Shaken Police Officers Share The Scariest Calls They've Ever Received
As if being a cop or first responder doesn't already come with a built in scare factor, nobody thinks about -well who the heck would want to- the extreme danger or crazy of certain situations. Sometimes it can be the particular insidiousness of the crime or even the odd paranormal aspect. Law enforcement face frightening challenges on the dally. How they find the strength is beyond me.
Redditor *Rayanm3m3lord asked law enforcement personal __Cops of reddit, what has so far been the creepiest call you've ever had to respond to and what happened? And some of the responses will keep you up at night.
I HEAR DEAD PEOPLE.
911 Dispatcher reporting in:
Received a call from an elderly lady who had trouble breathing. I had taken several calls from her and her husband in the past so I recognized her voice. I dispatched an ambulance to her residence and held her on the line trying to keep her calm while the ambulance was responding. Ambulance advise that they a 15 minute ETA (She lived in a very rural part of WV.) I'm talking to her asking about her husband and how he was doing and just making small talk with her. The ambulance calls in and advises they are on scene and I let them know that she is in severe respiratory distress and I still had her on the line. I let her know the ambulance is coming to the door to go answer the door and she says okay and hangs up the phone.
Pretty normal yeah? Well here's where it gets weird. The EMT and Paramedic on scene call back about a minute later and advises no one is answering the door. We have a Sheriff Unit who was in the area pulling on scene about that time. The Sheriff Unit confirmed the address and advised he is breaching the door to make access to the PT. 5 minutes go by and the Paramedic on scene radios in asking who the caller was. I advise it was the elderly female who lived at the residence. He tells me that he's going to call in and needs to speak with the supervisor on shift. We get him over to the supervisor and the supervisor confirms the information that I gave him and asks what's going on. Apparently the elderly female had been dead for a while and was in already in full rigor mortis. They thought I was wrong on the caller but the other dispatchers played it back and confirmed that it was the female who called. The ambulance transferred the hospital and we got the same calls and disbelief from the doctors.
So... I took a call from a ghost!
NEVER TRUST A LOCKED DOOR.
I am interning with a Sheriff's police department so most of my time is spent on patrol.
We got called out to do a wellness check which the Deputy thought was going to be a piece of cake like she was out of town or something. We get there and are met by the neighbors who told us that the mail is pilling up in the mail box and that there are several untouched packages on the porch. Ok so we go up the house and the front door is unsecured, so we crack open the door a couple of inches and the Deputy calls inside, but the door wont move any more. The house was one of those split houses where the stairs meet at the front door and the upstairs and downstairs are offset so we concluded that there might be stuff behind the door. Its about this time that the deputy tells me that she is a known hoarder and that could be why the door was stuck. He also mentions that if we see flies on the inside of the windows she is most likely inside and deceased. As we walk around the side of the house we notice a lot of flies on the windows. The back door was locked and as we looked in we noticed bags on bags of garbage diapers and misc shit all over the place.
We head back to the front and attempt to make entry. He pushes the door open, this time with more force, and from underneath I see a grease like liquid spreading out from under the door. The deputy stops, closes the door and calmly tells me that the lady was indeed dead, and wedged behind the door. From the dates of the packages We concluded that she had been gone about two months.
THE BONE COLLECTORS.
Went to a welfare check. A neighbor called in he hasn't seen this guy for a few days and the lights have been on for a while. I go and look around and find no footprints or tire marks in the snow (recent storm). I check the garage and nothing. I check the house which was unlocked and found the guys cellphone, keys, wallet and cash with the TV on. That's when I realized this was now a dead body search. I looked everywhere in and outside the house and around the garage. There were several old junk vehicles on the property but again, no tire marks or shoe prints or anything. I call all recent numbers on his phone and no ones heard from him. Only so much I can do so I issue a BOL and we start getting NCIC paperwork ready.
Next day the day shift officer goes over to follow up. Turns out, the guy was plowing his driveway and either had a medical condition or something and either passed out or died on the spot and crashed the truck onto the other junk cars, which then caught on fire (edit: investigation leads to the fact this happens a week before I got this call) leaving only a pile of bones in the front seat covered in snow. I felt like crap for not finding him that night but it was really creepy knowing his remains were inches away from where I was searching.
YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT DARKNESS LURKS BELOW.
I'm not a cop but my dad just recently shared these stories with me. My grandfather was a cop in a small town in the 60's-70's. Late at night it was common for officers to pull over vehicles driving through town, especially if they didn't recognize them. He pulls over a bus load of people. He walks through and asks them where they are headed, yada-yada. They were headed to California, it was Charles Manson and his group.
Another story. Same grandfather, same stop a car passing through protocol. Asked the driver where he was headed, BS'd for a while and told the guy to have a nice evening. Few towns over guy gets pulled over again, shoots and kills the cop. Apparently he was doing this as he drove along, get pulled over and shoot the cop. When they questioned him he said he had been pulled over by my grandfather, but he was such a nice guy he didn't kill him, but he did have the gun sitting in his lap.
IF ONLY PEOPLE WOULD REACH OUT SOONER.
Went to the site of a suicide by firearm. The guy was DRT with two gunshots to the head. How you ask? The first one didn't complete the job. You could see where he walked to the bathroom mirror, looked at the failed suicide attempt and then returned to the living room to finish the job.
Not sure if that counts as creepy, but I've always wondered what was going through his head when he looked in the mirror.
NOBODY IS SAFE APPARENTLY.
I stopped a 25 year old Asian male from entering the east executive entrance of the White House. He had slit his wrists and neck prior to his arrival, but not deep enough to hit major blood vessels. He told me that he was a secret agent working for J Edgar Hoover and that he was 60 years old. He said he had important information to pass to president Obama. I ended up having to detain him, stop the bleeding and then involuntarily commit him. Turned out to be a local college kid, going through some mental health issues. I've field interviewed hundreds of White House "callers" but this kid took the cake.
SOME CALLS ARE SADDER THAN MOST.
I responded to a report of an unresponsive infant. When I arrived, all the family members were standing around casually in the front yard pointing into the house. I found the baby in the back room laying on her back on a bare mattress. I started CPR, but realized the baby was probably already deceased. We rushed her out to the arriving ambulance hoping they had a way to bring her back. I learned she was the mother's second suspicious SIDS death, and I had her other children removed from her care. The difficult part was when I left the scene and went to the ER to see what came of the situation. As I walked in and asked where she was, an ER nurse walked over to me and handed me the deceased baby swaddled in a blanket and told me to wait for someone to show me to the morgue. So I'm standing there in the ER in uniform holding what everyone thinks is a live infant, but rather, an infant corpse, and several people stop by wanting to see her and commenting on how cute it is to see an officer holding a baby. It killed me inside. I was ushered back to the morgue after what felt liked an eternity, and told I had to wait with the baby until the medical examiner arrived.
THE GRAVEYARD IS FULL OF ANSWERS.
Two adults reported missing; parents of two adult children, one male, one female.
Alerts are in place for the missing people's credit cards. The father's credit card hits on a purchase at a jewelry store where an engagement ring was purchased. It leads us to the son who made the purchase of the ring. Son is questioned and confessed to killing both parents and burying them in shallow graves. The son led us to the grave site and we began the process of recovery. Both mom and dad had black garbage bags over their heads being held in place by duct tape around their necks. The site of the bodies, especially their faces once the bags were removed and the smell is something I'll never forget.
IT'S HARDEST WHEN IT'S ONE OF YOUR OWN.
My father has been an officer for 20+ years and this story is probably the worst thing he has ever had to do. My father and I were heading to the range one day to sight in our hunting rifles. We were in his police vehicle since we were going to the shooting range for local law enforcement personnel. Dispatch came over the radio to get an officer out to a 911 call of a possible dead body. Many of the officers joked over the radio that it was probably a prank or someone overreacting since it was around Halloween. The responding officer arrives at the scene and calls in that he is going into the woods to investigate. A few minutes later he sends out a call confirming it's an actual dead body and to get the necessary resources sent out to assist. Then the responding officer personally calls my father because he recognized the body. It was my dad's brother. He had been having rough times. The second worst part was that he had been reported missing for a few months. The worst part was that my father had to go to assist in the removal and scene investigation. That day was the first time I ever saw my father cry and I was in my mid-teens.
IF IT'S A STORMY NIGHT... PRAY HARDER.
It was a stormy night on the Oregon Coast. A lady was driving drunk and ran into the back of a parked school bus. When she did, her car caught on fire, but she was able to escape. When I found her slowly walking down a side street, I was telling her to stop and turn around. When she turned around, her lower jaw was gone, and she was totally dazed. She ended up surviving but needed tons of plastic surgery.
A SWERVING TRUCK IS NEVER A GOOD SIGN.
My dad was on the freeway, and saw a guy in a big truck (it may have been a mail carrier?) that was swerving and driving crazy. He pulled him over, and the driver's hands were shaky and covered in blood. It turns out he had a body in the back of his truck that he had killed not long before.
AS IF MY NIGHTMARES AREN'T BAD ENOUGH!
Man this was probably 2010, 2011... I was really new. Call came I'm as an "unknown problem", basically the 911 was so messed up, even dispatch didn't know what to call it. Turned it this guy had just murdered his step father and then walked to his grand parents house to kill them as well. He stabbed his grandmother through the eye with a Rambo style bowie knife, one that had the compass in the pommel of the handle.
He missed her brain by about an eighth of an inch, so she did not die. Instead she came running out of the house when we got there, knife sticking out of her eye, and the compass was spinning around because she was moving. My brain literally went "that's not real" and I went past her, along with several other cops, before the sergeant was like "what in the actual hell are you guys doing?"
She survived. We caught the guy in a stroke of pure luck. Elderly woman with a massive hunting knife for an eye, definitely the creepiest thing I can remember seeing.
CHRISTMAS ISN'T ALWAYS A JOLLY EXPERIENCE.
I once went to a two fatality car crash. The cars had collided head on in a 55mph zone.
One of the drivers had left the house suicidal, and it was surmised that he picked a car out at random and went straight into it.
I had spoken with that man several weeks prior. I won't describe the rest of the scene, but the worst part of it is...
This was Christmas Day. Not a merry Christmas at all.
I THOUGHT 'SILENCE OF THE LAMBS' WAS FICTION.
My uncle was a sergeant and had to be called several times out to a house for domestic abuse. This older guy had someone he would pay for the guy to swallow certain objects like paper clips and human hair. They would defecate into a bag and the older guy would sift through the feces like a god damn treasure hunt for the items. He would then put them in an envelope and file them.