Redditor King_bob992 asked:
"Emergency service dispatchers, what is the scariest call you have ever gotten?"
You're definitely in the right profession.
"One of the first calls I ever took. Woman calls up and asks about the process of filing a restraining order. She discusses how her boyfriend has been abusive and controlling. Mid conversation the doorbell rings, she puts me on hold opens the door and I hear yelling."
"Guy barges in and starts beating on her and I'm sitting there helpless listening, because I didn't have her address yet. Luckily, I did have her name and within a few minutes we got her address and got help to her. She was pretty badly injured but lived, and he is still in jail."
"That call made me doubt myself and if I was in the right profession, but I stuck with it and it has been a very rewarding (though sometimes sad) profession."
Scary stuff.
"Not a dispatcher but a paramedic. But a man called, saying his mom had severe chest pains. So we head over to their address in a hurry. However, there was no mom, just the caller waiting for us and then robbing us at gun point saying be were going to kill us. He just wanted the drugs, but was quite shocking still."
"Always going through my mind when entering some shady neighbourhood."
GiphyThat's so heartbreaking.
"I work for a sheriff's office and a good friend of mine was a dispatcher. I stepped outside one day for a smoke and my buddy was standing there shaking and crying. I asked him what was wrong and he told me that he had just dispatched a call for his best friend."
"His friend was a former army sniper and had only been out for a few months. He was a volunteer fire fighter and was responding to a house fire, rolled the truck, and had beed decapitated. Guy had 5 young daughters."
fryamtheeggguy
A miracle.
"Call came in and was flagged as a frequent caller on the a** end of a very rural county. The dude was just screaming. We couldn't make out anything he was saying but we had his address and sent every available unit we had. After a while the screaming started to die down and his breathing got very labored. He wouldn't talk to us but he just kept muttering. After a few minutes we realized he was praying."
"Few minutes later deputy arrived on scene. Heard him check in on scene and also heard him on the line. First noise I heard was him vomiting. Turned out the dude had been working on his car and the lift collapsed. The guy wasn't under the car but was between it and a tree when the car started rolling. He was impaled on a branch and pinned between the tree and car."
"Dude lived. He's a quadriplegic but he's alive. First legit 911 call he ever made and everyone took their sweet time getting there because it was usually nonsense."
hatchethates84
Ouch.
"I am a emergency helicopter dispatcher so I get calls from EMS in rural areas. First question I always ask is, 'what is the closest city to the scene?' I swear 80% of these people do not know how to pronounce it correctly and 50% of them do not know how to spell it."
"One time this guy cut his d**k off on bath salts. When he came too he realized what he did and called us directly."
GiphyHow tragic.
"I worked as a jailer for a while after getting out of the Marines. We had a dispatcher who had 2 kids. Both boys one a POS that was always in jail the other younger troubled and riding a dangerous line. She got the call one night that her younger son got shot twice in a drug deal gone wrong at a public park where he was playing ball."
"He was dead before the helicopter got in the air most likely. The dispatch center was connected to the jail where she had to work less than 50 yards from the man who shot her son. She was pretty tore up."
Patrocitus
Chilling.
"Not EMS, but work for a domestic violence shelter that offers sexual assault services. Will never forget talking to this one woman, and her husband came home during the call and she must have dropped the phone in the process but then I could just hear her screaming and him yelling. That will stay with me forever I'm sure. I really wish we had been able to get her help before that happened. That is the worst call I've had. But I find it so hard when children call, just always breaks my heart."
cshpolysci29
Good for them for not pushing themselves.
"When I was younger, I applied to be a 911 operator for the city I was living in northern California. I got through most of their tests and interviews, which there were numerous. The pool of applicants was over 200 for about 8 positions. I got down to the last dozen applicants then they played some recordings for us."
"The recording I listened to was a young girl calling 911 from inside a closet. She was crying and hysterical saying that her dad was in the house with a gun and was going to kill her mom. You could hear the mother screaming in the background and the operator was really calm and collected. She got the little girl to keep her voice down and whisper and tried to keep her on the line. You could hear the gunshots in the background."
"I couldn't listen to it anymore. I didn't want to find out what happened next, so I don't know the outcome. I knew I couldn't handle that then. I don't think I could take something like that now."
huexolotl
GiphyHorrifying.
"There was an accident once on a somewhat busy state road here. An older couple in an suv pulled out onto the road without seeing a motorcyclist that was going well over 100 mph. He rear ended them, died instantly and plowed through the suv, landing halfway through the windshield. The suv flipped a couple times and landed on the passenger side, trapping the wife. Then it caught on fire."
"At my dispatch center we had 3 of us working at all times, and I don't even know how many 911 calls we instantly got when this happened. Dozens, I'm sure. After I sent the FD and they got on the way(this is a rural area and this intersection was probably a good ten minutes south of them), some bystanders managed to get the husband out of the suv but he died in the helicopter on the way to the hospital, I believe. The wife burned alive."
"Honestly the worst part was right after I dispatched the FD, one of the lieutenants on the biggest police department in my county happened to be driving through there with his family and he called 911. I'll never forget how panicked and frantic he was on that call. I had never heard any of our officers like that before, let alone one of the administrators. We were pretty friendly with all of them so it shook me up. After I hung up with him I just started sobbing."
nillah
The strength it must take to move past that...
"My sister works as a dispatcher. Her first week on the job, she had a man call in, saying he was going to kill himself. He told her that she couldn't do anything to change his mind; he was simply trying to let her know where he could be found. She heard the gunshot through the call."
"Second one, she had a little girl call in because her dad was unresponsive. She knew that CPR would likely save this man, but the daughter wasn't grown enough and didn't have the strength to perform it effectively. My sister had to tell her to leave the room, because the longer that girl stayed in there trying fruitlessly to save her father, the more scarred she would become by the experience of watching her father die."
m4cktheknife
Both are horrifying.
"Former 000 calltaker reporting in. Scariest one would have to be one of the very first calls I took while I was training. A young man rang up and it was evident from his voice that he was in shock. His exact words were 'I've just hit a motorbike rider who was coming around a blind bend on the wrong side of the road. I think I've killed him.'"
"From dealing with a few noise complaints to a car accident with a possible fatality was a massive switch, and this was only my second shift taking calls in training. The motorbike rider did not survive that accident."
Giphy"Second scariest would be when someone was working down a well and was overcome by generator fumes. His wife tried to rescue him but she fell off the ladder, injured herself as a result and was unable to help her husband. So there's one possibly dead male in the well and his wife is in danger of dying as well. And all of this is in a remote location that I am completely unfamiliar with. We didn't save the male. We did, however, manage to save his wife."
dexbydesign89
That's terrible.
"My answer from a similar thread:"
"The one that always sticks with me was the time I had to tell a father how to cut his 15 year old son down after he had hung himself. He was actively reciting reasons why he may have been a bad parent while doing it. I'll remember that until the day I die."
FireAlarmOp
Holy s**t.
"Obligatory posting on behalf of my mom. She answered 000 police emergency calls (Australian 911). The top two: A woman phoned up. She had a restraining order on her ex-husband, had come home to furniture moved positions inside the house."
"Whilst checking rooms she noticed handprints on the wall leading up to the roof cavity access point. This was slightly ajar. Mom tells her to leave. Woman decides nope, she's Dora the explorer and gets a chair. She stands on it, starts to lift the cover and it gets slammed back down. Yep, hubby in the roof. He'd been there a while (days)."
"2nd: a call comes in from a remote outback community. Someone's using a machete to stab their way into a door while laughing maniacally. There are no street addresses or house numbers to ID the location and the caller cannot give a location. Nearest police are 2 hours away. Mom just heard screaming, then gurgling, then silence then whistling."
ottersrus
Super anxiety-inducing.
"I was working at a small agency during a storm. We would work 1 person in dispatch per shift, as it was pretty common to go an entire overnight shift without a single call. The local hospital called and said 'A tornado just hit the hospital.' Turns out, the tornado dropped directly on top of the hospital, moves across the street to the college dorms and destroyed at least one of them. There must have been multiple 'naders because all of our phone lines lit up and everyone was saying a tornado just hit their house."
Giphy"The town close by had a couple fires, our paging system went down (meaning no paging out our volunteer fire guys, 3 officers in total for the entire f**king county, and all of our medics tied up at the hospital."
"The calls would go like this: 'Are you injured? Do you feel safe enough to drive yourself to the hospital?' If they said yes, I'd tell them to make their way to the staging area at the hospital, if no, I had to write it down and have one of the other agencies sending help to check on them."
"Luckily the college was on an extended weekend so hardly anyone was in the dorms. I still have anxiety issues when I'm at work when a storm hits."
Don't do drugs.
"My dad's friend got a call from a man who claimed there was an alien in his stomach. When they got to him they discovered he cut his own stomach open and took his insides outside. The knife was lying in his flesh next to the body. The man was high on some drugs."
lubie_chlebek
Too Sad
"A 3 year old was at a campground with her family and they let her out of their sight for 20 seconds and she wandered down to a creek and drowned. Her mom found her and her father called in. While I was getting details from the understandable distraught father, a random guy camping there was doing CPR managed to resuscitate her. I can't imagine how her parents felt, but it was like physical weight being lifted off of me."
crathis
Pain in the moment...
"Was a 911 operator for 10 years. Scariest is probably different than worst. My scariest was an active shooter in a high rise. Just sitting on the line trying to give the best directions so every one makes it out okay."
"When I first started out, I worked for a rural county and some areas were very far from help. One night I got a call from a group of people who were in a3m accident and their car caught fire. The girl I was speaking with was stuck in her seatbelt and as the fire spread she was in terrible amounts of pain."
"She kept begging me to send help and I was but it was far away. I stayed with her until the phone dropped (assumingly the phone and it melted or malfunctioned). The other was a hanging."
"The father called me for a welfare check and I was putting in the call when he got to the house. He said the door was unlocked, so I stayed landline while he went inside and he found his son. The pain in the moment he walked out and told his wife was so horrible and raw."
allaboutthatpuc
Terror
"I think the most genuine terror comes from child callers. I had this 5 year old call in that her dad was growling and wouldn't wake up. Ok agonal breathing, probably a heart attack scrambling to get a confirmed address for ems, pd dispatched to unconfirmed address."
"Finally confirm the address and start giving directions on CPR. Nope she will not touch him because she is scared then bursts into tears. Luckily pd arrived just after she refused and they were able to do CPR until EMS arrived."
oneofthesesigns
CPR instructions and he kept screaming...
"911 dispatcher here for a large city. I get a little bit of everything and mostly it's BS. But one that stuck with me was something recently. A man called in frantic and it was really hard to get him to calm down. He told me his 35 year old girlfriend was unresponsive and not breathing."
Season 5 Nbc GIF by The OfficeGiphy"I immediately started giving this guy CPR instructions and he kept screaming 'I'm sorry I'm sorry my love.' Tough morning for the guy no doubt. It hit me that he could have been responsible or the last thing he ever said to her was not pleasant. Never followed up on the call. In this line of work, it's on to the next one."
"Too busy to think about it. I have millions of people depending on me not to let the last call effect the next one. I don't know what happened other than she was a DOA. Didn't hit me until the next day. My God, that scream was deafening. All i know is there was more to the story, I could hear it in his voice."
"P.S. I've heard people shot in real time, parents trying to revive their dead kids first thing in the morning, but this for some reason hit me."
.DNastythenasty
On the Roof
"There's a guy up here on the roof. He was wandering around in a daze and not responding to me. He's got his shirt off and he's sitting on top of the parking garage with his legs over the edge and he's rocking back and forth. He's covered in blood."
"Vehicle pursuits aren't fun either."
Dr_Frasier_Bane
On the Porch
"Heard this story from a cop I knew. Guy calmly calls 911 to report a man standing on his front porch with a shotgun. Police arrive at the address provided to find a man in his 50s standing on the porch as described in the call. They take cover and prepare to shoot if man decides to open fire. Man points gun to his own face, cops realize what was going on, but it happened too quickly for them to intervene. That man on the porch was the one who called."
the_one_with_no_face
scared famous smile GIF by VH1GiphyDispatchers seriously aren't paid enough.
Do you have any experiences to add? Let us know in the comments below.
Reddit user electrickgaming asked:
"911 Dispatchers of Reddit, what is a seemingly dumb call you got which turned out to be serious?"
People's responses were pretty incredible, but be warned - they're decently intense.
There will be mention of death, gore, violence, etc.
Proceed with caution, as some of these entries can be triggering.
The Monster In The Closet
I was USAF Security Forces a looooooooong time ago.
Call was a kid home alone complaining about a monster in the closet... which was a bit weird, because the kid seemed too old for that. So we go check and OHMYGOD, there's a snake in the closet that's got to be at least 150 pounds. Promptly closed the closet door and noped right on out of that, kid in hand.
GiphyCalled Animal Control
Called Parent
Parent arrives first and indicates they don't even own a snake, let alone a people-sized snake.
All parties agree "monster in closet" was accurate-enough description of event.
Silly Old Man
Not dumb, but it was a seemingly minor call by the way it was portrayed to me - and ended up being very serious.
An elderly woman called her doctor (ie standard gp at her local clinic) and said her husband had accidentally shot himself and she needed to let them know. The GP called emergency and lets us know as they thought it sounded minor, but police needed to be aware due to the gun aspect.
I call her and she sounds very surprised Police were calling her and says in her old lady voice "Oh you know hes a silly old man, he's shot himself in the garage."
I ask where he is injured and she says "He's shot himself in the face" - completely calm and serious. He had blown half his jaw off whilst sitting in the chair in the garage and was bleeding profusely. I think he wouldn't have survived but I'm unsure of how it turned out.
I'll never forget her saying "Silly (insert name here) what have you done to yourself?" in a sweet, calm, caring old lady voice. It's very interesting as a dispatcher to be exposed to how people react when they are in shock.
- ahelx
Saved By The Treeline
When I was a Military Police officer we got a call about an accident. A 2 and 1/2 ton truck t-boned a Saturn at a T intersection. When we arrived we found the Saturn pancaked against a concrete barrier. The barrier was protecting against a 10-foot drop into a heavily forested area. We couldn't find the driver of the Saturn. As my partner and I were looking about we heard people yelling from under the concrete.
GiphyWhen we got down there we saw where the flashlights were pointed. About 6 feet off the ground there was a young woman tangled in tree branches about 20 feet away from the barrier. She was conscious but unable to speak.
The truck hit her car with such force that her body flew through the broken windshield close to the passenger door, out into the woods, and she was saved by the treeline.
She survived with multiple puncture wounds, a broken femur, broken collarbone, collapsed lung, rib injuries, and she lost one of her eyes.
Unstuck
Got a call from Life Alert one time saying that one of their clients was stuck in her kitchen because her wheelchair got stuck on a cupboard. She wasn't in duress just needed to get unstuck.
Wasn't an urgent call and it was a busy night so the road sergeant had to pull a unit off the call twice due to more urgent calls. After she pulled the second unit she said he would go and help the woman herself while the other calls were being handled.
When the sergeant arrived the caller's front door was open with just the screen door in place. That wasn't unusual since it was a nice day for a breeze. Sgt could see the caller from the screen door and tried to ask if there was a way to unlock the screen or if she would have to cut it to get in.
The caller was not responsive to our Sgt so she called on the radio that we should have FD en route and that she was going to have to cut the screen door to make entry.
When our Sgt made it in, she found that Life Alert had the circumstances totally wrong. We don't know if the caller downplayed the situation, or if the operator just got the details wrong. Caller was not stuck in a cupboard at all.
The caller was sitting in her chair at the sink and had been washing dishes. The caller appeared to have dropped a knife and cut into her ankle. She was unable to bend down to stop the bleeding and was on blood thinners. She did not make it.
Radio Silence
My center took a call from a number like 5 times in an hour, always radio silence on the other end. On the 6th call we finally heard enough of a voice to know someone was there and got an address and enough to know it was serious.
Make entry to the house and find the caller. A man had picked up his soon to be ex-girlfriend to "talk." He then duct taped her mouth and zip tied her wrists and ankles and spent the next 14 hours beating her with a bat and broke her cheek bone.
It was an absolutely terrifying moment and what made it worse was on review of the tape we could hear her say help on one of the previous calls, but couldn't hear it on the initial call in.
Too Much What?
A call came in and the caller was hard to understand. The man says my friend is sick, he's chocking from to much of something. It sounded like he said too much penis, so we asked him to repeat himself. Again, it sounded like penis. We would have brushed it off as a prank, but he sounded really scared.
Turns out he was saying peanuts. His friend had a peanut allergy and was going into shock.
Edibles
We got a call from a couple a few years back. They said they had eaten edibles and thought they were going to die and all that. It's not an uncommon call, actually. So obviously we all thought they were just anxious from the marijuana.
It turned out when we got to their apartment that the marijuana they had gotten was laced and we had to rush them to the emergency room because when we got there they were passed out.
- moof420
Emergency Or Not?
Sometimes people call on 911 for non-threatening things and vice versa, so it doesn't surprise me when the first line is, "I don't know if this is an emergency or not...."
So while at work one of those comes in. "I don't know if this is an emergency.....but I just saw a man shoot out the back window of a car while it was driving off."
Um yeah, that would qualify, ma'am.
Then about four minutes later, I get the 911 call from the girlfriend of the shooting victim. She was driving her boyfriend to the hospital.
Debris
Got a call for debris in the road on the main highway heading into town. It was outside our town limits, but was passed on to us as it was pretty close and the Sheriff's department was going to take a while to get to it. We often took small calls like this as a courtesy to their dept.
Once the officer arrived, he discovered the "debris" was what was left of a motorcyclist in a hIt and run. The body was in pretty bad shape, most likely hit by a semi, and had been subsequently run over by other motorists not realizing what it was. It gets pretty dark out in the desert, and the body looked more like someone had dropped some old clothes off the back of their truck or something. There was no way to know it was a body if you weren't standing over it with a light.
We had to track down the lady who made the original call. As it turned out, she was in the local convenience store. We discovered one of his arms had flipped up and become lodged in the grill of her car as she ran over it.
Along with dealing with the original call, we had to call an ambulance as the lady panicked and went into shock when she saw the arm. Ended up being a long night. After the initial investigation phase, the whole thing was turned over to the Sheriff's dept., I never did hear if they caught the guy who hit him.
- Faelwolf
Totally Oblivious
I had an older female call in saying her husband fell while in the basement. Pretty normal call. I was trying to get info before turning it over to Fire(EMS) dispatch.
Said she heard him fall with a loud bang. So I asked a few more questions because she was so lackadaisical about explaining. I asked her if she could see him, she said no as she was bedridden. So I typed it up as an unknown complaint, but with details of a possible fall and asked about any possible weapons before I turned her over to Fire.
I muted myself and stayed on the call listening to her explain what she had heard. Before she hung up I un-muted myself and asked Fire to stay on the line so I could talk to them. Told them it didn't feel right so I wrote up a run for us to go also (we have enough officers that we generally get there before Fire) So the police get there to find her husband had killed himself in the basement.
She was totally oblivious (or didn't want to admit what she heard to herself) as to what happened.
If you or someone you know is struggling, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
To find help outside the United States, the International Association for Suicide Prevention has resources available at https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/
Mad About The Ditch
My mom is a 911 Dispatcher.
One day she got this call about a woman who was lying in a ditch. The caller was the woman's neighbor (who didn't even bother to get out and check on her.) The caller said that she was staring up with a glare on her face like she was mad about falling into the ditch or something.
So my mom dispatches an officer and they find out that the woman was getting her mail and started to have a heart attack. Kinda sad that the neighbor didn't bother to get out to check on her, but whatever. People are selfish sometimes.
The Smell
Not my story, but I took a wilderness first aid course with a former EMT who shared this story with us:
An elderly woman calls 911 to report that her husband has a "splitting headache". She didn't sound too stressed or afraid so the ambulance took its time getting their to check up on him, didn't turn the sirens on or anything. He (my instructor) knocks on the door and the woman answers.
He asks where her husband is and she leads him to the kitchen, where her husband doubled over onto the kitchen table with a chef's knife lodged in the base of his skull. Shocked, he asked the woman how this happened. She replied, "I did it, now can you get him out of here, I don't like the smell."
I don't know what happened after that but he did show us pictures of the crime scene.
A Fatal Assault
I'm not a dispatcher, but I work in crime intelligence. We monitor the radios, so we know what's going on.
Last night there was a call about a car accident. It wasn't portrayed as a big deal, possible small fender bender, but the dispatcher specified that there were multiple tickets out for it. Scout says they're on the way. Less than two minutes later, dispatcher comes back saying they're getting calls about an assault and battery at that same intersection. This very quickly turned into a fatal assault.
"Sick Looking"
Not me, but my cousin is a paramedic in a Small town in Texas.
They had received many calls from a family with a diabetic teen daughter over the years. Usually every instance was not an emergency. These calls from the parents started coming in more often and typically the symptoms were mild to moderate, certainly not life threatening. They always advised the parents how to manage her condition so these calls wouldn't have to happen. The parents didn't seem to get it.
Late one night the parents called complaining that their daughter appeared sick. My cousin and the paramedics thought it was a typical non-emergency case and didn't rush to the scene. The station was 20 minutes away. My cousin couldn't have known the seriousness at the time, the parents just said their daughter was "sick looking". When they arrived she was dead from diabetic shock. My cousin thinks she died minutes before they arrived and years later still regrets not rushing to the scene.
Stop Singing
I was the caller. Three weeks from Christmas. Pearson airport in Toronto has deer living in the woods on the edge of the property near HWY 401, arguably the busiest highway in North America.
Well, the fence was down and there was a deer on the edge of the 401 so I called to report a doe on the road. The operator said "A Doe?" I said, lord forgive me but I couldn't help myself, "Yes, a doe, a deer, a feee-male deer." She laughed, I laughed.
Then a truck swerved so as not to hit the deer and took out 2 lanes of traffic. We stopped laughing.
- Morbido
GiphyThe Fake Officer
My uncle was a cop and I was with him by his car when he got this call. A woman said her daughter was going to be arrested and wanted to know what she did wrong. They were puzzled and thought it was a prank call. The woman said her daughter called her because she was pulled over at the garbage dump and police were searching her because they spotted a couple of empty beer boxes in the back of the truck she was driving.
The officer wasn't listening to her when she said she was taking them to the dump. The police she initially called brushed it off and said it was probably a made-up story because none of their officers were on that road.
My uncle was out on patrol and thought it was strange, so when he saw another officer he radioed and asked if there was anyone at the dump. The officer said no, not that he knew of. That was enough for my uncle's curiosity to get the better of him. He responded to check out the scene and found a girl pulled over.
The man who pulled her over was a fake cop. He probably stopped an assault - or maybe worse - by going to check.
- Kookabob
A Giant Man
Not my story, but my cousins. He is a 911 operator and got a call from a young women went really sideways.
When he first answered the call, the person was mumbling and whispering. He asked her to repeat herself saying he couldn't understand. The girl again was mumbling and whispering, but something sounded off.
Cousin asked what the address was and the girl was able to give that somewhat clearly. Now that he had an address, he asked again what the problem was. This time he could understand her.
"There's a giant man in my house." - and then she screams bloody murder
Apparently, the young girl was home alone and the girls parents were at work. A man saw the house and since there was no cars there he thought no one was home. He broke in through the window, and as he was breaking in she hid under her bed and called the cops.
Unfortunately, she went under her bed in a bad position. She wasn't facing the door, which meant she couldn't see him walk in and her foot was sticking out. He grabbed her legs and pulled her out and stabbed her. My cousin heard the attack.
She survived, thankfully.
Lightning
I work at an urgent care, and a lady called and casually said her son was struck by lightning. He seemed fine, but his primary doctor wanted her to take him to the emergency room for an EKG and to check out his cardiac enzymes. I told her to follow her doctors orders and go to the emergency room. She seemed super annoyed and she said, "Well can't you do an EKG???"
Woman, your son was struck by lightning. He needs to be monitored, as these symptoms can show up later. His heart rhythm is probably screwed!
Leaking
I thought the caller was just a crazy lady - it was a full moon night and very common to have mentally ill people call about weird things. She called and started talking about how her son was 'leaking' in her living room and there was something strange knocking around her house. Very odd.
After I did some searching in the system I found out her son was murdered a week earlier and his body had been lying in her living room. He had not been embalmed and was leaking black fluid on the floor. The undertaker was knocking at the door trying to be let in to fix the problem, but the woman couldn't tell where the knocking was coming from.
- ahelx
When working in emergency services, things can go sideways fast.
Hats off to the people who tackle that challenge every day.
Want to "know" more?
Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
Never miss another big, odd, funny or heartbreaking moment again.