Who knows what plethora of things you can find in another person's house? The place we call home can easily be a base for the strangest, the bizarre, and the unexpected.
u/Aura_Blaze_Official asked: Redditors who have a job where they go into other people's homes (plumbers, electricians, etc) what's the weirdest most disturbing thing you've seen while working in a customer's house?
At least she has a hobby.
Was a firefighter another time in my life. Had a middle of the night call to a mobile home for an elderly lady once. We walk in and it's dark but as my eyes start to adjust I think "oh that's weird wallpaper". I keep looking around "huh, it's on the ceiling too". Weird inconsistent patterns and rectangle shapes. Eyes adjust some more while we are talking to her. Wtf? "Are those puzzles?!"
She had hundreds of puzzles that she had glued when completed and then glued them to every surface of her mobile home. Walls, ceiling, living room, bedroom. Every square inch covered. Weird... But you do you. Especially in your own home. Certainly not as bad as most ITT.
Look at all these chickens.
Used to deliver oxygen to people's homes. Saw plenty of weird things. Lots of hoarders, but this one took the cake. He didn't want to let us into his house, but I had to do a home safety assessment before I could set up the equipment. He was anxious about letting me in because his house was mess. He kept telling me about his messy house.
Come to find out, it wasn't just messy. It was filled with 200 chickens. He was proud of his show chickens and wouldn't let them live in a barn or coop. The smell was unbearable. Other than that, he was a super nice guy.
What an awful sight.
A few years back I worked as an electrician.
I found a guy with a rifle laying next to him where he had tried to shoot himself, but he had "missed" the vital parts. Blood was all over the bed but he was still breathing, he was in coma state of mind, heard later that he died that day.
No idea.
Long ago I did estimates for fire and water damage repairs for a restoration company. This couple had a smallish fire in their bedroom. When I enter the home it's seemingly normal, smells like smoke (there was a fire, makes sense). They take me to the bedroom and it was the mattress that had endured the majority of the fire, along with some of the wall above the head of the bed and smoke damage to the ceiling.
Next to each side of the bed are 10 gallon buckets FILLED TO THE BRIM with cigarette butts, and hundreds of spilled over butts all over the floor. I was just in awe how they could live like this in their bedroom, especially since the rest of their home seemed tidy and normal. Also completely beyond me why they wouldn't clean it up after the fire if for no other reason than insurance adjusters being able to blame them (rightly) and possibly not pay out.
"How did the fire start," I asked. (required to ask)
"No idea," the husband replied.
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I was a paramedic in Oakland and once I was in a home where a child has been bitten by a rat in her crib. As we were standing there talking to the mother about her options a rat walked up to one of the firefighters and bit his boot.
The firefighters stomp to the rat to death and the rat was taken to the health department for testing. That was a strange situation.
Awkward.
Fire Alarm Inspector. Working in a cheap long term hotel and knocked on a door where a larger man dressed in essentially a purple bikini opens the door half asleep. Enter to test the smoke detector and tried to keep my eyes off the bed but I knew I had seen something...tried not to look but I did and there's a big old purple adult toy next to the tv remote.
The detector then decides to not alarm in a timely fashion so I'm just staring at the wall hoping it will alarm so I get out of the room.
Probably the right move.
Bunch of used pregnancy tests on the floor of the teenage daughter's closet.
I didn't say a damn word to anybody.
Anxiety sucks.
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Just read a post in another subreddit about a girl with social anxiety who hid under her bed when the plumbers came and then the plumbers caught her under there. And then she ran and hid in the bathroom until they left.
Wonder if those plumbers are on reddit. I most definitely want to hear their side.
Good call.
I use to do flooring and when we had to get up the sub flooring due to water damage. Underneath it there was a black garbage bag. When I opened said bag it had a bunch of women's clothes in it. Didn't think anything about it until we dumped it out and found ripped underwear and torn dresses.
Told the owner we had forgot some stuff at work and wouldn't be back until tomorrow. Called the police and never went back. The house was soon up for sale a month or so later.
That's kinda wholesome.
Food bank delivery to home bound elders.
I always fill two banana boxes (around foot and a half by 3 and a foot deep) of all types of food and deliver to his house. One time after delivering to him for 3 years I have to come inside because he hurt his foot.
He had never thrown out a single box. They lined every wall and entrance. He built a castle around his bed, and a series of paths through his house. It was like those pillow forts you would make as a kid but with boxes.
I asked him if he wanted help getting rid of them and he said no. That it was fun and helped with his dementia. He's super fun.
That's a whole lotta nope.
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I work for a restoration company. This is a long story but I'll keep it short.
We get a call to go to this house. We're told to clean upstairs and completely gut the basement. It sounds like a lot of work but definitely doable. We arrive, and the second we set foot in the front door, we're greeted with the rancid stench of years of accumulated filth.
Once in the front door, we saw a mountain (literally up to my waist) of empty liquor bottles and milk jugs, littered with empty cigarette packs and butts in the living space. In the kitchen, another mountain, this time it was made of dirty dishes and takeout containers glued together with moldy grime and sludge that was once food. Over in the dining area, a literal minefield of turds. The dog that lived there would regularly poo on the floor, interestingly, the shots were evenly spaced. To inspect the bathroom, we had to cross the minefield, unfortunately, it was impossible to avoid stepping on the little doggie bombs so after a quick round of rock paper scissors, a loser was chosen to be sacrificed to the bathroom gods. As my poor co-worker walked across the kitchen, the sound of the puppy delights crunching like Cheetos under his feet began. The bathroom was a nightmare. We were informed that there was no running water before arriving but we didn't expect that to result in a third mountain. A mountain of poo filled garbage bags, human poop. The smell was unbearable, my co-worker sprinted to the front door and decorated the lawn with his lunch.
Having seen the entirety of the top floor, we decided to venture into the basement. For this, we put on boots and masks so we didn't have to struggle to breath. We made our way down the dark, musty stairwell and discovered about six inches of water waiting for us at the bottom. The reason the customer had no running water was because the main line broke and was pouring into the basement. Thing is, this had been going on for years, the water was pouring full bore into the basement for three years. The only reason it didn't start pouring out the windows is the drain in the laundry room. The basement walls had black mould up to and on the ceiling, and there was more mountains of recyclables and belongings all covered in mold and sludge.
So, the most disturbing thing I've seen in a customers house was the state of the house itself.
TL;DR: Went to a house, house had several hundred dollars worth of refundable recycling lying around and a load of mold and actual poo.
Not the type of tip you'd want to get.
Pizza delivery driver...
I delivered once to a caravan at the side of a sketchy drug house. The guy went to hand me some cash and accidentally handed me his baggie of ICE too. I handed it back and said something along the lines of 'woah just cash will do mate, better take that back'
Crack is wack.
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I paint and flip apartments as a side job and I found a pipe. We kinda just threw it away, and just hoped there wasn't anything else. We wouldn't call the police or anything most likely nothing would have happened.
Sounds sketchy af.
Artist here, went to a house to do a mural. Guy had over 1000 crosses hanging on the walls of his house. Also most of the house was built by what seemed to be highly unskilled labor. The patron was a criminal defense lawyer that offered work on his compound instead of paying lawyer fees. So there were ex cons walking around building stuff around his place, they were nice enough people. But....yeah.
Also one of the rooms wasn't tall enough? So they were just digging down into the ground to make the room taller. Almost every room was just a WTF situation. Another oddity was that the entire compound's construction materials did not match with anything else it was made with since it was made with reclaimed materials. The owner is rich AF but I think ONLY because he might be the cheapest person alive on the planet. But the number of crosses was the most disturbing of all of it.
Kids these days.
Not me but my friend is a paramedic he got a call out to a stroke and when he and his partner arrived they were let in with police escort as they were taking her out of the house they happened to catch a glimpse of her son in his room playing video games, he turned back and looked at them and pushed the door shut.
Awkward
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Ok so I once worked as a pizza delivery guy right. One day I get an order like normal and drove to the address, the moment I took off my motorcycle helmet I heard what obviously was the sound of sex. I still had other places to go after this one so I knocked on the door politely, and they stopped for a few moments, but kept at it.
I was kinda mad, so I kept knocking, not very hard but I realized that the dude fell into my rhythm. So I knocked faster and faster and the dude went faster and faster until I heard an annoyed grunt. He the came and paid and when I asked about tip he yelled in my face, "NO TIP!"
That definitely isn't the right way to dispose of cats.
Not a personal experience, but my dad is a Electrician.
He goes to alot of crazy cat lady houses but this story definitely takes the cake.
He went to some old ladys house, immediately when he walked in the room smelled like complete piss, which was nothing out of the usual for cat ladys. My dad counted about ten or more, and that was just in the living room. He finished up his work and got up to tell the lady that he was done, when he looked over to see a big shelf just FULL of stuffed dead cats. It made him want to puke. I remember him so vividly ranting about his day and bringing up that story.
Ca-CAW.
Not me, but my dad and brother.
They install radon systems in people's houses. A lot of times they are contracted by a leasing agencies and such. The tenants know they're coming but truly don't care most of the time. They've seen everything from hoarding, to heavy drugs and paraphernalia, and fecal matter all over the house.
However, they have one particular house that absolutely topped everything. It was a kind of run down house from the outside but nothing too bad. And most of the rooms inside weren't anything terrible. But then they got to one of the bedrooms that immediately kind of set off their weird meters.
The first thing was that there was a GIANT shrine/altar that took up almost an entire wall. There were pictures and garlic and other off things hanging from it but that was about it. They kind of shrugged their shoulders and continued on working in the room. However, they kept hearing this rustling noise every couple of minutes and couldn't figure it out.
Until my brother sees this potato sack type bag under a chair in the room. He realizes that the noise is coming from there. So he goes over to the chair and squats down and sees that there is a full grown, live crow in this bag. As soon as he makes the connection, the crow absolutely starts losing it. They said they've never left a room or building so fast. They actually told the leasing agency that contracted then that they would do the other houses but not that one unless a member of their management team was with them.
Gross.
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I used to do roofing work in Florida as a salesman. Sometimes if the damage was severe enough clients could have interior damages from leaks. My company was a roofing contractor and a general contractor so we always tried to sell the whole job and not just the roof.
One trailer I went to after a hurricane was just in absolute disgusting shape. There was a woman living there probably in her late 60's to early 70's and there was just stuff EVERYWHERE.
She had newspapers from 20 years ago, but that wasn't even close to all of it. The unit reeked of black mold and cat piss. Parts of her ceiling were collapsing, but not only the ceiling the FLOOR in this woman's house had holes everywhere. Where there wasn't holes the floor would sag with each step.
That home was by far the worst of any that I walked into for that job and I was terrified the entire time I was dealing with her. I left the company about a month after going out there but I'm sure we didn't even touch the property because it was beyond any sensible repair. I advised the owner to leave asap because of all the mold in the home but she wasn't having it.
That's a big ol' nope.
Went into a house to measure carpet. Owner (landlord) is reviewing drawing on iPad I'm holding when I look down at the kitchen table.
It is covered in ants.
Wow.
It's the things I didn't see, that scares me more than what I have seen.
I work in healthcare and we our unit does home visits daily, to help elderly and handicapped people get dressed, get fed, go to the toilet. That sort of thing, like all-inclusive within your own four walls.
An old lady in a wheelchair had put out a small plate of milk on the floor, when asked about it she explained that it was for the kittens. She did not have any kittens, no pets at all, in fact. I tried to shift her thoughts to something real, and didn't accuse her of hallucinating. Next day, a new plate. This time she's leaned over in her wheelchair to the point of almost falling out. I ask her what she's doing. She says the cats aren't drinking the milk. They are just smelling it. I ask where the cats come from "Under the kitchen counter, they seem to live there". The kitchen counter with 1 millimeter clearing between the floor.
The hallucinations continues and worsens. All of a sudden she sees a boy, a young kid. She asks what he wants, what his name is, where he's from. No answer. Never an answer. He starts sleeping on he couch. Later, in her bed. She asks him to leave, he just looks at her. When me, or my colleagues arrive she says he's hiding inside the bed cover. It gets so bad that she does not go to bed. She stays up all night because the bed "is taken, and he refuses to leave".
After days, she tells me she sees a small girl as well, just sometimes. Swinging her legs off the couch and sleeping in it, the cats are there too, she says. They are never mean, they are just scaring her. They are making her stay up all night, losing sleep because the bed and couch are always taken when she needs them. They follow her around the apartment.
One night, when going to bed, she sees a man in her bed, with the boy. I asked her if he talks to her. "No, but he wants me to leave. I can tell. He's there to protect the boy, so the boy can do as he pleases".
These events stretched a few weeks, sometimes she got to sleep. Sometimes not. The scariest part is not the hallucinations of an old, sick woman. The scariest part is that we have more residents in the same house, that we visit. Two days after the woman stopped seeing the children I spoke to another resident. She says she sees a small boy, and a girl. Usually during the day. They never speak. Always silent.
Oh no.
Installed blinds and was in a large 2 story house. It turned out to be a group home. When I went into the basement it was empty except for a large round bed, lights mounted on tripods, and an empty tripod. (I assume for the camera) This was early 2000s so making "home movies" was a little more of an involved process I figure.
So many questions raced through my head. Am I in danger? Who is being filmed? Where are they exits?
Oh dear god.
Heck no.
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I sell cable door to door. Went to a run down section of a run down town, and these apartments were set up in what must have been an abandoned Motel. Everything there had a very motel-like atmosphere.
Anyways, I walk up to this one apartment and the blinds are wide open in the front window. Big fat guy in boxers and a tank top (wifebeater) on the couch watching TV. I ring the bell, he gets up to answer the door, and I notice the giant bottle of lube, and a glistening double headed sex toy.
While we were talking I asked if he lives with anyone. Family, girl/boyfriend, whatever.
"Nope! Just me and my dog!"
Ugh.
Smart move.
Not really meant for me but once when baby sitting I went exploring around the father's house and found a very expensive looking camera aiming at the neighbors bedroom window.
I stop babysitting for him right after.
Bad Naomi!
When my parents were young and living in a crappy apartment together, they had a pet rat named Naomi. On a particularly hot night, my parents decided to sleep on the floor rather than the bed because it was just too unbearably hot.
My dad wakes up with Naomi having escaped her cage and munching on his forehead (we think she tasted the sweat on his face and thought he was a tasty snack). They went into their bedroom and discovered that a figurine/doll they owned had its face chewed off.
My mom jokes that she got a "taste for face."
How sad.
I used to do some work for a woman who was a certified hoarder. She paid me by the hour to try and help sort out her mess. I'm not kidding, her front door would be wedged shut by the junk.
And when she cleared some space from the inside, you finally got some room to open the door up. The mess in her hallway was piled almost to the ceiling. She would crawl on all fours across the mess to reach her first floor bedroom. She couldn't even shower in her bathroom as that was also full of mess.
She was actually lovely person in many ways although clearly had many issues. I eventually has to stop helping her out. It was too much for me to bear. The stress of working in that kind of environment like that began to effect me. She was living in her own filth and she lived in pure squalor.
To this day I've never seen anything else like it. Sometimes when I came over the first job would for me buy her coffee and a sandwich. Because of the mess on the first floor she attached a bucket on a string and lowered it out of the window, and if then load up the bucket from outside on the ground floor and she'd pull it back up. It was hard to imagine how someone could live like that, incomprehensible.
That's comforting.
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I'm a home visitor and a client had a dead mouse nailed to their outside wall of the house right at the front door. It was eye level and pointed outward as if jumping out of the air. They were creepy weirdos.
You learn something new every day.
Husband (delivery driver and furniture assembler) informs me he went in to a customers house and found sex swings and other such kinky accoutrements hanging from the ceiling in the garage.
Surprised you don't have a CDC suit already.
Electrician by trade. Working in low income apartments. The first floor of these buildings is always the mechanicals of the building. The boiler room, electrical room and storage areas etc are always cluttered like they are populated by hoarders. Moldy cardboard boxes, mouse poop everywhere, everything is sticky. Makes me wish I had a CDC chemical warfare suit.
Firefighters deal with much more than just fires.
Firefighter. Had a call for a smoke condition in the kitchen of a small ranch style house at 3:30am. We went, sure enough there was. We ask if everyone is out of the house, and the guy was like nope, but don't worry about it. We were like um no, we need everyone out there's a possibly fire in the walls.
Turns out this was a crack house. Being firefighters we couldn't really do anything but just get in and get our job done. We reassured him they won't get in trouble but he needs to take us to everybody or tell is where they're at. Oh boy. The mother was upstairs... Naked. Probably about 85 years old. Refused to get out. Eventually did but refused to get dressed. She started to hit on my asst chief as well.
Two other guys (assuming sons) were fighting in a living room. Needles everywhere. Mold everywhere. Torn up carpet, place smelled of dog piss but no animals in sight. The place was vial, and their kitchen wasn't much better but we've seen some nasty kitchens. Least to say job got done, we've back to the firehouse, hosed everyone down with a garden hose because we all felt gross, and stared wide eyed into our drinks for about an hour until the sun came up.
Bot crazy stories.
I can't help but decide between two things, one is my experience, one is for my teachers. Mine is simple, I was installing a GFI for my uncle, go into his panel and find a breaker for a room called the "porno room." He refuses to turn it off to find out which room it is.
My teachers is that he goes into this guy's house to replace an attic fan, glad he's walking through he looks at a kitchen table where he sees a huge stack of money and a Glock just lying on the table. He said he did the job and walked out, ghosting the man sitting there counting it.
Uhnhhhhh.....
I was doing door to door "sales" one summer for one of those "charities" where they want you to commit to monthly donations for a year. We were told not to go in peoples houses for safety reasons but we all knew you had to get inside to really solidify the donation sometimes. One afternoon a middle aged man said he was in the middle of cooking so if I wanted to give him my pitch I'd have to step inside. That may sound sketchy but that actually occurred a lot and the man was literally holding a bowl and whisk in his hand so I said sure and followed him to the kitchen.
I sat at the kitchen table and was focused on my pitch so I didn't really take in my surroundings at first. The man was moving around frantically from countertop to countertop stirring things. I then noticed there were giant bowls of cooked spaghetti noodles everywhere. And his "stirring" was actually him just whisking the various bowls of spaghetti noodles. None of it made sense.
After I said my closing line he sat down with me and immediately started telling me about his wife that recently left him for someone else. He went on for over 20 minutes without ever stopping or waiting for me to give any sort of response. Before I knew it I was following him upstairs because he wanted to show me his new computer.
It was the biggest desktop I've ever seen in my life and he put on a slideshow of photos of him and his ex wife. After a few minutes I realized it wasn't him in the photos. But he gave a backstory on each photo as if it were him. I don't remember how I finally got out of there and I can't remember if he ended up donating.
Praise be.
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Use to service this Doctor's house regularly because they had 10 HVAC systems that were old.
They had a life size Jesus standing at the foot of their bed, facing the bed.
Never even met the guy, but he was very nice over the phone. The wife was an absolute hag though.
I used to deliver food for a small place that made things like pizza, chicken, wraps etc. I often had to go inside people's homes on request to deliver. There was one customer that all the other delivery people avoided when it came in. It was a massive delivery order, I don't remember what that amounts to any longer, but it must have been something like 5-6 pizzas, some chicken, etc. I arrive at a small mobile home, and knock on the door, and a voice asks me to enter.
I walk into the living room to a stench like french cheese baked in Parmesan with a side of cooking artichokes. There was the largest woman I've ever seen, sat in front of a sofa, covered in towels and other tattered cloths.
She was so massive I couldn't make eye contact etc. Apparently she had a deal with the food place, because she didn't pay, and as such didn't tip for the delivery. I became the delivery person that had to take that order each time for a couple weeks, until there was a kind of emergency there, and the fire department had to actually cut the mobile home apart to remove this woman. That stench stays with me today, ugh...
Seems a little excessive.
I used to work for a company that did control systems for hydronic heating systems in apartment buildings.
A co-worker of mine had to install temperate sensors in some of the units so that we could get a general idea of the heating profile in the building.
One of the tenants was convinced that he was installing a listening device. By the time he got back to the office, it had stopped reporting the temperature. Guy had taken a hammer to it.
That's what I call good timing.
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Not my story but my dad's. He is a plumber, and he works on call for a rental agency.
One day he got called out to fix a sink in an apartment. The tenant, a woman in her early 20's let him in and he got to work.
As he went about the job, the woman kept talking to him, and it became increasingly obvious that not only was she drunk as a skunk at 2pm on a Wednesday, but that she was also trying her hardest to get into his pants.
Dad is trying to politely rebuff this woman, and finish the job as quickly as he can. He is freaking out that he will get in to trouble if he offends the tenant and she decides to flip the tables on him and call assault. Eventually she goes and sits on the couch, but continues to pose in a lewd nature until she finally passes out, legs akimbo, on full display.
Now Dad is finished fixing the sink but is also concerned about leaving this heavily intoxicated woman passed out by herself, but also doesn't want to go near her with a ten foot barge pole in her current state.
Luckily the situation was resolved when the boyfriend got home. Dad decided to be honest about his interaction with the woman; apparently the boyfriend just sighed and thanked him for fixing the sink, covered up his snoring girlfriend and let Dad out, apologising for the bother.
Dad noped it out of there and put in a formal report to the rental agency to cover his butt.
To this day I would love to know what went down once she woke up!
Wow, Mom.
I was a private tutor during my bachelor. Once I was in one house helping a student and the mother left some eggs in the oven. After 30 minutes teaching mathematics, I hear a small bang in the kitchen and starts smelling like burned awfulness. Some smoke comes out of the kitchen, I told my student to tell her mom and turn on the oven off.
Her mother was taking a nap, and after waking her up she went again to sleep like nothing was burning in her kitchen.
Happy cows come from this guy's house.
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I work as a cleaner for the elderly and disabled around town (so that they are able to keep living in their own house instead of a retirement home or whatever). There's one particular guy whose house was something else. Not disturbing, but definitely weird. The dude had a thing for cows, and almost everything in his house was cow-themed. Cups, plates, pillows, paintings, bed sheets, chairs, soap holders, curtains and I think even the toilet brush.
He's a pretty chill dude though, and I think his cow collection gives him a bit of purpose in life. Go cow-man.
Whoops.
My father in law is a home inspector. He ran across a sex dungeon. He is not a enlightened man and made some crass comments about the same sex couple that owned it. Nothing outright hateful but they were slobs and the house was a wreck but their sexual activity area was the only semi clean area in the home.
Sounds disgusting.
I do estimates for home improvement. Go in about 1000 houses a year. I have seen some STUFF. The most notable was a gentleman's house for window replacements. We chatted outside because he said he has "5 hounds that will howl the entire time" once I made it into the house I found out that he just lets them piss and shit EVERYWHERE and did NOTHING about it. Made it a foot into the door before I gagged and left the house. Made some excuse about how I didn't need to actually be outside. The smell was so bad that when he opened his garage door I wasn't able to be within 50 feet of the house.
Now I have been to some houses that smell and I have been able to stick it out for the sale. This....this wasn't worth it.