You would think people would tidy up or be on their best behavior when they have a guest in their home but you'd certainly be wrong. These workers share the times they've had to enter folks' homes and discovered everything from the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Just Another Day On The Job
“As a chimney sweep in Germany, I have seen some crazy stuff. One guy definitely takes the cake though.
So I’m on my normal work routine in a district that is new to me and where I don’t know the clients yet. I have to go into every apartment in a standard apartment complex to check the gas heater.
I knock on one of the doors and as soon it opens I literally jump back. Standing opposite of me is the most zombie-looking freak I have ever seen. Completely grey, leathery skin, sunken, bloodshot eyes, dressed in a very old green parka, and just terrifying to look at, even as a horror movie fan.
Nonetheless, I got a job to do and so I proceed to enter the zombie lair. Here is where things gets really crazy. Pictures of the Queen cover every square inch of this dude’s apartment. Blows my mind to this day just thinking about it. Completely surreal. Literally everywhere are pictures and memorabilia of the British Queen, in a zombies apartment in the middle of Germany.
I make my way to the bathroom with the back against the wall while this creep is following me and just silently staring me down with his dang red eyes. I just want to get my job done as quickly as I can and get the heck out asap. All of a sudden, the guy starts to speak to me. Well, not really speak as much as mumble and ramble incoherent stuff. From what I can gather from his ramblings, this crazy mofo is absolutely convinced that he is the Queen’s illegitimate son.
That seals the deal for me, this guy is absolutely crazy and I have to get out. I rush my job super quickly while planning an escape route in my head in case things go sideways. The zombie is getting irate about me ignoring his ramblings and starts getting louder, not quite screaming at me but getting there. I say forget it, grab my things and push past him and bolt out of the door.
After my shift I told the story to my boss and he was like ‘Oops, lol, should have warned you about that one, sorry.’ Turns out he had tried to poison my boss twice, offering him bottles of reisling with a clear drill hole in the cork. My boss had the second bottle analyzed and it turns out there was rat poison in there. He also tried to stab another chimney sweep a few years before. Apparently, he is also barred from entering England because he allegedly tried to climb the fence to Buckingham Palace while shouting for his ‘Mom’ to come out and accept him as her son. Can’t confirm that story though, it’s just what I’ve been told.”
This Lady Was In Heat
“Used to do carpet cleaning. Went to one house with my brother-in-law, we worked at the same company at the time. When we got there it was a mother and daughter at home, the mother showed up around, but kept making comments about her 19-year-old daughter being in college. Like constant comments about how she was 19 and single. Pointed out her room to us and said if the door was closed to just go in.
Super uncomfortable but ok, me and my BIL we’re in our mid-20s, so maybe she was trying to set her daughter up, but with two strangers doing carpet cleaning? I dunno… Anyway, then it got to where the mother’s room was and she showed us what all needed to be done, then started talking about how her husband had left and how lonely she was. She was throwing up all kinds of red flags. I was legitimately worried we were going to get a course of some kind of assault like this was a setup.
We started cleaning, and I specifically told the mother how we start as the farthest point from the front door and that was her room, which she was fine with. We get in, start vacuuming and setting up, unfortunately, this job needs 2 people working separately to be fast and efficient so we couldn’t stick together as I wanted, but after vacuuming the first room I was by myself in there and started to work. The mother came and told us how they were both going to take showers and let us know exactly what bathrooms they would be in and then left. Next thing I know the mother is walking around completely bare because she ‘forgot’ something before her shower, and then starts to strike up a conversation with me.
I let her know how busy I am and that I’m a little uncomfortable with her not wearing clothes, so she puts on some lingerie quickly and keeps talking. After a few minutes, she comments about how hot it is when a guy does manual work, and I turned around to ask her if she could leave so I could finish up the room, and she is spread eagle on the bed touching herself. I said I forgot something in the truck and went to find my BILwho had been prepping the rest of the house to find him cornered by the daughter in her room with her just wearing a towel.
The whole thing felt like the start of a skin flick, we finished the job asap and basically bolted worried we were going to get in some type of trouble at work or legal because who knows these days. Never heard anything from it, but they got put on the blacklist for our company.”
That’s Enough Work For One Day!
“I was an inspector for a housing insurance company. My area was Putnam and Westchester counties in NY. So every other week I’d have to drive out about 6 hours and do inspections on various residences for a week. The inspections would be an exterior survey of the property, taking measurements of the perimeter, and taking notes of the structure and integrity of the home. If the residents were home, I’d ask to look in the basement and take a pic of their circuit box. I did this gig for about three months because as things went on, I realized I was getting more and more lousy areas/houses to inspect. I suspected the general manager didn’t like me much because he thinks his wife made a pass at me, but I digress.
One of the last inspections I did was in this semi-trailer-park like area, although they weren’t trailers, just rundown single story homes. I was having a hard time locating a house I was to survey so I stopped and asked a woman walking her dog which house it was. She pointed in a direction and said something to the effect of ‘way in the back, keep going around the bend’. I pulled up to a small brown house with a covered porch. I got out and walked up to the porch and realized it was INFESTED with giant carpenter bees. HUMUNGOUS bees. I stood there for a few minutes and I hear a woman and man inside screaming. Then one of the largest men I’ve ever seen comes out of the front door, through the bees and approaches the steps. He was about 6’5 and 500lbs. wearing just overalls, no shirt and walking with a cane. I’d guess he was in his 60s. I told him why I was there and he asked me to come inside (I hadn’t asked yet) so he shuffles back inside and I ran through the bees in the door. I was hit in the face by some awful smell of cat feces and urine and dank old rotting magazines. As I walked through the living room they had piles to near the ceiling of magazines…everywhere. The ceiling was drooping and peeling paint.
Snapped a few pics and asked to see the basement. I was led outside to those outdoor entries where you lift the two large doors on the ground. He told me to go first. In my mind I said ‘yea I saw this movie no way’. But I mustered the courage and started down the stone steps. I got a few steps down and started looking at the floor. It looked…weird. I couldn’t place it. I didn’t look like a regular floor and as I got closer and closer the more off it looked. I just couldn’t tell what it was…then I took my final step and sank about a foot and a half deep in water! The floor i was looking at was still water! As I turned to nope the heck out, I nearly ran into the guy who was literally a step behind me. As I bumped him he tried to turn around but was falling backward! I thought ‘This is it! this is how I go out…crushed and drowned by a huge fat guy’…but I pushed him back before he fell on me. He got his footing and walked back up the stairs. I ran back to my car and took off back to my hotel room. I quit a couple weeks later.”
From Prude To Perv!
“Not my job or my house, but talked to the repair guy who left my neighbor’s house looking a little shell-shocked. Okay, so what you need to know about my neighbor is that she’s a crotchety, old, holier than thou Christian prude. For example; I have been best friends with the boy in the house across from me since I was a baby, and one day when I was ten I was leaving his house, I hugged him goodbye and then went home, she stopped me before I could get to my porch and said: ‘You know if boys see you slutting around like that you won’t get a good husband, and I don’t want to live next door to a floozy, so keep your legs closed.’
I was literally 10-years-old.
Anyway, I was 15 when this story happened. I was gardening and doing outside chores when a plumber came to her house. He was there for 20 something minutes before he left looking like he’d seen a ghost. I asked him if he was okay and what happened. I’d seen the interior of her house before and it was much like her, bland, outdated, and overly Christian (like there were crosses and pictures of Jesus everywhere ). He told me that he’d gone to her basement to check on something with her water heater, she tried to stop him saying it was messy and she didn’t realize he’d need to access that room, but he went in and was met with a room absolutely filled with s*x toys.
Some were ‘really weird’ apparently (he didn’t elaborate on that), and to make everything worse, several were quite obviously recently used and suddenly her being around him in nothing but a bathrobe and slippers was very uncomfortable. He fixed the issue and got out. When he finished telling me he actually looked at me and realized I wasn’t an adult and cringed. He asked me not to tell anyone that I’d told him all that, and I said ‘Dude, I am going to do everything in my power to forget what you just told me.’ (That failed, unfortunately) I never looked at her the same way again and was so glad when we moved four months later.”
A Horrid Discovery
“Trigger warning – dead person and somewhat nastiness – I’ll try to be polite about my descriptions, but you have been warned.
Again, was a cop for a while years ago. Spent most of my time working on patrol, the guy who shows up when someone calls the cops.
One of the calls we got frequently was welfare checks. Someone called asking us to check on another person for whatever reason. These could range from inane where an older person forgot to call into our dispatch program that kept an eye on seniors living alone, to (occasionally) someone attempting to harass another person by sending the cops out (think domestic issues and such, sending us out to do their dirty work, none the wiser), and finally to situations like this story where a person had not been heard from in some time.
I’m this particular case, a man lived alone and had some type of terminal illness. He had no family or friends in the area. A friend drove from a few days out of town after not being able to reach the man for almost two months. After finding the man’s car in the driveway but no answer at the door, and not seeing anything in the window, he calls us. After hearing the above description on the radio, I already know ‘what time it is’, and tell the dispatcher to give a call over to the EMS station closest and wake them up, but don’t dispatch them yet, let them get a chance to have a cup of coffee or something since it’s gonna be a long few hours, and it was very very AM.
Get there, talk to the complainant, he already knows what’s up as well. Make attempts to get an answer at the door, and the Sarge gives the go-ahead and boot the door (well, not really boot it, the other guy on scene had one of those halligan tools since he was a volunteer firefighter).
Once the door is open, I’m immediately met at the door by a poor medium-sized dog who is skin and bones. He is very happy to see us. The smell is immediately apparent, and the complainant backs off a bit while we continue inside. The other officer with me is relatively new, and had not had this kind of situation yet, from either law enforcement or volunteer firefighting, so he is a bit more ‘struck’ by the smell than I was – but it was still quite overpowering. I though I had come prepared with a surgical mask and a swipe of Vaseline right under my nose, but it was cutting right through it.
We continue in, me taking the lead followed by my reluctant rookie. We find another very skinny but happy dog in the hallway.
We make it to what appears to be a bedroom, door shut. I can almost see fumes of decaying odor come out from under the door, or maybe the powerful stench is starting to make me somewhat delirious….
The rookie pleads with me ‘please don’t make me open it.’
I nod for him to do it, he pushes, but meets resistance. Again, still resistance. We push together till we get it cracked, I shine my light through and see him DRT (dead right there). Open it a little more so I can squeeze through, since I was much smaller than my coworker. I get in just enough to confirm with the back of my hand that he is cold, before I see that he appeared to be melting somewhat. He’d obviously been here for a bit.
It then occurred to me that the complaint mentioned 3 dogs and a cat….
I found the third dog, a little Pomeranian type. Fur matted. Had been locked in the room with the deceased. Fat and happy….
Yes, if you get my drift, that is exactly what happened.
When EMS showed up, along with the coroner, we were able to get the door all the way open. As they started packaging him up (or attempting to, the coroner described to the EMTs that ‘meat just falls off the bone after a little while,’) the rookie handed me his flashlight and ran the heck out of there. We saw that it appeared that ‘something’ had been eating off portions of tender skin and muscle, in some places down to the bone.
I stood there and held the two flashlights while they did their best to collect the poor man. I tried not to watch but the coroner would occasionally bark at me to keep the lights on the body so they could see. Even the EMTs seemed to be a little queasy after a bit, but the coroner was unfazed.
I felt really bad for the guy, for the dogs, for the friend. It was a lousy situation to go out like that. For months afterward I would catch a whiff of something and it would remind me of that smell.
Never did find the cat though….”
This Mother Had Some Devious Plans
“I was a visiting home health nurse specializing in psych care. So this is sad but also really odd. A very brilliant woman had a stroke and was now under the care of her 80ish-year-old mother. The woman was now like a child. It was so sad. They would only let me on the bench by the front door and never in the house but my job is to inspect the house so they let me in once. They were hoarders but fairly neat ones. I looked into getting things taken care of there. Turns out the other daughter was there 3 months prior and had things cleaned up. The neighbor also checked on them.
The mother was pretty ornery. My patient was very sweet. It was a shame her stroke was so severe. Every visit I would stop in the driveway to finish paperwork and the patient would come to the car window to see when I’d be done. After a bit, I started stopping down the street under the shade of a large oak tree so I wouldn’t be bothered.
Well, one day I decided just to go straight there. I pull up and sitting on the bench is the mother, not my patient. I get out immediately and ask where my patient was at. The mother replied, ‘She’s in her room. She didn’t get up for her pills all afternoon yesterday and all day today.’ (It was 1 pm) I bolt past her to find her daughter barely breathing on the floor of her bedroom sitting in half dry urine.
She had a pulse and was breathing erratically. I called 911 and tried to get her on her side since it looked like she had thrown up. She seemed to know I was there but couldn’t move. I then spent the rest of the time yelling at the mother while I chucked old magazines and newspapers to the side to make room for rescue to get to her. I demanded to know why she hadn’t already called 911 when her daughter was clearly dying on the floor! Her answer was, ‘Oh I thought you were coming.’ I yelled more. Rescue showed up and took her to the hospital. I called DCF and the patient’s neighbor called me a few days later to tell me my patient had made it and they were making other living arrangements for her. I swear that old lady was hoping her daughter died before I got there. She wasn’t stupid.”
“They’re Cooking Something Down There Alright…”
“Never had to go INTO someone’s house for the job, just delivering onto their roof (roofing shingles). But one house always sticks out to me.
We get there to deliver, should be there 45 minutes at the most. Semi small town (maybe 2,000 population max surrounded by nothing) so the house isn’t anything crazy. The homeowner greets us and says he’ll be in the detached garage and some friends will be coming over. He looks to be around 50, long white beard, little overweight with overalls. Pretty normal for the area.
A tall lanky guy in his mid-40s comes over, fits the same rural Midwestern American look as the homeowner. Then a kid no older than 16 or 17 who seems to be trying to look like a gangster with a pitbull shows up and walks into the garage. I just think ‘Huh, he doesn’t seem like the type to be friends with these guys but whatever.’
So I’m on the truck next to the garage sending shingles up to my partner who is on the roof of the house. Suddenly dense white smoke is coming out of the smokestack to the garage and smells like cat pee. My partner asks ‘Does that smoke smell like cat pee?’ When I tell him yes, he says ‘They’re definitely cooking something dank in there.’
So we decide to kick our pace up a notch and knock out the job in less than 30 minutes. As we’re strapping the truck back down, the homeowner strolls out to thank us and the tall lanky dude walks out behind him SMOKING A CRACK PIPE in the open. Not a care given. Like holy cow dude, is this okay? Are we in danger? Is this homeowner about to tell us not to mention anything we see here? Just noped the heck outta there.
P.S. – As an added bonus while delivering, we heard the neighbors across the street yelling, glass shattering, a woman running away, then a guy sitting on the front porch pretty obviously holding a shooter. Glad I never went back to that town.”
Jerry Is A Prick
“Once upon a time, I worked in law enforcement. Did it for about 10 years. Spent about a year or so in criminal investigations, working ‘special victim’ type of cases (assaults, molestations, child and elder abuse, neglect, domestic violence, internet crimes against children – working with the state task force, and missing and endangered persons). One day, me and my partner were working on a case of mine about possible child abuse reported by a school. I don’t remember the specifics, but I believe it ended up being unfounded – kid was upset that his Xbox was locked away after doing something, and told the school counselor he was being beaten. I spent a month doing random check ups at the school and at home, never found anything out of the ordinary.
Anyway, one Saturday, the first time me and my partner stopped by to meet with the family we got a surprise. The place I worked during this time was pretty rural, fairly low income, in BFE in the southern US. We are sitting at the table, kids are playing Xbox again (grounding was over so he got it back), chit chatting, I’m facing the living room and my partner sort of has her back to it. Suddenly I see a brown and black furry creature about the size of a cat go galloping past…but it wasn’t a cat, that I was sure of.
My partner notices that I seem bewildered and asks if I’m okay.
‘Yeah…uh…I’m gonna be honest with you man, I think I just saw a friggin’ monkey…’
‘Oh, that’s just Jerry!’ The mom says and gets up to go collect ‘Jerry.’
Sure as heck, they’ve got a flippin’ monkey. They had a larger sized house that allowed for Jerry to have a room all to himself, complete with jungle gym and a hammock thing hanging in the corner to sleep in.
I got to hold Jerry (well he kind of hung onto my arm for a minute or two like it was a tree branch). Apparently, they poop wherever they feel like and can be a bit bitey. The mom said they’re more trouble than they’re worth.
I asked my supervisor later on if I should look into how they got it or consult with a friend of mine who worked for the state’s Wildlife and natural resources enforcement, but was told not to push the issue unless we needed to down the road. So me and Jerry got to be bros for a few weeks whenever I stopped by, and by bros I mean he was a huge prick.”
To Each Their Own?
“I install HVAC.
A middle-aged Asian (we guessed Korean) guy that had an entire collection of sailor moon (and other anime’s) paraphernalia including two locked glass cases of action figures. He also had a ton of cosplay girl pictures on the walls. That was weird, but nothing too crazy….
Then we go into a room to hang a unit and there is a mannequin all done up in a female outfit with an entire female wardrobe. Kinda weird but we figured maybe he had a wife/girlfriend that we just hadn’t seen. Then we go into the basement to run wires and this is where it gets really weird…
The ENTIRE basement is painted for children in a circus theme. Really bright colors, polka dot rugs, race tracks, and dollhouses, and in the corners is a wall full of women’s shoes. It creeped all of us out and we all started to look at all the photos to see if we saw any women or kids. The dude really didn’t have any photos of himself or any kind of family, any photos out were basically just fanart and cosplay girls.
We spent all week making up crazy theories about this guy being a serial killer or into weird kinks but never did get any answers. The guy ended up being really nice (albeit a little socially awkward) and never gave off and creepy vibes, but goddang that house was weird.”