1. I watched a complete stranger get cut in half by a train

“I honestly didn’t have time to react.

I witnessed two people getting hit by a train. One pretty much exploded, the other was cut in half.

The train folk must have contacted 911, because the fire department was there almost instantly, and I had just stayed in the same spot after throwing up pretty badly.

The backstory, is a woman was waiting for her commuter train and did not know that a 75 mph amtrak had just passed her train a few minutes ago, so when the gates went down, she tried rushing across the tracks, and got her foot caught in the walkway. The amtrak hit the horn and the brakes, but was too close to do any good. At the last minute, a guy jumped out trying to get her out of the way, and he looked up, yelled, ‘OH SHI-‘ before getting creamed. He is the one that pretty much disappeared, she got swept under the wheels and was bisected.

It happened in February, and the town spent all night cleaning up all the red and pink snow.

I volunteer at a homeless charity, and their building is right next to the tracks. The other day, there was a train that had stopped at 855. I watched at least 5 people climb under the train to get to 900 breakfast. I have never had any PTSD thankfully, but watching them crawl by the wheels, I felt nervousness and panic that I hadn’t felt since that day…” — blodisnut

2. I discovered a dead woman floating in the water

“I found a dead snorkeler while on vacation in Hawaii. She looked like she was snorkeling but I thought she looked a little off. I kept watching her and her snorkel went under water and she had no reaction. So I walked over to her and shook her shoulder with no reaction. I flipped her over and saw she was obviously not breathing so I called over to my boyfriend to help me pull her out. When I pulled off her mask her face was completely blue/grey. It was very obvious she was dead. We were on a busy beach so the lifeguards continued to give her CPR and shock her but she had passed away. The sad part was if she was with somebody they had not noticed she was missing. Very sad.” — saccybee

3. I stepped on a piece of a gunshot victim’s head

“We had to make entry to a house after a reported gunshot. I was the first one in the stack, and I am left handed, so I immediately hooked to the right, which happened to be right where the guy was sitting.

He had put an SKS in his mouth and shot himself after he received letters with pictures from his wife, who was deployed, cheating on him.

I stepped on a piece of his head when I was moving past him to clear the little laundry room. I had to change my shooting stance around a bit so I could keep one hand basically shoved in my mouth so I didn’t throw up.

Not my favorite day.” — Judoka229

4. As a child, I found a dead body in the parking lot

“I was about 12 and in the Boy Scouts. Two friends and I were helping out with the weekly cubscout meeting that was two blocks down the hill from where we had our Scout meetings. When we finished up we were walking back up the hill to the church where our meeting was.

We walked past the parking lot and I glanced to my left and saw something odd on the pavement. I said something like ‘what’s that? Somebody dumped something over there.’ It was already dark out so we couldn’t quite see it. We detoured and walked towards it to investigate. When we got within 10 feet or so we saw it was a body.

All three of us instinctively took off running. For some reason we ran all the way around the block instead of taking the direct route through the alley. I made it into the meeting room first, out of breath from the sprint. I coughed out, ‘THERES A huf huf DEAD BODY huf huf IN THE PARKING LOT!’

The scoutmaster said, ‘Yeah right, H.I.’ because I was known as kind of the class clown. Then my two buddies ran in behind me and confirmed the story.

911 was called, police and ambulances came out, I remember lots of flashing lights and sad faces.

We never did find out what happened to the guy.” — HI-McDunnough

5. I found a motorcyclist whose body was completely mutilated

“Found the singer of my band dead. OD. That was the worst one I’ve come across. Pulled some bodies from some nasty car crashes too. Saw a guy get told to bite a curb, he died. Saw what was left of a motorcyclist after a car pulled out in front him. Imagine taking a pencil and dragging it across concrete until it was worn down and gone. That was the guys head. Had to unplug my father from life support and watch him take his final breaths. That really sucked. I’ve seen more than my fair share of death.” — peewinkle 

6. We found a homeless man who had been stabbed to death

“Walking my dog with a friend and her dog in a normally pretty busy park in Chicago. It was early AM, and her dog took off sniffing towards a line of trees. We followed, and the dog had found a homeless man that had been stabbed sometime overnight. It wasn’t very gory, but the skin color and open eyes have been hard to forget. We just called the cops and stuck around until they came.

A second time I was ordering at jimmy johns in Uptown (Chicago neighborhood) and a gang related drive by took place outside. After the shooting stopped I went outside and saw a man face down on the sidewalk. Hard to tell where the bullets hit him but there was a ton of blood. The fire station was only 4 buildings away so they came over and checked his pulse. He was very very dead. I didn’t go back in for my food, went home, and got sick. Really lucky no bullets went thru the window.” — Welcometochicago8

7. I found my friend in a broken bloody heap

8. A man inside of the psych unit hung himself

“Former corrections officer on the emergency squad. My first dead man was when we got called to an emergency in the prison psych unit. I ran in and saw a nurse and an officer standing at a prisoner door. I looked inside and the prisoner was hanging off his door handle. I had to push him into the corner to get in. He was already cold when I got there, but I pulled him out and started CPR. The other officer did the compressions and I did the ventilations. Of course we heard cracking and crunching while the officer was doing compressions. After a few moments, I saw the prisoners belly rise, so I knew I was not getting all the air into his lungs. Right after I readjusted his neck, his stomach contents came up, into my mouth. We didn’t have CPR masks back then. I started puking, and swept the mouth and tried again. I puked again. Real health care showed up and relieved us. Even after I cleaned myself up, I puked and dry heaved the rest of the day. I knew I shouldn’t have started. His eyes were open. They looked five miles deep. I had seen this look years before when my father-in-law died. It’s a seminal moment and I felt the same with this prisoner. I knew we probably wouldn’t get him back, but I had to try. I was luckier the next time, when I was a first responder for our volunteer fire department, this guy stopped breathing, but as soon as I adjusted his head, he started breathing. I have watched more than a few people die in my years, and it seems somehow easier now. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older, or because I’ve dealt with it before.” — benzethonium

9. We found a bloated corpse floating in the pond

10. My coworker died right in front of my eyes

“I had a co-worker that I carpooled with die right in front of me. We rode to work in the morning and he complained of feeling unwell and very tired. End of the day he got the car from the parkibg garage and pulled up to the front of the building to collect me and another passenger. It was about 1530 and a hot summer day. The sun was shining on the front of the building. He stepped out of the car and opened the truck. I was standing beside him. He seemed to pass out or faint. I grabbed him and we steadied him. He said he was fine. He took a step and went down again. I grabbed him and pulled him into the shade. Put some underneath his head and told someone to call emergency services. His breathing was shallow and I couldn’t find a radial pulse so I checked his neck. It was weak. His skin was clammy. His speech was slowing and I couldn’t tell what he was saying. The ambulance came and picked him up. I was last person he spoke to. They took him off life support the next day after his family got a chance to see him. He died of a massive internal hemorrhage from liver disease that he had been diagnosed with the previous week. I didn’t notice until his body was in the ambulance that there were pools of congealed blood on the sidewalk that looked like pudding.” — zamascipio

11. We found a body frozen inside of the ice

“I was playing ice hockey on a retention pond with friends 3 or 4 years ago, and we found a body frozen in the ice. it happened very quickly and we all thought it was a prank because what we saw first was a hand sticking out, and it was white and rubbery and looked like a cheap prop or something. It turned out to be the body of a missing adult man who had autism and lived two or three houses down from my friend’s. Apparently he had wandered out in the middle of the night and had been missing for several days. It was pretty shocking to see. My friend ran to his house and got his mom, and then his mom took us all inside.” — christmasbell

12. I found a dead body hidden beneath a house

“I work for a company that does environmental conservation and disaster relief and during the Baton Rouge floods I was under a house looking for their gas cutoff (old house was demolished the new one had been built over the valve). I remember being very worried about snakes and I looked to my left in the pitch black was a large mass. I turned on y headlamp and low and behold, a human body. I sat there looking at it for about 15-20 seconds before slowly crawling out from under the house and calling the police. Turns out he was a squatter and didn’t get the memo that there was a flash flood warning for the city. He got stuck in a 2 foot crawl space in 4.7 ft of water. Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.” — NoMansPies

13. We saw a man in a pool of his own blood

14. Someone brought a dead fetus into our medical clinic

“I’m late and I don’t know if this counts but it messed with me pretty bad and still bothers me.

I used to work in the front office of a medical clinic and it had been a slow day. It was afternoon and this guy came in with a brown paper bag and said he was told to drop it off at the clinic. I figured it was a stool or urine sample so I opened the bag to see if it needed to go to the nurses station or to the hospital lab.

Nope, inside was a Ziploc baggie with a fetus in it. The guy’s girlfriend had miscarried and they had called earlier for help. (I didn’t know what the call was about, I answered the phone and transferred it to the nurses for triage.) I guess the nurses said that they could do some tests and asked them to collect the fetus and bring it in.

Gotta fucking warn people so they know what they’re expecting. I just sat there and cried for a while. Still remember it and think about it sometimes.” — CennaX1215

15. I watched a man jump to his death

“I saw a jumper in downtown Toronto. He was lying in a parking lot below a 30 story building. He was covered by a big tarp, but you could see a big circle of red and pink liquid around him on the pavement.” — danrwalker

16. I found a missing woman while out jogging

“You know the classic ‘the body was found by a hiker/jogger early Sunday morning?’ Yeah, I was one of those.

A woman in her early thirties went missing in my home town, which is very unusual where I’m from. So, I had heard about it through the grapevine and on the news, but I was also very removed from anyone who knew her. There were rumours that she’d been schizophrenic, her car was missing, and she’d left behind a husband and a toddler, so the police generally thought she’d run off and would eventually come back. There were still searches and posters, etc, and it went on for a few weeks with no sign of her.

I was walking on a pretty popular track early morning with my dog. I got to a steeper part, which ducked into some heavier bush and carried on along under cover about half way up a hill. It was the most surreal thing, because I walk on my own a lot I can sometimes spook myself out, and think ‘man, what if I found a body right now. That’d be totally crazy, haha.’

I was just admiring the scenery, glanced to the right, and saw her hanging from a tree down the hill off the trail. Everything was in slow motion. I remember feeling extremely calm, but at the same time my heart was just pumping like crazy.

I tied my dog to a tree so that he wouldn’t mess with anything, took a few steps down towards her and peered closer but she definitely wasn’t moving. I had an extreme fear that she might’ve only just done it because she didn’t look decomposed. I’d actually seen dead bodies before after living through a natural disaster. There’s a way dead people look that is just so… unnatural, for lack of a better word. It’s almost like you can sense it before you’ve even confirmed it. She didn’t look like that yet.

So I went down to her, but the closer I got the more certain I was she was very dead, and so I got out my cell phone and called the police. I could see her suicide note under a rock near her body, but I didn’t want to mess with anything, so I stumbled back up to the trail.

I don’t know how to describe how I felt. It was very instinctual. My brain immediately was like, ‘Okay, you found a dead body. Now you call the police. And you stay calm. And you tell them what they want to know. And you do what they say. And you pat your dog for comfort.’ I didn’t start having real thoughts again until after the police arrived (they asked me to stay where I was and keep other walkers from coming past the scene until they arrived). I’ll never forget the way my senses were heightened, as well. I kept looking around, up, down, over my shoulder. I felt like I could hear everything in the forest. She’d obviously committed suicide but the wrongness of the situation made me feel like I was in danger.

A couple of officers eventually showed up, but I was about an hour into the track so I was there for a while and started to get nervous, spooked out, giggles. I felt extremely guilty about this afterwards, but the very nice police officer explained that I was obviously in shock and he’d seen much stranger reactions. I remember the police man coming up the track waving to me, and I sort of didn’t know what to say. Like, ‘Hey, having a good morning, officer?’ didn’t seem quite right, so I sort of said ‘Hey guys,’ quite grimly, and then awkwardly motioned down to the body.

One of them stayed, and the other walked back with me. The walk back was super weird. He kept checking in to make sure I was okay, but at the same time, I really was fine by that point. So we had a small chat about the walks in the area, my dog, and he told me what to expect over the next few hours. I remember thinking he was cute and only a little older than me, and then reprimanding myself like jesus, not really the time.

I was taken back to the station, given a cup of tea, and asked about everything I’d seen/done at the scene. During the questioning I realized it must’ve been the missing woman, and remembering she had a young child and husband I had a little cry, haha. Everyone was very sweet and kind to me. I had a few nightmares in the following weeks, but no lasting effect otherwise.” — do__you__concur

17. I found a dead man down by the river while walking my dog

“So I was playing down by the river with my dog somewhere in Oregon where I live when I was like 14 or so when I saw a dude laying in the fetal position. Assuming it was a homeless person just taking a nap as I was near a park. (Outside of the park a bit where it was more brushy and not managed). I made a mental note of it though. The next day I came back and saw the same guy in the same position and I was like ‘Woah, that’s weird, he’s probably dead or something.’ I walked up to him with a stick and poked him a little and he didn’t move. Didn’t really smell anything so I assumed he might just be passed out so I went to a local business near by where I knew the owner as a family friend and used their phone to call 911. I met the cops near the location and guided them in. They put on gloves and checked his pulse and they said, ‘Yep, he’s dead.’ They took my report. Guy was a homeless man the cops were familiar with. They suspected he killed himself off a nearby bridge or fell off in a drug or alcohol induced stupor then made it to the bank of the river and died.

I didn’t really take it hard but I remember getting really frustrated at a friend of mine because he didn’t believe me at the time. The cops gave me a number to a therapist if I was having a hard time but I never felt the need to call them.” — MasterProtoge

18. I came across a man who had shot himself in the chest

“About 4 years ago I came home from lunch since my wife was off work caring for our newborn. She had left to take a short walk but came back and said there was a lady screaming in the townhouse in the units next to our place. I ran over since I had CPR training when I was a lifeguard. Found the lady’s husband in the garage sitting in his car. He had shot himself in the chest with a .22 handgun, a suicide. Some 20 year old HVAC guy was working next door and got there the same time I did.

I pulled him out beside the car and started to do CPR while I had one of the neighbors call for help. After about 40 seconds I knew he was gone. He was cold enough and the blood had already flowed down to his lower extremities. I kept working on him because you’re supposed to and his wife and son were there and figured maybe it would help calm down his wife. Cops arrived and then paramedics who immediately declared him dead.

Cops made me wait around for about and hour before the talked to me so I talked to his next door neighbor while they made me wait. Apparently they said he was a really nice guy, hard worker. They said they could frequently hear his wife yelling at him. Apparently the adult son was completely fried from drugs and had stolen from the family before. Later came to find out that the wife had come home around 11 and saw the garage door open and assumed he was leaving for work. She went inside and fell asleep on the couch, woke up an hour or so later and went out and found him.

When it happened I went into ‘gotta save this guy’s life mode’ and just did what i was taught really calmly. After paramedics got there i was a bit shook up for a while. The weirdest part was when I was waiting for the cops to talk to me, I was sitting by the stepson. Very detached like he really wasn’t interested in what was happening. I didn’t realize he was the stepson even until about 20 min of talking to him when I asked who he was. Neighbor was right, his brain was fried.” — WeylandExec 

19. His eyes looked like a dead animal’s eyes

“It was very gross. Had to grab his hair and pull his head back to see if he was still alive. He had puked, his eyes were open and like a dead animal’s eyes, he was still warm, all muscles slack the skin drooped on his face. Had just met the guy that morning and he seemed like a real nice guy who had just gone through a very bad year. The paramedics worked on him for almost a half hour but he was so dead already.” — safetyalwaysoff5000

20. I found my great grandfather after his death

“I was online schooled, and one summer in high school I went to California and stayed with my great grandfather who had dementia because my mom couldn’t and had “suspicions” about his care taker.

If you’ve never been around a family member with severe dementia I very much recommend against living with them for 3 months, as it was the worst 3 months of my life. He didn’t know who I was anymore, he kept confusing me with my grandma (his daughter who killed herself) and he would scream at me until he cried about how I did such a terrible thing and left my family behind.

Anyway, I found him dead on the couch one day, it was peaceful, and honestly, made me breathe easier. I loved the man, but when I found his body I was happy he had finally gone.” — 2sassi4u

21. I found a man who suffered from cardiac arrest

“Didn’t find them as such, but was called to attend a cardiac arrest. The person was long gone, but myself and the ambulance crew had to go through the motions for quite some time before a doctor arrived via HEMS to call death. What made it worse was that the person’s spouse was standing in the door watching us, and their young son was sat at the top of the stairs. There is really nothing you can do but your best. The strangest part was just driving away when my job was done.” — charlie_boo

22. I found my grandmother dead in her armchair

“I found my beloved Grandmother dead in her arm chair over two years ago. She had been unwell for about a week and the day before she died, I went over to her house and it was a complete mess, supposedly my uncles were meant to be taking care of her (I had been away for about 10 days). I spent the day cleaning and washing clothes and just furiously thinking about my uncles and how did they let her get like this – I want too add that she was not neglected at all and I still don’t know what happened during that time I was away. Anyway, she was sitting in her chair while I cleaned and kept saying to me to come and talk to her, I kept saying in a minute, let me finish this cleaning. It is a day I regret so deeply and I’m tearing up just thinking about the time I wasted cleaning instead of talking.

Finally I went home that night and I was really on edge, I had an awful feeling and I called her and she said she was fine, I told her I would be over the next day with some food and medicine.

The next morning I unusually slept in, I called her and she answered and she seemed okay but I still had a nagging feeling that she was going to die. I spoke to her around 10am, I got to her place at 11ish and I KNEW before I walked in the door that she was dead, there was a strange feeling in the air, I walked inside and she was in her chair, where she always sat.

I was literally hysterical, hyperventilating, screaming, I called the ambulance and I was instructed to give CPR even though I knew there was no hope. I had to pick her up out of the chair and do this, to this day it is still the most traumatic thing to do, the CPR was pointless. Finally the ambulance arrived and also some detectives to question me.

I am still greatly affected by what happened, I should have stayed the night with her the day before, I should not have slept in. I should have gone to her place before I went to collect her medication and foods But I do feel she knew she was going to die that day, there was strange signs that happened and she said some strange things. We were so close and her behaviour the day before and the morning of were just weird. She knew.” — MarriedWithHuskies