26 Cops On The Creepiest Thing They Found During A House Search

You need a strong stomach to become a cop. Why? Because, according to Ask Reddit, these are some of the things you might see on the job.

Unsplash / Clem Onojeghuo

1. Her dog ate off her face

“I used to volunteer with my local PD. Nothing will beat the old lady who passed away in her house and her little dog ate her face. Literally just the skin from the jaw line to the hair line and from ear to ear. It left the eyeballs in the sockets. Just a skeleton in a lady suit, doing the 1000 yard stare.” — robinson217

2. Teeth were lodged in the walls and floor

“A cop I know, his first day on the job he goes to a suicide call. Shotgun in a chair, pulled the trigger with his toe. There were like, white things stuck in the wall and on the floor. He didn’t know what they were. Yup, teeth.

Another one told me of the guy who was forced at gunpoint to shoot his own dick off. Rival drug dealers.” — DeucesCracked

3. His skin popped from the heat

“My very first dead guy had been in his house for almost a week during a very hot July with no A/C…

Did you know that you skin will become clear and you can see EVERYTHING? He popped when the funeral home came to get him. Yes, popped. Some people, they’re not bothered by this. Me? No no no. I don’t have the stomach. This is the only part of the job that bothers me.” — MaxTitration16

4. He owned a collection of eyeballs

“Crazy neighbor screaming in his shed at 3am. Call police with a noise complaint. Whey they arrive he throws a rock at them and runs back to shed. Then they follow him to the shed out back where he is hiding.

All those missing neighborhood cats… now a mural on his shed wall. Cop was fine with me standing on a deck chair in my own garden staring over the wall to see all this unfold. Cop commented that this took the biscuit for creepiest shit he has ever seen. Cats were arranged into a spiral pattern on the wall. He had collected their eyes into a bowl in front of it.

In retrospect, neighbor could have as easily chosen some children rather than cats for his next project. For the best the guy is locked away from society now getting the help he needs; pills and lots of em I expect.” — DangerousStolen

5. Blood was covering the apartment

“My dad answered a domestic call at an apartment on the 23rd floor. As soon as he walked in he saw blood everywhere. In pools on the floor, spatter on the walls and ceiling, smeared all over everything. He walked further in to find a woman crumpled on the floor, battered beyond recognition, and the partner is standing in front of an open window. My dad started to talk to the man, to coax him into coming with, and the man immediately turned around and stepped out the window, falling 70m to his death.” — throoowah

6. We found a little kid’s foot

“Not a cop but a fire investigator. We were working a scene where two kids had died after a space heater caught on fire and the dad was playing poker down the street and the mom was with some other man down the street. The fire department came in and cleaned out the scene and we came in after. As we were sifting through the ashes to find components to the space heater, we found the two year olds foot. Mind you, this was after dark so we could barely see and were using flash lights. It was a bit creepy.” — CoGa

7. Creepy messages were scattered across the walls

“I’m not a cop but a paramedic. Went into a ladies house one time, can’t remember what the call was for, that had sheets of paper taped all over the walls. They all said something along the lines of ‘remember the voices aren’t real.’ Gave me a warm safe feeling.” — medic861

8. The body was stuffed into the oven

“Friend of a cop here. He told me about how him and his buddy went to search in an apartment. They looked around and his buddy finally called him over. A guy was just … in an oven. Dead of course, but in an oven. When the guys tried to pull him out of the oven all the contents and gas of the dead guy fell right out. A few of the guys vomited and gagged.” — Vizzy1225

9. He owned video tapes of other men masturbating

“Dude had three years worth of videos he took of boys and men of all ages using the public library bathroom. He said it was common for guys to go in there and jack off. I had no idea. He said most people had no idea they were being recorded…others knew, just didn’t care.

He also had two external hard drives full of every kind of twisted porn imaginable…again, involving all ages.” — katemeister86

10. He collected stabs so he could eat them

“I spent my first year as a constable in an inner city suburb of Queensland. Now, of the population of this area, something like 40% was reserved for government commissioned housing for rehabilitated criminals and persons released from mental health assessment centers. So here was a share of creepy shit, but to be fair for the most part, the people we dealt with were more like cartoon characters than super shady creeps but they had there moments.

One guy that we had met before just decided one afternoon to start destroying shit in the commission set of units he lived at. He was going fucking off. Kicking through latticing, throwing pot plants off of buildings at passersby, stealing and collecting people’s shoes, smashing car windows.

After about 15 minutes of mayhem, he must have ran out of steam and gone back to his unit. That’s where we found him and he decided to bung on a turn. He just would not stop screaming and bashing his head and face into any surface or object he could find. Eventually we got a van with a pod and secured him, then we went back into the the house to figure out what the fuck had happened.

The house is a cluster fuck. Somehow he had fit 2 Coles trolleys inside and was using them as furniture. The whole place smelt of rotting food and shit. On the coffee table (if you can call it that) are a series of scrawled notes of just expletives (again, not massive mental function with this guy) and a wooden box.

Inside the wooden box, was about 100 small clip seal bags. Over half the bags had a brown granular organic material in them, the others had clear crystal like stuff in them. The brown bags were somewhat organized from smallest to largest staples.

Now with the type of people we had in the area, we had all sorts of wonderful ways these people got high. We were used to seeing weird shit that people would ingest. So we don’t recognize these bags, but we’ve got a pretty good idea it’s a narcotic of some kind. So of course, we examine these bags and the contents. There is enough there to test if need be so I get one of these bags and empty the contents to see it better.

So these ‘samples’ of brown material. They’ve got flecks of color and little tendril like hairs, not unusual for a plant derivative to have. But I’ve never seen it before, so I’m looking at it as I hold talking to my partner that it might be really course hash derivative or a byproduct of production of something else. Khat maybe. Might explain why this guy went nuts.

A dog unit officer who assisted with the arrest comes in. He sees the scene, looks at the coffee table looks, looks at the bags, looks at me holding the contents of one in the palm of my hand. And straight away says, ‘That guys got golden staph, he’s been collecting scabs…’

This guy had been picking at a golden staph infection on his leg, collecting the scabs, organizing them into smallest to largest, and then eating them. The small yellow crystals? Snot and crust from his nose. Same end goal.” — catattackjack

11. Old semen covered the entire room

“I was a fresh officer with dreams being a hero. I get dispatched to a call of a family fight. Not wife husband, but brother sister. The female was reporting the male had attacked her. I arrived and located a female and male. The male I knew from prior contacts. I detained him in handcuffs and quickly smelled the strong odor of pepper spray. I found out that after the male knocked off the females weave she pepper sprayed him. I knew there were different types of pepper spray, like gel.

I’m walking around the house taking photos for my investigation and accessing the property damage. I noticed that in his room the odor from the pepper spray was extremely strong and made my eyes instantly water with a decent amount of stinging sensation. The fumes made it incredibly hard to breath and left me without the ability to breath at points, requiring that I leave the room to get fresh air. I find a brownish gel substance all over the walls in the shape of handprints. I photograph it and determine that it was the pepper gel that male suspect was wiping off of his face onto the wall. I found it odd that it was all over the walls and covered the room. I though this chick dusted him with the entire can of pepper gel.

After some investigation I took the male to jail.

I responded to the same house several days after for an unrelated medical issue. There were more family members at the house and the male was still in custody. I was having a conversation with the family as the hero firefighters were saving the day. I inquired if they had fully cleaned up the pepper spray from the males room. They gave me a strange look and told me there was none in there. I told them about the gel that was on the wall. I then sat there in horror as they explained to me this man had been, for years, cumming on his walls and playing with it. And the gel was in fact old cum and the fumes were the pungent smell of this man’s cum room… My fucking God.” — SwagyY0L0

12. The meat had been cut into edible cubes

“My aunt is a police dispatcher. Normally she takes calls from the public and has an officer nearby respond. But one day she was asked to work the station’s radio because the normal guy was sick. That meant she was acting as the central hub of the police radio network, taking calls from officers in the field and issuing backup to them, that kind of thing.

She wound up having to listen to four cops talking back and forth in a panic as two squad cars arrived to check on a reported murder (The person who called was certain that there were multiple killers present). The victim’s meat had been cut into one-inch cubes, as if their killer was going to fry them up, or make kebabs. The whole crops had been disassembled like that. Bones cut into neat inch segments, organs removed, separated, organized. She remembers one of the officers panicked and screamed something along the lines of: ‘This is OCD movie monster bullshit.’

I can’t remember the exact quote sadly, and I doubt my aunt remembers it herself. She thought they were playing a joke on her until they called for a hazmat crew to get the body.” — Yurei2

13. He owned a soundproofed abduction room

“A teacher in my little town of 35,000 souls was caught fiddling little boys. In his house the police found a fully kitted soundproofed abduction room. Luckily still unused.” — royalfarris

14. She had maggots coming out of her

“This one wasn’t mine but from an EMT friend. It’s also maybe not so much creepy as nasty, but it makes my hair stand on end whenever I think on it.

In one of the apartments in a nearby city, the apt manager went in to investigate a really bad smell in one of the lower units. Apparently people all around it were complaining. Once he saw what was up, he called the ambulance.

So first-responders show up – which includes said EMT friend – and there’s this lady sitting on the couch. There’s also something squirmy going on down below in her underpants area. So they check her out, and in the process remove said undergarments. Out falls a swarm of maggots. Yes, her lady-bits were covered in them.

Apparently, said individual had a fairly strong substance abuse-problem. Some of the needles she poked into her nethers, which caused an infection. This led to rotting flesh which attracted flies which in turn led to maggots. The worst part – she was NOT dead – just so drugged up that she basically never noticed that she was literally rotting and falling apart from the waist down.” — phormix

15. He set himself on fire — and then changed his mind

“This one is from an MP friend of mine, so take with a grain of salt.

My buddy was duty officer one night and as such, he had to respond to serious events.

One night there was a fire alarm and he and a bunch of MPs rolled on it. This was a real fire (false alarms are pretty common). The source turned out to be an officer’s apartment and… The officer.

When the investigation was conducted, it was found that the officer had filled a bathtub with fuel and field manuals, and decided to suicide out by sitting in the tub and igniting the fuel. After a few seconds he decided that this was a bad idea and ran from the tub to his apartment door before death finally took him. So the responding MP s found his charred remains and the bits of burning flesh that were falling off him as he ran for the door.” — sdcinerama

16. His decaying body merged with his chair

“Friend is a cop: Wellness check called in. Went in – smelled horrible – and discovered a large dead guy, shirtless, sitting in his front room, in a lawn chair watching TV. He had setup an industrial space heater behind his chair, which was on at full blast. Due to the heat, and apparently other factors he had ‘merged’ through the back of that lawn chair.” — RogueSock

17. He was meaty and rotting away

“A dead guy. But not just your average dead guy. This guy died on his couch, surrounded by no less than 1500 Miller Lite cans. Plus, he had no friends or family. None. He was retired and his electric bill was auto deducted from his checking account. He died, on his couch, and no one realized it for 5 months. When we found him, the top (front really, because he was on his back) was completely skeletonized. But the bottom (or back, against the couch) was still meaty and rotting. The half skeleton was kinda creepy. But its really creepy and sad that this guy left this world and it didn’t affect anyone. Just gone and forgotten.” — Forensicunit

18. An aborted fetus was stored in the freezer

“Wasn’t my call but I was told about it later. Aborted fetus in a chest freezer. This lady did an at home abortion with some meds she bought online. Didn’t know what to do after so she kept the fetus in her basement chest freezer for months.” — letsfinddwaldo

19. Their grandmother was dead for a full year

“My uncle is a cop and likes to tell the story of the time he shown up to arrest a 15yo who skipped school to throw rocks through some cars and steal things in them. He gets there and knows the kid, They’ve gotten him a few times from the school with drugs, one time for having a knife. They knock on the door and his 18 year old brother and 17 year old sister open it.

Cops say what they want and they tell them to fuck off. Cops show they have the warrant for the kids arrest and that they have to open the door. Get told another time and now the other cop car pulls up and asks whats going on.

uncle said they might have to force their way in and break the chain. 18yo shit head says he’s got a gun. about 3 seconds later the door is borken, 18 year old shit head is tassed, 17 yo is screaming for the brother whos wanted to book it. He jumps out the window and gets away (for now), Brother is thrown in cop car, 17 yo slaps the one officer, gets the same free ride and bracelets. They call the property manager and get permission to enter the house completely to investigate.

The second-floor REEKS. Worst smell they’ve ever smelled. They get upstairs and it just gets worse and worse. They open the door and find a long rotten body surronded by needles and other drug shit. They leave and call it in.

Uncle said later it came out that they grandmother died of an overdose, the mother was in jail for stabbing a ups guy, and the kids never reported the grandmother was dead so they could keep cashing her Social security checks. She was dead for about a year.

Other than that his best creepy stories were a guy who tortures and killed animals buy feeding them to other animals (not mouse to snake, think more cat to dog, or WAAAY to large rabbit to a starved snapping turtle) He also nailed several live rodents and cats to a board in the basement where he’d photograph them. and the other is a drug dealer who killed a guy and tried to put him through a meat grinder and feed his pit bull.” — suitology

20. He was a broken sack of bones

“My mother used to work for a police department, and I’d hang out there when I’d be home sick from school. This old man used to walk to the gas station on the corner to get a pack of smokes and coffee every day. The gas station attendant called for a wellness check when she realized she hadn’t seem him for a couple weeks in the dead of summer. Cops went, knocked, smelled something, opened the door, walked in, instantly came back out vomiting from the smell. They had to come back later with respirators, trash bags, and snow shovels to clean up the sludge that used to be the old man.

Another officer almost quit his first night on the job. Really bad accident, guy shows up, the one car has no one in it at all. He’s looking around, guy isn’t on the ground anywhere. He tried to figure out if maybe the guy walked away, so goes to look inside for some identification. Finds the guy. He hit so hard that he slammed up under and into the dashboard, and was just a broken sack of bones stuffed in around the steering column and other parts.” — MidwintersTomb

21. His jaw was hanging off his face

“Super late to this but I’ll post anyway. We went to an apartment which was a local drug den. A female we knew called and said the male renter had been assaulted and she had run. We got there and the door was bolted shut. I kicked the door over and over again and it wouldn’t open. What I found out later is the dope team had done a search warrant on the apartment a couple weeks earlier and afterward the tenants had reinforced the door jamb with a metal plate. It took me a total of 22 times kicking the door before I broke the deadbolt in half which flew across the room and hit the wall. We made entry; guns drawn and started clearing the apartment.

This place was the kind of spooky I have only seen in places where a lot of Meth is done. It was dark, there were swastikas, 666, upside down pentagrams, etc painted on the wall, pictures of faces hung on the wall with the eyes X’d out and baby dolls with their eyes scratched out into X’s. As we cleared the first room we started seeing the blood. First on the bed, then a trail on the floor leading into the back room. The layout was weird; one main room, then a back room which was more of a hallway and a bathroom at the end of that hall. We followed the trail of blood down the hall to the bathroom door. In front of the door was the renters dog which was shaking uncontrollably and pissing all over the floor, scared out of its mind. As we got closer the dog got really aggressive because it was scared.

I made my way around the dog and entered the bathroom where I found the renter hunched over in the shower, bleeding from his face, holding his cheeks with his hands. He was frantically trying to talk, pleading with us not to hurt his dog. Blood was dripping from his mouth and I couldn’t understand him. Then I saw the extend of what had happened to him. His jaw had been dislocated on both sides when he was beat by 2 men with a hammer and it was just hanging there. As he was trying to plead with us he could only attempt to talk by flicking his blood covered tongue in the pattern of the words because his jaw didn’t work at all.” — imcodefour

22. We found a bathtub of dead rats

“Bathtub of dead rats in a share house of illegal workers. They’d leave traps and poison out and when they caught the rat they added it to the pile. Whole house was disgusting.” — UsquatM8

23. They were trying to rape their own brother

“Trooper here. Responded to a fight between two brothers and another unrelated black male. All these guys were in their late thirties, early forties. Get them separated. They were all drunk. Turns out the bigger of the two brothers and the other male were fighting over who got to have sex with the other brother. They had been raping him for a while. All three were low functioning.

Not really creepy but I’ll always remember that one.” — KSP925

24. The entire family had been dead for a week

“Tiny, quiet, southern town. Whole family that had been dead for a week. Their teenage daughters boyfriend who she met online was visiting from across the country. Step dad, mother, daughter and her friend all murder and hacked up by an ax. The mom was a professor at my university a block away and when she didn’t show up to work for a few days cops went to house and talked to murder who gave them some plausible excuse so they left. He stayed in the house for a full week before leaving. The cops went back when neighbors reported the smell. They caught the guy at the airport about to fly home.” — usernamebrainfreeze

25. A sex offender had a child’s bedroom in his house

“I know I’m late to the show, but during a search a sex offender’s house, I found a room that looked like a little girl’s room. In the closet I found a 4ft doll in a pink dress. He had no kids and was in his late 50s.” — Embarker

26. We found a dead man in a running shower

“An elderly man’s daughter rung us to check on her father since she was out of town and had been unable to contact him in a few days. Arrive as his house and get no answer at the door but can hear running water, we end up finding an extremely scaly elder gentlemen dead in the still going shower.” — Wowdamelom Thought Catalog Logo Mark 

Holly is the author of Severe(d): A Creepy Poetry Collection.

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