25 Average People Describe The Night They Discovered A Dead Body

1. He jumped to his death at a red carpet event

“Well, my story is a little different. I live in NYC in an apt. with a balcony overlooking the queensboro bridge. About 10 years ago, there were some new stores and event spaces built under the arches of the bridge (the ceilings are very pretty). I was hanging out on my balcony one afternoon when I see a guy standing on the edge of the bridge. Spoiler–he jumps and immediately dies. I see all of this and call the police.

Here’s the kicker. The guys body was DIRECTLY in front of the door to a major event space under the bridge. Of course there was a huge party there that night (I think it was a People Magazine party) and he jumped just hours before the doors were to open. SO, the event staff put a curtain around the dudes body. It was surreal from an ariel view watching celebrities walk the red carpet and just a few feet away there was a dead guy with his head smashed up.” — ottovonballsack

2. We found a dead body in our dump truck

“I worked in a clean dirt landfill when I was 18 driving bulldozers and excavators. Basically the land was below grade and they were taking clean dirt excavated from houses and buildings, and dumping it on the site.

Someone once dumped a dead dog in a garbage bag and threw it in the back of a dump truck, it got loaded with dirt and brought to the site. The other dozer operator, Bill, was pushing the pile and the bag ripped open an he found the dead dog. As you can imagine, he was pretty pissed off about it.

Well, a few years later, he was pushing a pile and another garbage bag rolled out of the dirt and the blade of the bulldozer caught the edge of it and ripped the bag. He saw hair come out of the bag, so he stopped the machine and jumped down. He was expecting to find another dog, and pulled the bag open…

I was in the office trailer when he came in. He said “call the cops, there is a body out there…” No one believed him straight away until you noticed how white he was, and it was clear that he had just finished puking.

I never saw the body, but apparently it was a young East Indian female. If I remember correctly she was naked, and hog tied from her feet to her neck and her hands, behind her back. She was stuffed into the garbage bag with other household trash. When Bill jumped down and ripped open the bag, it was the back of her head he could see. Her head slumped out of the bag and basically looked up at him (I don’t know if her eyes were open or closed) and he almost instantly started puking.

They caught the guy who killed her, her husband who was a dump truck driver. They had a log of him being on the premises and dumping there, but the big clincher was the other trash in the garbage bag with her. There was empty beer cans with a manufacturing codes on them in the bag. In the fridge at their home, there was more beer with the same manufacture code.

Not sure how much time he got, but I know he went to jail for her murder. Bill was pretty traumatized for a long time after that.

Happened in about 1991 to 1996 or so in Delta BC, Canada. The truck driver and the woman were from Surrey BC if anyone wants to find the story. I’ve looked before but can’t find it.” — iamkokonutz

3. There was a dead body in the road

“Bit of a different perspective here, I guess:

I grew up in the country in the South. So a whole bunch of hills and backroads, so a lot of times, you could go several hours without seeing a single car.

When I was 5 or so, my mom was bringing me and my sister home from school one day, driving the way you do when there’s never any other cars (down the middle of the road without paying attention to the sides). Well, we go around a turn and my sister starts chanting, “Mommy, there’s a dead man in the road, there’s a dead man in the road.”

My mom tries to dismiss it and tells her it’s probably just someone napping in their yard, but my sister butts in and starts yelling “Look!” while pointing at the rearview mirror. My mom looks up, and sure enough, there’s a crumpled mass laying on top of the shoulder line, and had my mom not taken the turn unreasonably wide, she probably would’ve run over him.

My memory’s a little hazy, but if I remember correctly, he had also taken the turn lackadaisically, only he went too narrow and went straight into the ditch. He got ejected through the windshield and, I’m assuming, tried to crawl back to the road to get help, but like I said, no traffic, and ours was the first car to pass by in probably more than an hour. I don’t remember if he was dead when we found him or if he died a little later, but I know he was gone by the time EMTs got there. Unfortunately, since my mother was unreasonable and wouldn’t let her 5- and 7-year-old kids play with a dying man, I had to stay in the car and I don’t actually know how that whole sequence unfolded.” — Methuga

4. She split her head open in the bathtub

“I was about 7-8. I had spent the night with one of my best friends for his birthday. Well in his household he had his two parents and his grandmother. His mom was almost always gone so his grandmother was pretty much the caregiver, his dad was working with a railroad company so he was never there. Well anyway! During the night she had gone to take a shower and just sorta passed away in the tub. And in all the fun we had had during the night didn’t hear her as she fell down and split her head.

I went in and tried to use the restroom. Sat down on the toilet and almost finished before I looked up and seen her laying there. We called the cops and everything but nobody knew how to get in touch with anyone he was related to so my dad paid for her entire funeral and everything and his dad came home months later. Come to find out he didn’t work at all. The mom had ran away with another man and the grandmother was dying from cancer. We adopted him and he’s my brother. A REALLY horrible thing turned into a gigantic blessing for me and my family.” — ListenToTheBuffalo

5. We kept walking past a body in the woods

“Grew up in a very poor neighborhood in Michigan called shacktown. It was basically a redneck ghetto, maybe two black families (a family from France and the mail lady) there is an area called “fag park” which I to this day don’t understand why, I encountered lots of crack smokers and hetero-sex in the woods down there but never anything fitting the name. Anyway, me and my cousin are walking along a trail next to the Rouge river (chemical river, it’s so nasty you can smell it almost throughout the entire neighborhood) and just 90s kidding around like we did, we decided to go play some video games so we walk the trail back out and an ambulance pulls up, no police, just a random ambulance. The passenger sees us and asks if we have a knife, obviously answer “no”. They say Okay and grab the stretcher from the back. They walk down the same path we had just came out of and not even 30 feet in they pull a dead guy out of some brush. We had walked past a dead body twice without seeing it. They walk back out and at that point I was scared so I pull my little “it’s smaller than my thumb” pocket knife out and apologize for not telling them I had it. The driver of the ambulance says “that didn’t do this” and pulls the sheet back to expose a dead man with stab wounds to his neck and face. The smell was unbearable, but the river does stink enough to explain why we were able to walk past him twice without noticing him. Turned out we knew him. He was this homeless guy who lived in a bush across the park, we hung out with the guy all the time. (he always gave us cigarettes and we would bring him food) this guy literally dragged a couch down into the park. He really made his bushpartment home. I grieved his death almost as bad as my family I’ve lost and I’ve lost my grandparents, parents, and almost all my aunts and uncles since.” — GeorgedaflashGlass

6. I found a man with his legs chopped off

“I was 12 and had to go across an open rail yard to get to school, it was a shortcut for the 10 min walk to school, grass was overgrown on most of the track, walked right up to what look like from a distance a sack of potatoes or something that might have dropped from a moving train, is a dead guy with both legs cut off right at knee, died probably from blood loss, went back home and dad called the cops, it wasn’t scary or shocking, I barely remember it, this was about 20 years ago so no I was not desensitized by the internet, it just wasn’t a big deal to me at the time, nowadays things are different though, if I were to stumble upon a dead body I’d probably shit my pants.” — DoJu318

7. A woman bled from every orifice on her face

“If you’re squeamish or not looking for the feels, turn back now.

So I worked at a theme park for a while. One day I was walking back from my break, and a little girl, about six years old, came over and asked me if I could help her find her mom. She told me that her grandma was supposed to be watching her, but she fell asleep and wouldn’t wake up, so now she needed to find her mom (in that matter-of-fact way small children do). This was in the pre-cell phone days (they existed, but were for the wealthy only). So I told her maybe she should take me to her grandma.

We walk to a little seating area around the bend that was a bit out of the way, and there’s this old woman on a bench slumped over. Fuck. So I walk up and try to wake her, first by talking to her, then yelling. I can see she isn’t breathing, so I run to the nearest ride to get a CPR pack and to tell them to call first aid.

I run back to the woman, and shake her a little bit, at which point she begins bleeding out of every orifice on her face. Fortunately first aid got there at this point and the first-on-scene EMT just goes “oh fuck” and calls for oxygen, and calls the radio call for a person who isn’t breathing and is probably dead. The dispatcher asked her to confirm that code and the EMT just said “yeah, no doubt about it.”

So here’s where shit gets even worse. That little girl? Yeah, she’s still standing there watching all of this, but I had sort of forgot about her in the moment. I remembered she existed right as she walked up to my friend Melissa (the first on scene) and tugs her sleeve and says “will you please help my nana?”

Yeah. Melissa got to do CPR on this little girl’s grandmother’s dead body as it bled out, because policy said she couldn’t stop CPR until an ambulance was there, all while this little girl watched and cried and asked for someone to help her nana.

That was not a fun day. Everyone involved got at least a week paid vacation after that to deal with that mess. I don’t know what happened to that little girl, but there’s no way she didn’t need therapy later in life.” — arksien

8. A car caught on fire in front of me

“I was at work – a gas station.

I was just a cashier at the time, working at the register. We heard a loud crash and looked out the window to see that a small car had collided head on with a truck. The small car immediately caught fire. One of our customers yelled for a fire extinguisher and I ran out to give it to him. It was one of the huge industrial sized ones. I remember, very clearly, seeing the driver reaching out for help as the flames engulfed her. Her passenger was either unconscious or already dead. We used the entire extinguisher to no avail. Help arrived too late, and neither of the girls in the small car survived. They were only 20 or so. It was determined the driver was texting and veered into the other lane going about 50mph. Everyone in the truck was OK. Don’t text and drive, kids.” — airinmahoeknee

9. I found a man in an empty hotel room

“Story time! Here it goes! I was in middle school at the time and my mom was a maid at this hotel in the area. I got home from school and my mom asked me to help her open a door that was budged with something. She went to go find my father that was the groundskeeper for hotel and me being the curious kid that I am, I go inside the room to look around. Well, I noticed that the electric cord from the alarm clock was torn off along with the clock itself on the floor. I walked into the bathroom only to find a man ice cold on the bathroom floor facedown and ass naked. Yes, I touched him, which in retrospect probably wasn’t a good idea. His left arm was all purple and had the cord tied around it. Later I learned that he used it to inject heroin. There was blood splatter all over the wall. Man had to be in his 30s. His body already went through the algor, livor, and rigor mortis stages of death. Poor guy.. He had three kids. By the way, this happened in north attleboro, MA in early 2007 if I’m not mistaken. I can’t find the article.” — [deleted]

10. I found a dead driver with a mouth full of blood

“I was home from college for winter break. I was about to head into town when I got a call from my girlfriend, who informed me through a flood of tears that we could no longer be together. The effect of that had yet to set in. I put off waiting to go into town until my mom got home so I could share the news with someone. After she arrived, she gave me a hug and asked if I would be okay. I told her that I thought I would be fine and headed for town.

On the drive into town, I passed a car, headlights and turn signal on, that looked as if it was turning onto the road. The weird thing was that the car was in a place that I knew there was no road or driveway. After glancing in my rear view mirror multiple times and not seeing the car pull out, I decided the situation was too strange for me not to check out. I turned around and drove back.

When I pulled up, it became very clear that the car had crashed, hard. Right about the time I pulled up, someone else finally stopped as well. It was hard to tell how long the car had been there or how many people had unknowingly passed by. The scene itself was gruesome. a bloody arm hung out the window and there were pieces of the car everywhere. As I approached the vehicle, the other person who stopped was on the phone with the police, telling them that the people were dead. I told the guy not to say that until we were sure. Then began the tough part. I really hoped the other guy would go check, but he wasn’t going near the car. Knowing it was up to me, I approached the driver’s side window. I will never forget what I saw. The car had hit a palm tree so hard on the passenger side (not visible until close up to the car) that the passenger was in the driver’s seat with the driver.

Nervously, I placed my hand on the driver’s neck to feel for a pulse. Nothing but cold dead flesh. Just looking at the passenger, smashed into the driver’s seat and an open mouth full of blood, I knew she was dead. I decided to check anyways and felt for a pulse. Nothing.

That was the first time I found dead bodies. Needless to say, with the breakup and the car crash discovery, I did not sleep that night.” — count_phistula

11. A man was hung in the adjoining cell

“My cousin’s story, not mine. He was in jail in a small county jail. Some guy came in on a DUI. He wasn’t a local, so nobody in the jail really knew him, and he was just expected to be their until his hearing then be gone. Apparently he’d randomly start screaming, smack his head against the walls, and cry at night.

Nobody understood why he was acting so odd, it was just a DUI, and his first DUI offense. In this state, a DUI isn’t a huge deal (which it should be), typically a slap on the wrist, a fine, maybe some rehab. Nothing to be freaking out over, right?

Well, one day, my cousin and a different inmate were playing cards, and heard a loud bang from this man’s cell. Didn’t think much of it, he was always making weird noises like that. After 30 or so minutes, lunch gets brought in and my cousin starts yelling to the guy that he’s gonna eat the other guy’s lunch if he doesn’t get out soon. Finally, my cousin goes to see what he’s up to, and there he is, hanging in his cell. My cousin goes and gets the guy who he was playing cards with and a guard, the guy he was playing cards with just responded with “well shit, looks like you get Tubby’s lunch. Lucky.” Then went on to make fun of the guard for having to preform CPR on a “dirty spick”

Turns out the guy owed a couple grand in drug related debt, his wife had recently killed herself, and he had lost his job a week before being arrested.” — meownikki

12. My girlfriend killed herself

“She was my best friend. We had known each other for a few years at this point. We eventually started “dating”. We were in 8th grade, it was young love. She was home-schooled, so I’d stop by after school every day and we would hang out. I found out, over the course of that year, that her father abused both her and her mother. I then went over every single day to try to get her out of the house before her father came home.

This went on for a while, then things got worse. I wasn’t allowed to see her for days at a time. One day, I finally told her that I loved her, she told me the same. We had our first kiss that night. I went home, full of happiness, and a hope for a beautiful future.

The next day, I found that she had texted me during the night. She had sent one word, “goodbye”. I tried texting her, calling her, everything. No response. I finally rode over to her house. Her dad had left without checking on her, her mom had been busy in the kitchen making his breakfast before he left.

I was the one who found her.

She had hung herself. I cut her down, then sat there sobbing while her mother basically had a breakdown behind me. I remember her hair, it was so soft, but she was so cold. I’ve blocked out most everything else. I remember that the police were miffed that I had cut her down, since it was technically tampering with the scene until they ruled it as a suicide. I tried to kill myself later that day.” — Shethrewherselfaway

13. I accidentally broke a dead man’s leg

“I was working for Toys R Us as a duty manager. One of the checks we had to do on a weekly basis was to look at the out buildings that contained boilers and back up generators so on.

One day it was my turn I found it hard to force one of the doors open to check on the back up generator, something was stopping it from opening.

I ended up charging it quite hard and to my dismay heard a breaking noise. When entering the room I saw a body, there was no pulse and the man was dead.

It turns out that I broke the dead persons leg, he died with his legs against the door. Was a homeless guy and being January he had gone inside to get some shelter but died to exposure.

Safe to say I didn’t do the checks for some months after.” — Jamhatts

14. One of my residents stopped breathing

“I worked as a nurses aid in a nursing home while in nursing school. Did my 1am rounds and everything was fine. At 3am rounds I found that one of my residents wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse. I ran for the nurse, who after a 30 year career in geriatrics didn’t seem surprised. We went into the room together and the nurse listened to her heart, felt her skin, muttered something along the line if “she’s cold” before announcing she was in fact dead and we need to contact the on call doctor to make it official and call her family.

The nurse commended me for my actions and thanked me for not starting CPR on a 90 something year old woman who was very much dead before I found her.” — mider-span

15. A stranger drowned in the pool

“I was probably 9 or 10 and visiting my aunt out in Idaho for the summer. On the way back from a cabin trip to McCall, we decided to go to a water park. So we get there, and my aunt lounges on one of the chairs while I go into the wave pool. It’s all waves and shit for a few minutes, and when things calm down I start swimming to the deep end. On the way, literally underneath the lifeguard tower, my foot touched something slimy.I looked down expecting to see gum or something, but there was a little girl, face down at the bottom of the pool. I didn’t process it right away and took a second look; she was still there. Myself and 2 other kids started shouting at the lifeguard that there was a person at the bottom, and I’ll never forget what happened next. Stupid bitch told us not to joke about that with the lifeguard. The waves came on maybe a minute later, and I was too scared to go look for her again. She definitely didn’t make it.

The weird thing is that I never heard anything about it in the news. I’ve been looking around forever, maybe at the wrong parks but there’s nothing.” — zer0wid

16. My son overdosed on pills

“It was Saturday June 7th, 2014. I have a 14 year old son who suffers from Bipolar Disorder but was stable (for the most part) on medication. He has a girlfriend that he spent the whole day before with while I was at work. I fell asleep about 11:30, he was up playing his Playstation 4. I told him to go to bed no later than 3 am (lack of sleep is BAD for teens with bipolar disorder) I wake up around 11 the next morning and he wasn’t awake yet. YIPPEE, he is catching up on his sleep. Well around 2 in the afternoon I go into his room to give him his meds. He is 4 feet from his bed laying on the floor in his boxer shorts. COLD. I just starting screaming NO NO NO NO HE IS DEAD. I run into the living room where my daughter and dad are HE IS DEAD. I pick up the phone and call 911. They instruct me to start CPR (A LOST cause, he was already stiff) but I run into my bedroom to get my husband out of bed DARREN IS DEAD! Now my whole family is in his bedroom and I am just crying on him but my husband is on the phone with the 911 operator. I am telling everyone DON’T TOUCH HIM. They move me to start CPR because that is what the 911 operator is telling them to do. Bloody foam starts coming out of his mouth. There are no cuts, no bruises, no outward sign of why he is dead. I run into my bedroom to see if any of his medicine is missing (It was in a drop safe because, you know, Bipolar) it is all there.

Autopsy results, overdose on Welbutrin and tegratol. He had been hoarding his pills. He had gotten into an argument with this girlfriend after I fell asleep and took all of them which caused a seizure that caused him to fall hard and have bleeding on his brain. At least he was OUT when his lungs and heart failed. All for attention from a girl.

That is my experience with finding a dead body.” — nerdswife61878

17. I found a girl hanging from a rope

“When I was in in college I was out for a run one early morning. My run happened to take me through a woods by the edge of the lake. It was mid October, so water was rising from the lake, creating a very beautiful scene (sun cutting through the fog, etc). However, when I turned to glance at the lake, I saw a girl standing waist-deep in the water. She was wearing a white dress, and had long hair that reached down to the water. I stopped and called out to see if she was alright. No response. I began to look more closely and reached the conclusion that she must be a dummy (it was nearing Halloween so people were putting up decorations already). However, I looked further on down the trail and saw a pair of bright yellow rainboots and an old-fashioned lantern. I looked back at the girl and realized that there was a tree reaching over the lake, and that there was a thin cord reaching down from the tree, which was attached to her neck. I put two and two together, and then ran to the police (roughly three minutes away, thank God) and dragged them back.” — thomascirca

18. My father died of a heart attack

“I don’t know if you would call it a discovery. But a couple years ago my stepmom was in the hospital with a heart attack and kidney problems. I went to visit her and left the hospital when my dad left. He worked overnights and was going home to sleep before work. My dad was deaf and sometimes didn’t answer his phone or wake up to alarms. (He was in his early 40s and had recently had a checkup so no reason to worry). Around 10pm my stepmom texted me to see if i could go to their house and make sure he was up for work because he wasn’t answering the phone. I went over there and the door was locked so I banged on it for a while but assumed he couldn’t hear me so i got into his car and tried the garage door opener. It didn’t work so I tried my stepmom’s door opener. It also didn’t work. I went back to try the door again and decided to peek in the little window on the door. When I did I found my dad lying on the floor in front of the door. I called the fire department and they said he had been gone about 6 hours. He passed of a heart attack. Weird thing is the garage door openers both worked with no problem after that. My grandpa was an electrician and ever since his death (when I was 10) we have had weird things happen with lights especially on holidays. I believe there is a reason I was not able to get into the house that night.” — SmexyCant

19. I found a man floating in the water

“I grew up on the banks of a river. Every day, my childhood consisted of jumping in my canoe and going fishing up the river with my friends.

This particular day, we noticed something floating in the water. Thought it was a log, my friend thought it was a warthog (bush pig), so we poked it with our oars.

The “warthog” flipped over and it was a dead guy, bloated with no eyeballs. We got back home and called our parents who in turn called the local sea and rescue.

So they get there to retrieve the body in a rubber duck (not sure what the boat is called other than that), but the body is too waterlogged and decomposed to get into the boat. So they tie a nylon rope around the dead guy’s arm, above the elbow and start towing him back to shore.

By the time they got to shore, the skin had degloved all the way from the elbow to the wrist. Quite a sight for 10 year olds.

Turns out that this guy was a hunter, got chased by a group of baboons and pushed down towards the river. With no last resort, he jumped in the river to escape them, but didn’t know how to swim.” — iFornication

20. He found a body in the woods

“So this is not mine, but a close friend of mine happens to live in North Attleboro, MA. This is where the Aaron Hernandez murder took place. So one day after he was done either running or working out at the gym, he cut across town in a path in the woods. Now this may seem spooky, but most New Englanders know that the woods are fine in a white suburban town. So while he was walking through the path he noticed a body, he wasn’t sure if it was dead or alive so he crouched down and asked if he was ok. Well, since he was dead, the conversation didn’t last long. So he sprinted to the nearest restaurant to use their phone, as his was dead, and called the cops. He now has to appear in court to describe it.” — sjakati

21. I saw a collision at an intersection

“Didn’t really discover a dead body, sorta watched it happen. I witnessed a collision at an intersection, and quickly decided to respond. As a civilian with first aid and a little CPR, I figured I was hot shit. I called EMS, talked to driver 1 (she was texting and driving, leg was in pain, but I saw nothing that needed my direct attention), then sprinted across the road to driver two, who’s driver side was crushed in. His head was.. Crushed as well, I guess. This part gets a little blurry for me. I remember it looking like a deflated basketball. I told him I’d be right back, ran back to my trunk, grabbed rubber gloves and a towel, trying to think about what I can do to help until the ambulance arrives. I head back to the car to ask for consent to help, but at this point he’s unconscious. I was afraid, I was starting to panic, what if I made it worse? Hurt his neck? Do something wrong? Luckily for me, an ambulance was close, and they came and sort of took over. Look in the paper a few days later, he was dead on impact, so I guess that I found him dead. I’m incredibly grateful of that ambulances timing, and even more respectful of their, and Highway Patrol/Police/Sheriff’s/Fire Fighters service.” — Tylarious

22. A little girl’s parents both died

“I’m a paramedic and I’ve seen my share of dead bodies but my first dead body was when I was around 5 to 7 years old. My parents has just recently bought a nice boat that year and we hadn’t had a chance to take it out. I remember the day before we left my mom was arguing that she didn’t want to go and was making up excuses to my dad, and my dad is not a person who hears the word no. So off we went to rough river in Kentucky, a place we had gone camping at since I was a little girl. The first day we put the boat in the water, and set out. I was having the time of my life, we had taken according to my mom only 2 or 3 bends from the ramp when we started seeing a bunch of debris in the water. I remember looking at the shore and seeing a bunch of people frantically waving at us, so we turned and headed over. I remember my dad practically ramming the boat into the shore, leaping out and sprinting to the people.

Being the curious type I was and at the front of the boat I managed to get out before my mom could grab me. The first thing I saw was another little girl, she has a huge gash in her side and in her thigh and was covered in blood and just lying there starring into the sky while people were tying stuff around her limbs. Then I saw my dad and another guy doing cpr on another man who was missing his arm and most of his leg. A bit beyond that and lying face down in the water was a woman but no one was touching her. There were a few other injured people but I don’t remember them. Apparently my mom (much later in life) told me that the guys on both boats were drunk and came around the bend too fast and slammed into each other. The little girl survived but both her mom and dad died on the shore. The guy who hit them a month later somehow was released from jail and went straight home and shot himself in the head.

The interesting part is this is an area close to where I worked as a paramedic and we tend to get a lot of bleed over from other services. One day I was chatting with a part time retiree who worked for that County. I remembered that story and he said he was working that emergency and even remembered the little girl whose mom was trying her best to keep her from seeing everything. It was unreal but he described the entire thing to me without prompt from me.” — diabolicbutterfly

23. I found my cousin with a needle in his arm

“I was in between second and third grade (about 10 years old) when I was staying at my aunt’s house up in Pennsylvania. Her son, my cousin, was practically my best friend who I could talk about anything to. Being so young it was mostly childish stuff but he always listened and made me laugh. During my stay, I had a bad dream and got up at around 1:30 in the morning to talk to him since he usually stayed up late. I go to push open his door to find him when I hear a loud thud. I threw open the door to see him lying on the floor, eyes glazed over, with a needle stuck in his arm. It didn’t really hit me until around 7th grade (14 years old) when I realized what happened and then I went through a serious emotional breakdown. I began abusing drugs/alcohol to get the image of his lifeless body lying in front of me out of my head. I ultimately almost killed myself, but I couldn’t imagine my parents cleaning up my mess so I sat in my room with a rifle across my lap crying my eyes out. It wasn’t until I was 17 that I realized the drugs and alcohol were killing me and that I was not living up to what I could be. Since then (I turn 22 tomorrow) I haven’t touched any kind of narcotic or alcoholic beverage.” — howDoIWork

24. We found a young boy in the pond

“Not me but a friend. We were probably 13 and we were swimming in a pond at a campground. I was standing on the beach while my friend was paddling on a raft. When she dipped her hand to go paddle, she pulled out a chunk of hair and instantly started screaming. Come to find out, there was a six year old boy that had been missing for a few hours. She was just the unfortunate one to have found the poor boy. I remember my mother hugging me while a few people pulled the poor boys body from the pond.

Not even a month later, that same friend answered her door for the mail. And that mailman that dropped dead of a heart attack on her doorstep.” — melliee

25. I found my neighbor dead in her house

“First time was my neighbor. I was 14 or 15, parents were out of town, and the house phone rang at like 3AM. My brother woke me up and said that our neighbors son had called and wanted to know if we’d go check on her. He said he’d been trying to call her all day with no answer (he lived on the other side of the US) and was worried, thought maybe she’d fallen again. She was in her 90’s and that had happened before, so we had a key to her house just in case.

We got to her house, couldn’t see shit, and made our way to the back door. It smelled fucking awful and I knew immediately what the smell was, but my brother kept saying she must have gotten hurt and her trash was rotting or something because she couldn’t get to it. I don’t know why I went in the house, except we didn’t have a phone on us and I knew I was going to have to call from her house.

As soon as I opened the door, the smell flooded out and my brother took off and vomited all over the sidewalk. I still went in the fucking house, though. Flipped the light in the kitchen on. She was about six feet away from the door, bloated, didn’t resemble a human, period. Didn’t look like she’d ever been human. And she was fucking naked.

What her son neglected to tell us was that he hadn’t heard from her in over three weeks. Oh, and it was the middle of fucking summer. She’d had a heart attack in the shower, and apparently died on her way to the phone in the kitchen. It sucked. I’m still glad I found her and not my brother, because I really don’t think he could have handled it at all.

Second time was less finding a body and more knowing there’s a dead body, but whatever. Went to the beach with some friends. This one guy I didn’t know very well came with, and shot himself in the bathroom of the condo we were staying at, while some of us were in the living room playing Xbox.

I somehow got dubbed the person to “go check” while someone else called 911, opened the door enough to see blood all over the tile and closed it. Like I said, didn’t really know him that well, but a friend told me later that his parents had found his note after going through his things, and he didn’t want to do it somewhere close to home or where his parents might find him. Still don’t really know why he chose to do it that way, though.” — _TIXCY_