattresses were on the floor – didn’t they notice the fleas? Heck, even after all of our own precautions, we still brought a few buggers home. It was nearly a month of fastidious laundry work before we didn’t find any more there. Even basic precautions could have prevented that. They had functional appliances, and my parents would have jumped to fix the problem had they learned of the infestation ahead of time.”
An Entire Room Was Strictly For The Cats
“One of our clients had waterline breakage in their home and called in a claim. Our claims adjuster went out and then called us back immediately, telling us he had just finished throwing up and we needed to get off this policy IMMEDIATELY.
It turns out in this house they had converted a bedroom into a litter box room. Instead of using litter boxes, they just dumped new litter into the room on the floor. He said the litter was about 2 feet high, filled with excrement, and the whole house smelled so bad it made him sick. It was also a hoarder-esque type situation with piles and piles of straight up trash everywhere.
We had to go out and investigate and even that descriptive phone call didn’t scratch the surface of how bad that home was.”
I Knew I Wouldn’t Be Able To Spend Two Hours In There
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“I was a cable TV guy in the 80s and a TV tech in the 90s. I’ve been to hundreds of homes, from New Jersey to California to Washington. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been to high rise ghettos, scary desert trailers, and filthy welfare homes.
But the worst was Mrs. Smith. She was elderly and lived alone in a trailer in the woods of Washington state. She wasn’t completely alone. She had a whole herd of little yapping dogs and a few cats. She was a hoarder and wasn’t very big on cleaning up.
As soon as she opened the door, the pungent stench of urine burst into my lungs. She waved me in. The electric heat was set to ‘extreme,’ which didn’t help the smell situation. The carpet was filthy and squished and crunched underfoot. It squished from the urine, crunched from the ground-in cat litter. The smell was so overpowering I had to suck in air through my teeth.
Mrs. Smith yelled at her dogs the entire time. ‘PEPPER! You git away from the man now! Settle down, Pepper. PEPPER!’ This was repeated so often that 20 years later, I can still hear it.
Her wooden console ‘gramma TV’ was bad and she had an extended warranty that covered everything. A previous tech had found the CRT was bad. I was dispatched to replace it. Now kids: replacing a big CRT in a TV was a tough job. You had to gut the TV, replace the CRT, then spend a lot of time adjusting the magnetic yoke, the three colors, the equivalent of ‘gamma,’ and the corner correction to minimize ghosted images. On a good day with no errors, this was a two-hour job.
There was NO WAY I could survive two hours in that house. When my knee hit the carpet, it went SQUISH and CRUNCH and got soaked with pee. I thought hard and fast and told Mrs. Smith that due to the size of the job I had to work outside. I hauled that enormous and heavy TV outside and put it on some cardboard. It was already dark outside (winter in the Pacific Northwest) so I set up lights. The new CRT went in okay. I ran an extension cord from the house and did the CRT and yoke adjustments with my pattern generator as an input signal. I got it as close as I could, then I hauled the TV back inside and connected it to cable TV.
To my relief, she was happy with the picture. It wasn’t my best alignment job but it was good enough. She signed the paper as I held back vomit.
Once outside, I breathed in the cold night air in huge lungfuls. This staved off the vomit. I went home.
The next day I approached the tech who ordered the part. ‘Joe! What the heck! That house was DISGUSTING!’
He laughed. ‘Hey, the part was bad. I ordered it. Not my problem you got dispatched. Oh, and she renews her extended warranty every year without fail. You’ll be back.’
Fortunately, I got laid off that summer.”
The House Of Dead Animals
“I worked for a Home Owners’ Association and had to go turn off the water in a recently abandoned house, with the permission of the bank, as a pipe in the poolhouse had burst. The owner of the house just up and left one day, putting all his most valuable stuff in a trailer and leaving. In the middle of his hunting room in the basement, there were tons of pictures of stuff he’d killed. And a large tank under a ‘Don’t tread on me’ flag. In the tank was a long-dead 5-foot snake that couldn’t handle either the lack of food or the now-freezing temperatures. The place reeked since there were also dead feeder fish and a dead turtle decomposing. The floor had piles and piles of squirming maggots, including a large pile from a 100 pounds of deer left in a standing freezer that had lost power. The wood floors were warped from years of dog urine as well.
Houses in this area typically sell for $400,000. This one sold for $160,000 due to the massive damage caused by his hoarding and disrepair.”
Roaches Were Raining Down
“My job as a police officer has been occasionally pretty gross. Most people are reasonably clean and take care of their homes, but there is still a good number of people who don’t. On my very first day of field training, I went to this house and turned a flashlight on the front window (it was late at night). The ENTIRE window moved. It was covered in roaches that scattered once they saw the light. I didn’t know that many roaches could be in one home.
I had another case where I was doing a walkthrough, and roaches were falling from the ceiling. There were like 15 people living in the home, and I don’t know how they were able to live like that. I’d be afraid to sleep at night, just in case my mouth opened.”
She Was Basically Running An Illegal Zoo
“A woman across the street from me had 58 cats and 10 dogs. No litter boxes, so the cats just went wherever they were standing. There was cat urine and feces on every surface of the house including the kitchen table and kitchen counters. One of her cats was lying dead on the floor in the living room, halfway under a couch. Another dead cat was decomposing in the kitchen, and two more dead cats were found outside. And she and her son were actively living there! He was never sent to school (even though he’s 13 years old). The stench was so bad that you could smell it outside on the street. The son was taken away from her and she’s not allowed to see him or even talk to him on the phone. Animal control had to send three trucks and still couldn’t get all the animals out. They had to return the next day.”
They Were Living In Mountains Of Garbage
“I delivered furniture one summer in college. Not much fazed me and I tried not to judge too much, but I remember one particular house for being truly awful. I don’t know if ‘hoarder’ is the correct term for these people so much as ‘complete, absolute pigs.’ Garbage, laundry, junk, dishes, other things that didn’t even belong in an apartment, were piled up to a minimum depth of probably two feet and closer to four near the walls. There were little paths cleared through to the sofa, TV, ‘bedroom,’ and bathroom. I’m guessing the paths sort of collapsed in every now and then, and they’d just shovel it back up towards the walls. From the looks of the junk piled in the kitchen and the pizza boxes and McDonald’s bags everywhere else, it looked like they’d abandoned cooking and lived exclusively on delivery, takeout, and soda.
So we’re delivering these people a new bed set. Frame, box spring, and mattress. My coworker and I somehow get the frame up to their door, through the living room, and into the bedroom without causing a trash slide. Per company policy, we had to offer them free setup. My coworker and I were both silently pleading to every deity possible that these people will turn down the offer. Of course, they didn’t. The lady tried to clear a space for us while the man sat on the couch being useless, but their old sleeping arrangements were a mattress on the floor covered in two feet of debris. She manages to get about three square feet cleared and asked if that’s enough room. Absolutely not, but at least we had a place to set down the nuts and bolts without losing them to the abyss, plus we had other deliveries to get to. So my coworker and I tried to unpack and put this thing together. It was Laurel and Hardy levels of slapstick as we wrangled and balanced the pieces into place, slipping and stumbling on junk the whole time. Eventually, we got the stupid thing together, went to grab the box spring and mattress and chuck them on the frame. This thing was comically elevated off the ground and cockeyed due to the corners resting on literal piles of garbage, but screw it, it’s the customer’s job to deal with it once it’s delivered and put together. We packed up and got the heck outta there, and laughed our butts off in the truck in that way that people do when stuff just gets too weird.
Anyway, you’ve probably got a mental image of the people that were living there. About 300 pounds each, dressed in stained pajama clothes, unkempt hair and greasy faces, right? Nope! This was a young, well-dressed, and attractive couple with apparently good careers. Hoarders come in all shapes and sizes, I guess. Oh, and they also didn’t tip, so screw them.”