1. We had to search the water for a man’s brains

“One night at about 11:30, this guy jumps off of a bridge into a bay. On the way down, he hits a guard rail and loses both forearms and the top of his head. One set of officers found his arms and set them aside. I was on the dive team, so we go collect his remains. While we check on his condition, we notice the brain is missing. This was me flipping up his scalp and taking a peek inside to find nothing there. It’s very strange to look for something very important and not find it. Anyway, we bag him up and get him on the boat. Our supervisor tells us we have to at least look for his brains. Gross. So we dive and look around, but the only thing we find is a piece of skull. And we had decided if we did find it, none of us wanted to grab it.” — No_Im_Random_Coffee

2. I stopped a man from breaking into the White House

“I stopped a 25 year old Asian male from entering the east executive entrance of the White House. He had slit his wrists and neck prior to his arrival, but not deep enough to hit major blood vessels. He told me that he was a secret agent working for J Edgar Hoover and that he was 60 years old. He said he had important information to pass to president Obama. I ended up having to detain him, stop the bleeding and then involuntarily commit him. Turned out to be a local college kid, going through some mental health issues. I’ve field interviewed hundreds of White House ‘callers’ but this kid took the cake.” — ctmacdon84

3. We found dead bodies with garbage bags duct taped to their heads

“Two adults reported missing; parents of two adult children, one male, one female.

Alerts are in place for the missing people’s credit cards. The father’s credit card hits on a purchase at a jewelry store where an engagement ring was purchased. It leads us to the son who made the purchase of the ring. Son is questioned and confessed to killing both parents and burying them in shallow graves. The son led us to the grave site and we began the process of recovery. Both mom and dad had black garbage bags over their heads being held in place by duct tape around their necks. The site of the bodies,especially their faces once the bags were removed and the smell is something I’ll never forget.” — thisisnotmylocker24

4. A woman cut her own nipples off

“I was called out to negotiate with a 17 year old female who had barricaded herself in a bathroom with multiple knives and scissors (she’d done it right too, SWAT ended up going through the sheetrock wall). She wouldn’t talk with me at all but had multiple graphic conversations with her mother, who committed suicide 3 years earlier, and her dad, who’s serving lots of years in prison for sexually abusing her. When SWAT pulled her out, she had completed multiple circumcisions on herself with the scissors, completely cut her nipples off, and had sodomized herself multiple times with multiple steak knives. The kicker was, she was talking the whole time and her tone or volume never changed. The pain never bothered her. Or, more likely, she never felt it. The human mind is scary as fuck.” — 5uhoh

5. Two family members were hit by trains

“A few years ago we had an apparent suicide (pedestrian vs train). Hispanic male in his early 20s left a note and decided to take a nap on the tracks. It was a mess. I mean a real horror show of a mess.

And anyone who has ever worked a rail grade collision knows that your investigation really takes a backseat to getting the train moving again. So we are working like crazy to get everything in order so we can release the train.

Well, and this is the creepy part, the family claimed we missed some things out there. Personal property of the deceased. I guess, according to mom and grandma, this kid had a big gaudy gold cross neck chain he loved more than life itself. We searched for it and never found it. We even came back out with a K-9 (before I made the PSD unit) and tried to pick it up on an area search. No dice.

At this point it’s just gone. Disappeared into thin air.

Well this guy’s little brother is a 17 year old kid with a chip on his shoulder. He goes out there at night a few hours after we clear to look for himself. Before he went out he told his friends and family the cops were worthless and we weren’t trying to help.

I shit you not, you could not make this up, he gets hit by a different train in almost the same damn spot on the tracks. You could still see the blood stains on the shale.

So sure as shit we go out (I was on the red eye 12 shift from 1900-0700) and I’m not even kidding: we find this poor kid over a hundred feet off of the tracks and he’s GOT THE GOLD CHAIN CLUTCHED IN HIS HAND.

That’s some Final Destination shit.” — k00ni3

6. He chopped off his penis and put it in a blender

“Not a cop but answering 911 lines…

Had an open line of a guy yelping ‘ow!’ in between ‘thud’ noises. He didn’t respond to anything I said. Turns out, those thuds were the sounds of him chopping off his fingers with a meat cleaver.

Had a Good Samaritan call about a guy pulled up in front of a medical center in his car. He had a travel blender plugged into his vehicle and he was bleeding heavily. He had chopped his dick off and put it in the blender. I forget the specifics as to why but it had something to do with a pending child molestation or rape case.

Last but not least, the one that will stick with me, is the woman who called at around 8 in the morning on a Sunday telling me, in an eerily calm voice, that she had killed her baby by bashing his head into the floor because the devil was inside him. I didn’t believe her. It was true.” — milkcustard

7. Her jaw was completely missing from her face

“It was a stormy night on the Oregon Coast. A lady was driving drunk and ran into the back of a parked school bus. When she did, her car caught on fire, but she was able to escape. When I found her slowly walking down a side street, I was telling her to stop and turn around. When she turned around, her lower jaw was gone, and she was totally dazed. Her tongue was sticking straight out the top of her neck, and she was trying to talk. She ended up surviving but needed tons of plastic surgery.” — tallfescue1983

8. We found bloody footprints leading to a dumpster

“My department sends an officer to all rescue calls if one is available. We got a call late one night to ‘assist rescue’ at a townhouse complex for a ‘woman hemorrhaging.’ We didn’t show up until rescue had already left with the patient. So we let ourselves into the residence and eventually found the bathroom, which was COVERED in blood. Blood on the walls, all over the toilet, everywhere. CRAZY amount of blood. Rescue hadn’t mentioned anything suspicious on the radio, so this was surprising. We were preparing to leave when one of the younger officers noticed bloody footprints leading to the front door… and then across the parking lot… to a dumpster. We gathered at the dumpster, lifted up the top, and lit up the interior with our flashlights. Same officer extended his baton, reached into the dumpster with it, and brought out a bloody plastic grocery bag… with a dead baby in it. True story.” — cop1152

9. I found a pedophile with baby sex dolls hidden in his home

“Ex-cop.

I worked in a High Tech Task force agency conducting computer forensics investigations. Lots of child porn. LOTS. Anyways, we were doing a multi-agency search warrant sweep in large metro area in California. We serve a search warrant for distributing/possessing CP at a residence in a semi-decent area, and the suspect fit the prototypical hollywood ‘child molestor’ look.

He lived with his disabled wife, no kids, and she had mobility issues (mostly stayed down stairs, and had not been upstairs for years). We go upstairs, and this guy has a legitimate masturbation-station set up in one of the bedrooms that had an outside padlock on it.

It was dark, the windows were covered, and he had baby dolls with their assholes cut out all over the room and some of their mouths cut out for impromptu baby sex doll. Some of the heads were removed and scattered on the floor. This guy had serious issues.” — smw2102

10. He murdered his step-father and stabbed his grandmother through the eye

“Man this was probably 2010, 2011… I was really new. Call came I’m as an ‘unknown problem,’ basically the 911 was so fucked up, even dispatch didn’t know what to call it. Turned it this guy had just murdered his step father and then walked to his grand parents house to kill them as well. He stabbed his grandmother through the eye with a Rambo style bowey knife, one that had the compass in the pommel of the handle.

He missed her brain by about an eighth of an inch, so she did not die. Instead she came running out of the house when we got there, knife sticking out of her fucking eye, and the compass was spinning around because she was moving. My brain literally went ‘that’s not real’ and I went past her, along with several other cops, before the sergeant was like ‘what in the actual fuck are you guys doing?’

She survived. We caught the guy in a stroke of pure luck. Elderly woman with a massive hunting knife for an eye, definitely the creepiest thing I can remember seeing.” — Aardvark1292

11. Two brothers were found dead inside of their swimming pool

“Not me but my cousin, he got a call one night that two brothers (ages 4 and 6) were found dead in a near-empty swimming pool. There was like 6-8 inches of water in the pool and the call came from their dad. They never could charge the man but it is widely believed that he killed his two sons.” — rkanemvp1

12. A little girl flew out of the back of a truck and her head hit the pavement

“My Father-in-law is sitting beside me so I asked him; he is a retired sheriff and was a deputy before that. He was the first responder to an accident. A truckload of farm workers were coming back from the fields. The truck went over a hump in an interception and a little girl in the back of the truck flew out and landed head first on the pavement. My FIL held her as she moaned and eventually died in his arms. He says he still hears her sounds in his head all these years later.” — squirrel-phone

13. He gouged out his own eyes

“My cousin is on in a major city, apparently 911 got a call from a 6 year old claiming VEHEMENTLY that there was a zombie outside of his house on the street. So a patrol car swings around to see what’s up.

Turns out a tweaker on meth gouged out his own eyes, had blood dripping down from the empty sockets, and was stumbling around blindly with his hands stretched out in front of him. Goddamn, turns out the kid was telling the truth!” — Tower-Union

14. He slit his elbows and the blood went everywhere

“Not a cop, but a correctional officer in Texas. One time a guy slit the forearm side of his elbows (where it bends). He laid there in a big puddle of his own blood. I was one of the responders that day.

I’ll never forget it. As soon as you entered the cell, the smell just hit you. Blood has a strong metallic smell, which I never realized before. He’d been laying there awhile, so the blood had coagulated which again, I did not expect. As we lifted the barely conscious guy out of the blood, the blood fell off his body in chunks, like Jello.

It was pretty disturbing because I didn’t expect any of it nor was I able to mentally prepare for it. We’re not really medically trained, so all of it was completely surprising to me.” — iceman2kx

15. I saw a man hanging on Halloween night

“Working 3rd shift on Halloween night, I’m out by one of our smaller lakes just outside the city limits (kids love to go out and drink) which is surrounded by some very nice houses. Going through the neighborhood each of the roads ends at a small two lane road that surrounds the lake. I’m slowing to the stop sign and already starting to look to my right to make the turn when my headlights start tracing the rock wall that surrounds the lake I catch something out of the corner of my eye in one of the large trees that dots the walk path.

I back up to see what it was and I see a guy hanging. At first I thought it was a Halloween decoration (the neighborhood is REALLY into decorating for every holiday) so I stop, get out and as soon as my flashlight hits him I realize – nope, no decoration – he dead.

As I’m standing there getting ready to call it in, I notice a gaggle of kids coming down the street trick or treating (shit) As soon as they see my car they start heading my way faster so I book it back up the block to meet the parent walking with them and tell her she needs to take the long way around the block the other way – she can see it on my face I’m not kidding.

Turns out he was a 20 year old that was devastated about his girlfriend breaking up with him and she lived in the last house on that block where she would see him the next morning when she looked out her window.” — CaribbeanLounger

16. I held an infant’s corpse

“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 realized 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 SIDS death, and I had her other children removed from her care. The difficult part was when I left the scene and went to the ER to see what came of the situation. As I walked in and asked where she was, an ER 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 ER in uniform holding what everyone thinks is a live infant, but rather, an infant corpse, and 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 liked 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 laid 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.” — JazzieFizzle13

17. I couldn’t find his dead body

“Went to a welfare check. A neighbor called in he hasn’t seen this guy for a few days and the lights have been on for a while. I go and look around and find no footprints or tire marks in the snow (recent storm). I check the garage and nothing. I check the house which was unlocked and found the guys cellphone, keys, wallet and cash with the TV on.

That’s when I realized this was now a dead body search. I looked everywhere in and outside the house and around the garage. There were several old junk vehicles on the property but again, no tire marks or shoe prints or anything. I call all recent numbers on his phone and no ones heard from him. Only so much I can do so I issue a BOL and we start getting NCIC paperwork ready.

Next day the day shift officer goes over to follow up. Turns out, the guy was plowing his driveway and either had a medical condition or something and either passed out or died on the spot and crashed the truck onto the other junk cars, which then caught on fire (investigation leads to the fact this happens a week before I got this call) leaving only a pile of bones in the front seat covered in snow. I felt like shit for not finding him that night but it was really creepy knowing his remains were inches away from where I was searching.” — jjm295

18. He tried to escape from his handcuffs

“Detention Officer at a local jail here. We had a guy get brought in about 2am one night who we immediately knew was about to give us a fun time based on the way he was moving (quickly snapping the head back and forth, looking all over the room, etc.). One of my coworkers and I stay with the Booking Officer to help her out when the shit inevitably hits the fan. The guy keeps rambling on throughout the whole process; parts of his speech are understandable but most of it is gibberish. At one point he looks up at my coworker and says, ‘Would you blame me for it?’ Trying to keep the guy calm, my coworker tells him, ‘Nah, man, no one can blame you.’ For whatever reason this set the guy off. He leaps off the bench and we both push him back down. My coworker is trying to get handcuffs on his other wrist (he was already handcuffed by one hand to the bench) and I’m holding him against the wall with every bit of strength I have. This motherfucker was STRONG. I swear the bench was about to come up off the concrete when he first leapt at us. Once my coworker gets handcuffs on him, we take a step back. The guy throws his head back, eyes rolled all the way back, and lets out an inhuman scream that I’ve only heard in movies about demon possession. He then moves his head as if he’s looking around the room, but still with his eyes rolled into the back of his head and spouts off more nonsense. I’m not Catholic but I was very tempted to cross myself. The screaming, head throwing back and eye rolling continue on for about 45 minutes. Every so often he’d come back to reality and talk to us like a normal person for a moment and then go back into crazy mode.” — moocowboocow

19. We found a corpse that had been dead for two months

“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 like she was out of town or something. We get there and are met by the neighbors who told us that the mail is pilling up in the mail box and that there are several untouched packages on the porch. Ok so we go up the house and the front door is unsecured, so we crack open the door a couple of inches and the Deputy calls inside, but the door wont move any more. 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 that there might be stuff behind the door. Its 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 that 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 misc shit 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 shit, its 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.” — NotATroll4

20. There were bodies in the trees

“Dad responds to a call where a guy stabbed an old lady to death. Guy just kind of sat around after. When they got there he just went into custody without any fight. The dude had no expression or emotion. Like a real life Dexter.

Another time some tornado ripped through a trailer park back in the 90s and there were bodies in trees.” — LITER_OF_FARVA

21. I saw his skeleton inside of a burnt up car

“I once went to a two fatality car crash. The cars had collided head on in a 55mph zone.

One of the drivers had left the house suicidal, and it was surmised that he picked a car out at random and went straight into it.

I had spoken with that man several weeks prior and seeing his skeleton in the burned up car was a little creepy.

I won’t describe the rest of the scene, but the worst part of it is…

This was Christmas Day. Not a merry Christmas at all.” — chestersutherland

22. He killed a prostitute and stored her in the back of his truck

“My dad was on the freeway, and saw a guy in a big truck (it may have been a mail carrier?) that was swerving and driving crazy. He pulled him over, and the driver’s hands were shaky and covered in blood. It turns out he had a prostitute in the back of his truck that he had killed not long before.” — olympicsized_starfsh

23. A woman shot herself in the middle of the living room while her kids sat outside

“My cousin is a cop and he responded to a call on Valentine’s Day night. A 12 year old girl called in to say her mother had blown her brains out in the living room. I guess her and her brother were getting ready for dinner and the mom just shot herself. He said the creepy thing about it was dinner all set up, drinks on the table, and suddenly she shot herself. Kids were sitting outside when he arrived, to this day I can’t imagine Valentine’s Day for them. But I know that is something that stuck with him seeing that.” — hugatree0643

24. A man tied her up, raped her, and tortured her for hours

“My dad worked in a precinct with one of highest crime rates in NYC. 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 drunk.

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 fucking with shit. I guess someone forgot to lock it. The creepy guy ended up taking her down there, tying her up, and raping 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 raping both of them until dawn. Maintenance found them that morning, and my dad was a responder.

Again, my dad never told us stories. This one might’ve stuck out because he has four daughters, but I think it’s gotta be up there in creepy factor.” — eecb23

25. I found a missing husband after he was already dead

“Got a report of a missing husband. He told his wife and family of 6 children that 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 that they recently had a fight about finances, and he agreed that he was bad at money and maybe they should just have a joint account that she controls.

On a hunch, I asked his 14 year old boy if there were any areas in the mountains nearby that 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 shotgun 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.” — AwaitingDeath  

Holly Riordan is the author of
Severe(d), A Creepy Poetry Collection.
Pre-order your copy here.