Crime podcasts and detective shows have nothing on the police officers involved in these stories. These heroes directly witnessed (and often cleaned up) some of the most horrific things they had experienced in their careers. These stories feature the most spine-tingling, hair-raising surprises waiting for these poor men and women. Maybe hold off on the lunch until well after reading these stories. This content had been edited for clarity.
Slid Off Like A Glove
“My father is a cop, but this is a story from one of his cop buddies. Let’s say his buddy’s name is Dave.
Basically this one idiot was trying to fill up his gas tank from the outside of his car. It was a special vehicle, I guess. Not sure if it was gas or what, but as this dude is filling it up, the entire thing just bursts into flames, shooting gasoline all over him. He bursts into flames.
Dave was nearby and quickly arrived at the scene. He advised the dude, who was no longer on fire and lying on the ground, to keep his jacket on, because it had melted to his skin. If he tried to take it off it would take his skin off with it which in itself is already incredibly nasty, but it gets worse.
Dave reached his hand down to help the guy up, and according to my dad, Dave grabbed the guy’s hand and his skin just slid right off. The dude falls to the ground in immense pain, as Dave is holding this man’s floppy skin glove in his hand.
Still to this day the most awful cop story I’ve heard.”
Always Look On The Bright Side
“I took an intro to policing course and my professor brought in a bunch of cops. They told us a lot of grim stories and experiences, so to end it, my professor asked if someone could share a positive story and one of the guys spoke up.
He said they got a call one night about a disturbance and showed up to the location. They find a man whose head had been almost entirely severed off by a machete, he was holding it on with his own hands and managed to croak out an apartment number before he died. They went up to this apartment and found two young children who had been strangled and left on the floor.
So at this point, my entire class is mortified because this is supposed to be this guy’s positive experience, but he clues in that we’re all rattled by this story and wraps it up. He tells us that they managed to get EMS to the scene and revive both of the children. The story ultimately was that it was his grandchildren he was babysitting, and he was wrapped up in some shady dealings. Some nasty dudes came to collect while the children were in his care.
To the cops credit, he went full circle with the story and explained that you have to be able to take the positives out of even the most horrific situations or you won’t last on the job.”
“Like A Dollop Of Tooth Paste”
“I worked as a deputy back on the east coast near Savannah. From time to time, we’d get these calls from the port authority about someone skulking around the docks, no doubt looking for stuff they could steal from the containers, or various railroad cars, or whatever. It was like a weekly thing, usually on the weekends, when we’d get the call to come up and just do a drive through, lights on and all. The general idea being to scare them off. Every once in a blue moon, we’d get called to a specific spot where the port authority were certain they had some addict who we had to go in and deal with.
One night, myself and a couple other deputies got called out because one of the port authority guys was rather certain he’d seen someone up on this hulk that was in the process of being repaired. He figured the guy was trying to scavenge metals or some such. When we arrive, the port authority basically lays it out that he had witnessed this guy moving back and forth on the deck of the ship, tugging on doors and stuff, and that no one should be up there. We tromped on up, weapons drawn, and were expecting just about anything. Narcotics make people do weird things. I’ve seen several officers get badly hurt because the weirdo decided the best way out was to rip the face off the officer.
In any case, myself and another deputy started working our way down the ship, heading in the rough direction where the creepy man was last seen, while the third deputy waited down on the dock in case the guy tried to loop his way back. As I neared the stern of the ship, I see this guy come out of one of the doors, carrying several computers and other bits of metal in his arms. I announce ‘Police, freeze where you are!’ and aim my weapon at him.
Before I can stop him, the dude takes off running down around a corner while I chase after him. I see him turn the corner, hear the other deputy announce himself, and then curse, followed by a thud. Turning the corner, I find the other deputy looking over the railing down at the dock where our creepy addict lay. Dude had either forgotten what side of the ship he was on, or just didn’t care and when he saw the other deputy. He turned and did what amounted to a swan dive off the ship. He dropped a good thirty feet below to the concrete, head first. Spread his brains out like a dollop of tooth paste.”
That Poor Kitten!
“Ex-cop here. A few stories stand out:
There was a kid who was left in soiled diapers for so long that flies had laid eggs in the diaper itself. Said eggs had hatched, and the maggots were burrowing into the child’s behind.
I dealt with lots of itinerants who had diabetes. I would occasionally pick these people up and transport them to hospital or a safe house. If the people were a bit under the influence or unruly, we would assist the nurses and carers to help dress and clean the people. More than once we would have a dark chunks fall from a sock or boot. These were the blackened toes of diabetics.
Unfortunately, I had well-meaning, but naïve lawyers, politicians, and the general public try to use traditional law and ‘culture’ to justify assault and domestic violence.
There was a house that had mangy dogs and severely neglected cats. A little toddler was waddling around in the squalor with a tiny kitten in his hands. He raised the kitten up above his head and then slammed the kitty into the ground. I never forget the noise that kitten made as it hit the concrete. We ended up putting down something like 14 cats and 26 dogs.”
“Moving Raw Meat In Egg Yolk”
“We got a call from a landlord that some tenant has complained that there were maggots crawling through the ceiling of one particular flat. Other tenants complained about an extremely foul smell. You probably already know where this is going.
My colleague arrives, rings the bell, no dice. The locksmith arrives, opens up, and you just got invited to a maggot parade.
The entire floor was swarming with these little crawlies, but still not a single person in sight. They search the flat and finally find, well, a person shaped mass of maggots laying on a couch. Pieces of clothing were visible through that constantly moving arrangement of creepy crawlies. The guy was more alive than before he died, inside and out.
Now the problem is that we are not authorized to diagnose death under any circumstance, so they called paramedics. They first refused to go in because the smell was just so foul. My colleague and her instructor opened some windows in the flat so the smell could disperse, but anyone with a little experience knows that that doesn’t really work in such a case.
His face was completely covered in maggots. Eyes virtually gone. Maggots crawling in and out through nostrils and mouth. He was laying on his belly when they arrived, so they had to turn him. While turning him, my colleague said it sounded like moving raw meat in egg yolk. Once he was identified and death was diagnosed, he had to be transported. While moving him from the couch to the trolley, a finger may or may not have come off.
He has only been dead for 6 weeks maximum (according to letters/newspapers in his flat), so this is kind of drastic, but the flat was sealed (all windows and doors were closed), and extremely hot (it was summer 2018, anyone in Germany knows that that was no joke.)
The locksmith threw up on his way outside. One paramedic threw up on arrival. My colleague was close to throwing up but managed to contain it by telling herself that it’s just a wax figure, there’s not a real human underneath. I don’t know if she patented this coping technique yet.”
Straight Out Of A Horror Movie
“I’m not a cop. My mom is, but she’s retired now. And I am pretty sure this is not the most messed up thing she has seen.
Apparently she had gotten a call back in the day for a civil altercation or something like that. The neighbors heard a loud boom, but no one called the cops until the morning where they heard screaming. She pulled up to a house, which looked pretty normal, and she knocked on the door.
She did not get a response. She began to peek through the windows when she found something that was grounds for ‘probable cause.’ That is to say, a massive hole in the back of the house is probable cause for alarm.
She did the usual routine of calling in for backup, and she planned on waiting outside when she heard the screaming start. She busted the window and entered the house, her weapon drawn. She rounded a corner to find a woman with mascara running down her cheeks and a crazed look.
She tried to calm the woman down while she found someone tied to the bed. At that point, the woman jumped her and started laying into my mom’s bulletproof vest with a knife. It never broke through enough to cause more harm than a few scratches fortunately. Unfortunately, for the woman, my mom was still fully loaded. She had kicked the crazed woman off of her and into the wall. After that she open fired. Placing several rounds through the eye, mouth, throat, and chest. She did not check on the person screaming in the bed until she was sure the rest of the house was secure.
What she found was a man tied face down in the bed pants down and bleeding from his behind, as well as a bloody cactus missing a lot of thorns. The man had to go to the ER for head trauma and a severely lacerated rectum.
The story was that he had broken up with the woman because she was severely unstable. She had financial problems that was bleeding into his life, which happened to be related to substance abuse problems.
The woman was disgruntled. She had taken the spare car keys from under the car and used it to break into the house. She then used a blunt object to beat the man to the ground. She tied him to a bed, and she had forced penetration with a cactus.”
A Typical Day On The Job?
“I’m a detective who investigates fatal collisions. Most of us get used to the gore itself – it’s the families that hit us the hardest in the feels. With one particular crash, the family showed up to the scene and wanted to see their son’s dead body at his final resting position. I feel strongly that once safety, investigative, and evidentiary issues are taken care of, then even at the scene the family should absolutely have access to their loved one, no matter how strange it might seem to those on the outside of the family’s imploding world (within reason of course – I once refused to let a family see their headless daughter, for example).
In this case, when I ultimately let the family go to their son on the grass, they held him in their arms and began rubbing his blood all over themselves, naturally in hysterics. I don’t actually consider this messed up because very few of us know how we would react to something like this. I can almost guarantee that if one of my kids got smoked by a car, I’d be cradling his/her body in my arms and doing him or her the honor of loading them into the hearse myself and following him or her to the morgue.
In another case, I picked up pieces and pieces of a woman’s body and then spoke with and helped her husband over the following few weeks. He talked about how he regretted caring about all the small stupid things that annoyed him or that came up as issues between them, when in retrospect none of those small things actually mattered. Then he killed himself a few days after our last conversation.
Lots of other things like that. Not as conventionally ‘messed up’ as some other great examples, but that’s my own experience.”
It Still Haunts Him To This Day
“This old lady had fallen and cut her face open on the way down. She laid on the bedroom floor for three days, slowly creating a larger puddle of urine, feces, and blood. As I arrived at scene to answer a ‘check the welfare’ call, I saw the tell-tale signs of flies buzzing around the window. Those flies serve as a warning to prepare to smell a dead body. After not getting an answer at the door, I called for an assist and got in through an unlocked second story window. The unmistakable smell of death hit me. I grabbed my flashlight and followed the stench to the back bedroom. I found the lady surrounded by every body fluid imaginable, pale with tints of blue and black. She was dead. Had to be.
I put on my gloves and approached to verify no pulse or breathing. As I placed two fingers on the side of her neck, her eyes popped open, and she started shrieking over and over. I literally stumbled back and fell to the floor. Thankfully, I didn’t pull a weapon on the old lady. We got her an ambulance, and she fully recovered. I’ve chased robbers, wrestled with dudes much bigger than me, and run from vicious dogs, but that event was leagues above any fear I experienced up to that day.”
Motorcycle Massacre
“During my last month in training, I responded to a motorcycle crash on a 4-lane highway. We get there and there are two clearly dead people in the middle of the road. The motorcycle had two people on it when it clipped the center median barrier. The male driver had his left arm ripped off by the collision and significant injuries to his head. The female passenger had the top of her head removed. It was lying in the road and it looked like an empty bowl. Nearby was half of her brain, lying on the concrete by itself. Once the investigation was done, the coroner asked for the ‘new guy’ to help clean up the bodies. I had been in the army, so I was familiar with death and bodies. He gave me a thick set of rubber gloves to collect the pieces. When I went to pick up the brain, I was shocked to find that it was so light. It felt like a small roast chicken in my hand. I put it in the body bag with the rest of the parts of the woman. The fire department then came out to spray off the road, as it was coated with thick blood and fluids.
My wife has expressed interest in getting a motorcycle numerous times since and after that night, I would never be caught dead on one of those. This was 12 years ago, and I have seen numerous violent crashes since, but this one always sits in my mind as the worst.
No helmets and the man who was driving didn’t have a license or any motorcycle endorsements/training.”
“Flattened Like A Pancake”
“My dad was a firefighter and I remember the most horrifying thing he told me about was they were called to cut open a car that had crashed into a ditch. The dude driving was under the influence, and he decided it was the best time to start moving bricks. He’d loaded them in the backseat of his car without any sort of securing and no guard between the front and back. He swerved off the road, into the ditch, the bricks had flown forward right into the back of him.
My dad said it took them a while to find him, as the bricks had simply crushed him into the foot well. Apparently most of his body was basically a pile of viscera that had been flattened like a pancake. When he was pulled out, they believed him to have been completely decapitated, as they had found bits of skull and hairy flesh projected out of the windscreen, but upon later inspection, there was a fleshy flap on his neck… turned out that was his face, the bricks had taken everything of his head away, leaving just the skin of the face attached, which was almost perfectly preserved. I remember him saying that it looked like a Halloween mask.”
The Smell Must Have Been Outrageous
“I responded to a welfare check of an elderly lady who lived with her daughter. The elderly lady was widowed and the daughter never married because she lived with her parents her entire life. We get to the house, and the daughter answers the door. We ask about the elderly woman but the daughter doesn’t say anything, and she invites us in to look around. As were checking the rooms, we come to the living room where there is a large reclining chair covered in piles of blankets with car air fresheners (the kind that dangle from the mirror) laid all over the pile of blankets. At this point we get more serious with the daughter, explaining to her that we need to know where her mother is and if she is ok. She stares at us for a second and then starts crying, pointing to the chair with the pile of blankets and air fresheners.
Turns out, the mother had died in the chair months ago and the daughter, unable to cope with it, covered the body up with layers of blankets and air fresheners over the course of a couple of months. Good times.”
“Charcoal Zombie”
“My mum is a police officer, and she saw some gory and messed up stuff. One day she and her colleague had to check a small semi-abandoned factory because some people living around the area reported ‘suspicious movement.’ She said that there was a horrible smell close to the electrical room, but when she opened the door leading to it, she saw a burnt corpse, half decomposed, with fluids and whatnot leaking out (she described it as a charcoal zombie). Turns out, the genius tried to steal the copper wires without insulation, with the power still on, and got electrocuted. His ‘friends’ went to see what happened and left him there. When she found the documents and went to the trailer park where his family lived, they denied knowing him. They said that they had never seen the man in the picture. That’s unbelievably messed up.”
Brutal Biker Gang
“I’m a police officer in a pretty bad city. So naturally, I have plenty of interesting stories. Once at work, I was blocking traffic for a homicide that occurred where the victim was riding a scooter down a street. About 4 guys run out behind him and shoot him multiple times in the back. I had to leave that traffic to go to the fatal vehicle accident that occurred a couple blocks away. We have a juvenile dirt bike gang here, and they ride around on dirt bikes and 4-wheelers, which is illegal to do on city streets. They typically ride in large groups, usually followed by a car or truck to record them riding.
The majority of the streets here have at most a 30 mph speed limit. One of the riders was doing a wheelie at around 70+ mph. He leaned back too far and crashed. The gang stopped just long enough to load up the crashed bike and leave him there. Once the medic got there and loaded him up in the ambulance, he would take a shallow breath every 5-10 seconds. According to the medic, he was already brain-dead at that point.
Anyway, we notified detectives that we call the ‘Crash Team,’ who investigate fatal vehicle accidents. They mark the street with spray paint for things that pertain to the accident, such as skid marks. They marked the chips in the road where the dirt bike made initial contact with the ground when he crashed. The next area they marked off was the pool of blood which was where his body ended up, and that was about 30-40 feet down the road. And about 10-20 feet down the road from where his body ended up were the gold fronts from his teeth.”
Maggot Madness
“In my stint as an RN at the county jail, I saw a lot of patients who had either not had the resources or desire to seek out healthcare. One case that really stuck out to me was a middle-aged male who was being booked and had a bandage wrapped around his ankle. It looked pretty soiled, so a bandage change was offered and accepted. Turns out this man had a host of maggots that had made their home inside his ankle, all of which fell out as soon as the old bandage was removed. The clinical term for this I learned is myiasis. I also learned that these maggots had actually been doing him a service and had actively been keeping his wound clean by eating necrotic tissue.
Technically, it was the way nature intended. There are maggots that are used in a medical setting, but these were likely introduced during one of many nights sleeping roughly in a cold and damp city. The damp and soiled bandage and relatively warm environment underneath, along with an open wound was shockingly hospitable.”
Tidal Wave Of Death
“Myself and two of my good friends on the job went to a top floor apartment. I had met the strange guy about 2 weeks prior. He was approximately 50 years old, and I’d say about 5’10” max.
Anyway, we walked in front door of his flat, and the stench of death was unbelievably strong. There was blood filled human feces everywhere. We literally had to walk through it. He was in his bedroom slumped in a corner behind a door and fully clothed. In direct sunlight. Parts of his body had become one with the carpet, intertwined with his blood filled feces. His body has swollen up like a balloon due to his heating being at maximum, as well as having been in direct sunlight for at least 1 week.
The time came to move his body, we knew it was going to be very, very smelly. The undertakers moved him an inch, and I swear it sounded like a tidal wave as all the boils of puss and what not burst over his entire body. It poured onto the carpet, and myself and another guy made a run for the front door. Sadly, one guy got stuck in the room with the body with this wave of rancid bodily fluid seeping through the carpet towards him. The stench in the hall was the most intense, deathly smell I’ve ever been subjected to. The guy in the room couldn’t even describe it.
To this day, I’ve had to peel a face off a table as well as move a male who had died covered in his own feces. Nothing however comes close to what we now refer to as a Gregory.”