Professionals Share The Strangest Thing They've Encountered In Someone Else's Home

People are weird. Okay well... we're all weird. But we all don't know that because we do so well at hiding it. If our neighbors knew what we were all hiding from one another in our homes, we'd all be sleeping with pepper spray. The service men and women of the world who enter homes on the regular hold all the real secrets. Oh the things they must see... or, the things they'll never be able to unsee! Some poor fool is arriving to unclog your toilet, he doesn't need to be witness to your crystal meth orgy.

Redditor _theknights-whosay-Ni is dying for the gossip on all the things people are hiding in their homes by asking... _People who enter homes for a living (Maintenance, cable contractors, etc), what's the strangest thing you've encountered when entering someone's home?

I HATE CRABS!

I worked for a beach house rental company when I was in college. And part of my job was to go inspect houses to make sure that everyone had left before the cleaners came. So there was this one house. The renters had left on Friday. But because of some holiday, cleaners weren't going to be there until Monday. I walked in the house on Monday morning and was hit in the face with something pungent and wrong.

The smell was incredibly strong. Whatever was there had been there a couple of days. It was the kind of organic rot that doesn't just happen overnight. I looked all over the house. I couldn't find anything out of sorts. The house was, actually, remarkably clean. I go into the kitchen and the smell is strongest there, but I can't find its source. The refrigerator was empty and clean, the garbage cans had been emptied, and I couldn't figure out where this awful smell of death was coming from.

Then I opened the dishwasher. And the smell was so bad that I almost threw up and passed out. So, here's the thing. There used to be this trendy life hack thing where you could essentially steam fish in the dishwasher. What you do is you take a piece of fish and you wrap it in foil and you put it in the dishwasher on the top rack and you run it on a cycle without detergent. And the heat from the steam and hot water cooks the fish.

Welp, these geniuses decided that they were going to do that, but with crabs. So they jammed about three dozen live crabs into the dishwasher, and then filled the detergent tray with Old Bay seasoning. They must have been drunk when they tried this. And it didn't work. Worse, once they realize that the dishwasher wasn't hot enough to cook or even kill all the crabs, they gave up. But they didn't take any of the crabs out of the dishwasher.

In any event, they let the things sit there. And sit there. And sit there. Nobody cleaned it out, despite the smell that was growing in the house. I'll never forget that smell. Clever idea. Absolutely atrocious execution.

I used to do estimates for a solar energy company. One house I went to in Pennsylvania was an old 1800's farm house. People who lived there seemed normal other than a bunch of clutter all around. That quickly changed... Asked to see their breaker panel in the basement and was led down a winding skinny stair case to a dirt floor basement with no ventilation (doors, windows) and no less than 100+ rabbits. IN CAGES. FLOOR TO CEILING. ENTIRE PERIMETER OF THE BASEMENT. Felt like I was breathing through a straw because of the ammonia from the rabbit pee and poop that was covering the floor. Asked if they breed and sell rabbits or something and he answers "kinda." I'm positive that was their main food source for the family and rabbit was on the menu every night of the week.

I deliver pizza. The creepiest thing I ever saw was a corridor in a house lined with pictures/painting of crying children. Just...why?

Another customer had a almost naked life sized world of Warcraft character right behind the door. I jumped the first few times I went to his place.

Cleaning crew.

We arrive at the house, the owners are gone. We get to cleaning. We notice they have a lot of seagull memorabilia around the house. We are then told that the owners have a pet seagull. Every day at 3pm, they come home and feed a single seagull a hot dog they cook just for it.

And apparently they've been doing this for years. So sure enough, we looked for the seagull but couldn't find one.

3 PM comes around and the owners come home. Right as we are leaving, one lone seagull swoops down, perched on their porch, and they started cooking it's hot dog. That was interesting to say the least.

I was moving ceiling tiles in order to run a new line, and a sex swing fell out. It was bolted into the 8x8 main support. Needless to say the line I was running took a slight detour.

I'm not the one entering homes, but we recently underwent renovations at my family home. When I was 18, my parents commissioned a painting for me that was meant to showcase my love for a certain video game series. (It's tradition to get a portrait done when we hit 18 in my family.)

The painting turned horrifically - a very realistic version of my face plastered on an anime-style body next to the main character of the series, who was also in an anime style (it was based off of key art from the series). Worst of all, this painting is like 1.5 meters tall and hanging on the wall that is immediately facing the door. I can't take it down lest I offend my parents, as they don't think it looks "THAT bad."

I'm pretty sure I scarred the guy for life. That, or he things I'm obsessed/in love with a cartoon.

I used to do hvac and one time i went to go fix a guys furnace and he was pretty wasted. He ended up being a interesting guy. He was a pilot and then they let him go for "no reason." was in the army. Very smart but paranoid guy. Always thought we were going to get bombed (I'm from Canada). Anyways when i went downstairs he had a ton of throwing knives and tons of thick wood with holes right through it. He ended up giving me some tips and wrote like 5 pages about how to throw knives and gave it to me and a few free knives. I wish I kept them.

I was a cable installer.

I worked all over Southern California. I had people answer the door with guns, answer the door butt naked, even answer it with someone tied up in the living room (sexually).

I'm a Code Enforcement Officer for my City, and recently I responded to a complaint about a house that had dead rats all over the outside, and according to the complaint, it was so bad, you could see rats crawling in the yard and through the windows. We get a lot of people complaining about rats, and RARELY is it an actual rat problem. Usually, it's just mice. I had already issued orders on this house for something else, and had been in contact with the owner. When I went to speak with her previously, I was nearly knocked off the porch by the smell on her, but I couldn't see anything inside the house, and I can't write a violation notice on a person's hygiene.

Well, I went back to investigate to claim of dead rats outside in the yard, and sure enough, there are at least four of them just in the front yard. Based on this, the smell, and complaints from the neighbors and even a police officer, I probably could have obtained a search warrant, but I decided to contact the owner and see if she would let me in. I had asked once and she said no, but it was worth a shot.

When I called her, she said that she was having a problem with her roommate, and wasn't spending much time there anymore. She asked if I could do anything to help get him out of the house. I told her that I couldn't help her evict anyone, but if the sanitary conditions inside were as bad as I suspected, my inspection might result in him being vacated. I asked what the inside of the house was like, and she said that the floors in the kitchen were just bad and needed to be replaced. But still she agreed to let me in.

A few days later, I showed up with my supervisor and a city police officer (her roommate had a violent criminal record). We go inside, partially at the roommate's request because he had the nerve to call in a complaint on her, and find a house that I now call The Jumanji House, because it looks like we interrupted a game. The rat infestation was so bad, I observed multiple of them running around, one even brushed passed my boot. Anyone who knows about vermin and pests can attest to the fact that an infestation has to be VERY bad to even see one in the daytime. The carpets and floor were covered in rat droppings and dog poo. The floor in the kitchen was indeed bad, so bad that they had to move the fridge into the living room to stop it from sinking into the basement.

At one point, the roommate was showing us around, and as he entered one of the bedrooms, he stopped short and looked at us and said, "Oh. Um, this looks bad." My supervisor and I just looked at each other, wondering what the hell could be in there that was any worse than the rest of the house - perhaps a portal to hell?! It was just a freshly killed rat on a dresser that he hadn't yet tossed out the window.

Yeah, we vacated them immediately.

My brother in law interned with a law enforcement agency, got close with his supervisors. One of the supervisors told him a story about a time he was a patrol officer in Georgia. They were doing some investigation into a crime (something not super major, like auto theft or something). They knock on this guys door to ask him a couple questions. A young woman answers and says the man isn't home, and that she rents out a room from him. They ask her a few questions, what's this guy like? Any odd behaviors or schedule? She says, yeah, I'm actually trying to move out of this place, this guy is super weird. She cracks the door open so the officers can see inside. In the living room there is a crockpot full of sex toys. She tells them there is a similar crockpot in every room of the house.