People treat their homes as their sanctuaries - so having a job that takes you into peoples homes gives you a glimpse into things that the rest of the world may not get to see.
Sometimes you kind of wish you didn't either.
One Reddit user asked:
We expected stories about adult toys or humiliating family portraits or something - Reddit gave so much more. Proceed with some caution - it's not all fun and games .
There are talks of animals and children in unhealthy conditions, mental health struggles, and some "interesting" anatomical wall art.
I'll Never Forget Him
Realtor here. I was showing a house that was supposed to be empty. I knocked and rang the bell to make sure.
Once inside I walked into a bedroom and found the current tenant butt naked absolutely slamming on an electronic drum kit in what was a mostly sound proof room.
He never noticed I was there, but I'll never forget him.
- nolatime
Counter Hot Dogs
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Back in my teenage babysitting days, I regularly watched three kids whose parents kept one of those ENORMOUS packages of hot dogs out on the kitchen counter.
Everyone in that household would just wander by and grab a room-temperature hot dog as a snack whenever they felt like. I babysat for them 2-3 times per week for over a year and never not saw those hot dogs. I wonder about them all the time.
Seriously though, just the idea of this made me nauseous. Fleshy, slimy, overly salty, cold yet somehow suspiciously warm hot dogs... probably the worst combination of things for a food to be. How did the kids never get food poisoning?
A Hallway Toilet
Former babysitter, one house had a toilet in the hallway.
Not a bathroom - just a toilet literally in the middle of a carpeted hallway (against a wall) that totally worked. It was parallel to the wall not perpendicular- there was zero cover around it and it faced the stairway. So if you used it, and somebody came up the stairs, you were going to be making eye contact.
I never understood it. It looked like someone just set a toilet down for a minute.
There was a full bathroom 6' away connected to the hallway.
This was a small 2 story house with a family of 4. The hallway was narrow and if the toilet was perpendicular to the wall I'm not sure you could have walked by down the hallway without bashing your shins on it...unless you turned sideways.
It did work, it was clean, but probably wasn't used by the family since it was covered in child locks after the toddler discovered flushing things.
The Wall Plaque
I noticed a plaque the size of a large clock above someones' mantle. These people were middle aged white folks in the the middle of suburbia.
The plaque had names where numbers would be and a small trinket below the name.
I wished I would have never asked about it, because it turns out it was the preserved circumcision skin from all the men in their family. There is literally no appropriate response here... I literally just left the room and acted like I never heard anything.
She Never Mentioned The Naked Man
Installed sod at this lady's newly built home. She was in her mid 60s maybe. Anyway, she didn't know where the valve to the exterior tap was in the basement and asked if I could go down and turn it on for her. No problem. I go down the stairs to the unfinished basement and it's pitch dark. I find a light switch and then suddenly there is a 400 pound man naked and asleep on a mattress three feet away from me.
She never mentioned this before I went downstairs...
Kinship
A few years ago I was a social worker at a Child Placing Agency. In my state CPS can place children in kinship homes (relative, family friend, a person the child is familiar with) with little to no vetting- just some paperwork and a quick home walkthrough.
This woman was a distant aunt of four kids, making her a kinship home for them. Most kinship homes try to get licensed with a Child Placing Agency after the kids are placed because it will provide them more financial and therapeutic support for their kids. This is what brought me to her home.
She had a jaccuzzi in the center of her carpeted bedroom that she and the four (foster) children bathed in. There was no shower head or curtain. They also all shared a toilet in her bedroom that had no walls/ door around it. Absolutely no privacy.
All of the kids slept in the living room while she slept in the master bedroom.
During my home inspection I found three doors that had been completely plastered over and couldn't be accessed- she informed me that one was a full bathroom and the other two were bedrooms. None were accessible but she insisted that she used them to "store her tools."
I was so creeped the hell out.. there was no possible way for her to get to her "tools" from those rooms. The kids could have had bedrooms and there was no need for anyone to be bathing or using the toilet in front of anyone else.
One of them was a 12 year old girl.. imagine getting your first period in that home. ☹️.
I did everything i could to help the kids move.
I obviously did not license her home and I detailed all of my concerns about the children's living situation via phone and written report to CPS. I, of course, told them I did not think this woman should be caring for children.
One upsetting thing is that once her application was denied and I explained that I didn't believe the kids should be there or ever have been there I was basically removed from the picture. I did not technically work for CPS, so I couldn't tell you what happened after.
I think about it a lot and hope that the children are in a loving and caring home.
Karma And Bugs
I was working in this one hospital where this mother/daughter pair always came in with their two little chihuahuas. The women were always rude and obnoxious no matter how we bent over backwards.
Anyway. They'd been coming in repeatedly complaining their dogs had fleas and no treatments we'd sold them were working and the dogs still "had bugs."
So this one day they come in and demand to see their usual vet, who goes out and is greeted with a bag of "fleas" and shouting about how they were right/we were wrong cause look, they were still battling fleas despite treatment!
If you've ever had, seen, or known anything about fleas, good f*cking luck catching a bunch of them to put into a ziploc bag alive. They were definitely not fleas - but he didn't know what the hell they were, so he brought them into the back and asked if anyone had any ideas.
I'd just seen an episode of Monsters Inside Me about bed bugs. I said they were bed bugs and I was right (later confirmed it with a friend of mine who was a state entomologist who specialized in them!).
Apparently these always-obnoxious women had recently gotten a used couch for their basement from somewhere.
Karma? 🤷♀️
Those Poor Rats
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I volunteer for a breed-specific dog rescue and do home visits/inspections for people who want to adopt dogs. It's usually mostly a formality to make sure the potential adopters know the quirks of this breed and are well prepared to live with them and allow them a chance to ask me questions about living with this breed.
One home visit though.... it was in a rough part of town. A woman and her 17-year-old child living in an elderly and incapacitated man's home. They helped care for him in exchange for a place to live. The home was just generally not in great shape, cluttered, not super clean.
The woman and her daughter lived upstairs, which was 3 small bedrooms, all with the doors shut. They open room 1... it was being used to house foster kittens.
The 2nd room was the girl's bedroom, but they opened the door and it was just crammed with junk. You couldn't even get into the room. So the mom and daughter shared a bedroom.
They open the door to this 3rd room. The smell of ammonia instantly hits me. My eyes are burning. I feel like I can't breathe. There was a mattress on the floor that took up most of the room. Lining the walls were 20 gallon aquarium tanks, all filled with rats.
Dozens and dozens of pet rats in each one. No bedding or toys for the rats, just bare glass, food and water. The glass sides were covered in pee from the rats trying to climb out with their pee soaked paws.
The woman mentioned she had cleaned these aquariums the day before. I felt so so bad for those poor little rats. The way she spoke about them, I could tell she loved them very much. She just clearly couldn't care for them the way she should have.
I only stayed in the room for a couple of minutes before wrapping up the visit. I had a pounding headache from the overwhelming smell. I have no idea how they actually slept in that room. That was the only home I ever visited that I didn't recommend as an adopter.
Wild And Elderly
Was tasked with removing a rattlesnake from an elderly ladies home. What was found was her sex toy lodged between furniture and the wall while on/vibrating.
Poor thing thought it was a snakes rattle lol.
Turned it off (with gloves) and told her the snake had been removed! Makes me laugh, she was a sweet lady.
That Skin Smell
I used to do home health and just go in and help people with everyday things they couldn't do because of their condition.
Had this really sweet older lady with a bad case of psoriasis. Her floors had a layer of dead skin covering nearly every square inch of the apartment. It was even in her dogs water bowl.
I did my best to keep it clean, and visited twice a week. Each time it was just as bad. I can still smell it if I think about it.
Goat Head Stew
Used to live in south Florida and worked an apartment complex.
One day we cleaned out this apartment after tenants moved out, wasn't too bad as it was mostly clean, but the shocking part was finding a severed goat's head in the fridge (on a platter not just stuffed in there), it was skinned and everything. Startled the f*ck out of me and wasn't sure what to do.
Supervisor said it was no big deal, It's common among Haitian/Jamaican/Island populations to use the whole head for a stew.
My partner is Jamaican, as is his family who lives in south Florida. This is a common dish that's made, literally called goat head soup. Just asked them to confirm and the response was "yeah, it's good as hell" haha.
Goat cheek is some of the best meat I've ever had. Bought a head off some Persian guys I knew from the jewelry stand at the mall. Made an epic stew. Scared the sh!t out of my roommate's gf when she got home lmao.
They Come At Night
I worked for 18 years as a cable/phone service tech in a big city. I've seen a lot. A few stick out, but the one that always made me sad was an apartment of someone with extreme schizophrenia living in government housing.
This disease tends to make people think that they are being monitored, so often in a bout of extreme mania, someone with it will tear out all of the phone and cable wiring in their place and then later realize that they need it and call for a service call.
I had to go back to this woman's place a few times for this. She had written on every square inch of her apartment walls - sentence fragments, different thoughts and things that seemed to be written in different voices.
She had cut a 1x1ft hole in her wall around her phone jack and ripped all the wires out. I patched up what I could and assured her we wouldn't bill her.
She also cornered me at one point to tell me that it wasn't her writing on the walls and that people come at night and do it.