People Who Have To Enter Other People’s Houses As Part Of Their Job Share The Most Disturbing Things They’ve Seen (30 Answers)
A person's home is a reflection of their personality. Or at the very least, their lifestyle. That's why so many of us are wary of having people over. But some don't need an invitation. Movers, technicians, and even delivery drivers get to step (or at least have a peek) inside our properties virtually every day.
So when Reddit user Valar_Morghulis888 made a post on the platform, asking people who have jobs that require them to go into strangers' homes to share the weirdest things they've seen, many stepped up and delivered. Continue scrolling to read about their experiences.
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Car not house, but this one guy had hundreds of stuffed animals in the back seat of his car and in the trunk. All brand new, still with tags. Turned the car on and the radio started blasting some hardcore rap. Found out after he passed away that he was really good at claw machines and would donate all the toys to childrens hospitals. RIP dude, sorry I thought you were a weirdo.
I'm a tree surgeon so I have to go to a different house pretty much every other day. I never normally go in to houses but this time I did and I'm scarred for life. I went to this little old partially blind woman's house, as she wanted a couple of apple trees shaped and trimmed down. I finished the job and knocked on the door, the force of my knock just slightly opened the door. I didn't get an answer but I heard a heated one side argument from inside her house, so I went in. I walked in to the living room and she was shouting at her husband for not replying to her for the whole week. Her husband was dead in his armchair. She couldn't see very well obviously, she thought he was just ignoring her and not coming to bed. I burst in to tears, it was heartbreaking.
Not my story, my Dad's.
He used to deliver furniture. He and his buddy go to deliver a dining set to a house. The homeowner is sitting on a recliner as my dad and his coworker unpack the dining set and set it up. The guy had a gun on the side table directly next to him, he was just chillin and watching tv.
Finally they're done setting it up, the guy then grabs the gun and points it at my dad. Tells him to empty his wallet and get out. Dad's coworker was pissed, my dad did exactly what he said, coworker did the same. They left.
There was a payphone at the corner, my dad calls 911, says he just got mugged. Dispatch asks for details of the mugger, my dad was able to give the guy's first and last name, address, phone number, and a description of what the guy looked like.
Guy got arrested, my dad and coworker got their money back.
What an idiot. Did he honestly think that they wouldn't know how to find him?
Few years ago I was volunteering with the city council helping people clean their houses after the neighborhood I lived in had been flooded.
One house belonged to a Chinese couple who ran the local convenience store. They had asked our crew to help remove water damaged carpet from the ground floor rooms of their house so it could be thrown away.
As we were removing this carpet, we realised that it ran in one piece under a closed door and into a locked room, so we asked the lady of the house if she wanted us to cut it off at the door and leave whatever was in the locked room behind, or if she wanted to open the room and have us remove the carpet in there also. She responded, "I'll check with my husband what to do. That's his special room."
This lead to some nervously puzzled looks from our crew. What does a middle aged Chinese man who owns a convenience store keep in his "special room"?
Eventually the wife came back with a set of keys and told us that we could remove the carpet in the room and she unlocked the door. We all crowded around as the door opened to reveal..
A room with carpet up the walls, a mirror ball on the ceiling, a stage at one end with a PA standard sound system, a projector, and in the corner just about the fanciest karaoke machine I'd ever seen. Special room indeed.
That ended in a more wholesome way than I expected considering the rest of this list.
I worked for Best Buy's Geek Squad and Circuit City as an in-home technician (They named their in-home service 'Firedog'. Does anyone remember that?) for over five years. I've seen some s**t. Here are several of the highlights.
1) Had several people try to pay me in drugs.
2) I had the police show up and arrest an old guy for domestic violence while I was at his house. That was fun.
3) One guy had a bunch of issues with my store and a computer he bought there. He was pissed, so they sent me on a free in-home call to fix things and make him happy. He tried the 'macho intimidation' thing by cleaning his gun collection in the same room where I working on his computer. (I was/am a recreational shooter, so this didn't faze me.)
4) Single Mom wants me to work on her teenage daughters desktop computer. The daughter is watching me work and asking questions, which was fine. It's a long job, and as time passes, the daughter starts getting really flirty. She keeps finding excuses to touch me, laughing at everything I am saying, and making "suggestive" comments. I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I ignore her advances and try and concentrate on the job.
She finally gets up, walks over, and sits down on my lap. No warning, no asking permission, just does it. I shot to my feet instantly, dumping her on the ground. I went to find the mom, only to discover THE MOM HAD LEFT. SHE HAD LEFT ME ALONE IN HER HOME WITH HER TEENAGE DAUGHTER.
I noped the hell out of there ASAP, drove straight back to the store, and reported it to my manager.
Did appliance delivery/installation for a summer, we delivered a dishwasher and a range to a house that on the outside looked like a typical middle class ranch style house. We went inside, and there were no walls in the entire house. The frame work was there, all the electrical and duct work was ran like normal, but no dry wall or plaster on anything. You could see from one side of the house to the other, including bedrooms and bathrooms. The latter was very apparent when, during the installation of the dishwasher, the guy went to the bathroom that was adjacent to the kitchen and proceeded to take a dump. He was still talking to us and we unfortunately could see everything, including the fact that he did not wash his hands when he was done.
I worked for myself as a cleaner and people would give me a key for their place or meet me there, leave, and get me to lock up before I left. One time I showed up to one of my regular cleans and let myself in, as per usual. I started from the top floor down. I got to the second floor from the third and went to go into the daughter's bedroom. I walked in to find her leaning over a cardboard box, she looked at me with panic in her eyes because she was supposed to be at school, and whispered "I'm hiding a bunny from my parents, please don't tell".
I backed out of the room, finished the job, and left. I never did tell her parents about the bunny. Not really weird, just odd and super cute.
Hoarding. I was a state social worker...
The pattern on the wallpaper started moving... and I realized it was thousands of cockroaches. Holes in the walls where cats ran through them.
Counted 25 alive cats. 2 found dead under couch.
The carpet was so filled with cat urine it squelched over the top of my flats and into my shoes.
And used tampons..everywhere.
Had to remove all children. Home was condemned and eventually burned by the city.
Story time: My friends wife works for the DCF (Department of Children and Families) and she was telling us about one of her cases. She visits kids in care of foster families or just kids who have mental problems. One case in particular still haunts me. She went to check on a Mom and her 8 year old son who has some form of mental disability. She knocks on the door and the Mom answers. The Mom invites her in and she sits in their living room. They are sitting chatting and then the 8 year old son comes into the room so my buddy's wife greets him and asks him how he is doing. He was chewing on what she thought was candy or taffy. When he gets close to speak to her, he takes what he had out of his mouth to say hello. My buddy's wife looks at what he has in his hand which was just in his mouth and it is a f*****g used, bloody tampon. She is absolutely disgusted and asks the mom how she could let her son chew on a used tampon. The Mom nonchalantly explains that her son is very wild and out of control and when he chews on the used tampons it calms him down so she gives them to him. These are her used tampons that she lets her own son chew on for comfort. Needless to say she was reported and I think she was headed for a pysch eval after that.
TLDR: Friends wife works for DCF. Had a case where Mom let her 8 year old son chew on her used tampons for comfort.
I was a Mormon missionary. This is one kinda bizarre story.
I went into a hoarders house, but it wasn't your typical garbage nasty hoarders house. It was a sweet roughly 80 year old lady. She had the typical pathway that you could use to walk through the house and huge amounts of stuff but the difference was that everything was neat, clean, and organized. For example, she had couches that were nice and clean and in good shape, but they were completely unusable because the couch was completely covered with couch pillows, neatly organized. Her walls were completely covered with pictures, appearing to be stacked like Tetris pieces. Most of her floor was covered with decorations and lawn ornament type things with only a path that you could walk through.
She was a super nice and wonderful lady
I once entered a home where literally (and I am using the word correctly here) every spare space on the walls was occupied with cuckoo clocks. There must have been hundreds.
So you walk in, get a strange feeling ("Something's off here") and then you register that you can't see the walls.
And the sound... All the tick-tock's just fused into a hum.
Not a job, but found a dog that had escaped a lady's back yard. After returning it she was so pleased she wanted to give me a reward and invited me into her home. (heyo)
Inside her house was piles upon piles of boxes of strange kids toys that appeared to be from that old magazine "Oriental Trading Co." She tried to give me bouncy balls, tops, silly putty, packs of markers, stickers. These boxes were literally stacked to her roof, absorbing her entire living room. Why she had so much I have no idea. I ended up leaving with an armful of silly toys, hard candies and stickers.
Fun Fact: Silly putty is still pretty awesome.
I work for a funeral home. I go into people's houses on a daily basis. I've seen hoarders. I've seen decomposing bodies. But nothing was weirder than the family that had their refrigerator in the living room. Not even against a wall. Dead center middle of the floor.
I used to work as a mortician removal technician.
Which means I'd go to hospitals, senior living places, and homes to pick up and transport dead folks.
So, you f****n' name it man.
One lady died in her trailer with no relatives or friends, guy out for a jog called it in saying that the road out front of her trailer smelled really bad. Get inside and there's about 20 dogs of varying sizes, all very nice, all very full off of their owners corpse. There were cigarette butts literally (not figuratively) an inch or two deep covering the entire floor. And dog s**t, so much dog s**t.
So we put the remainder of her body in a bag and took her away.
There was another that was an old homeless dude, he lived in this clearing in the forest with a home made of weird metal scraps and clothes and such. It was like a 2 story Fallout building, s**t was hella intricate. He had somehow acquired a small walk in freezer that he used as a place to sleep. He died with his d**k in his hand, as we all hope we do.
Overall pretty good job though. Lots of down time.
Delivered furniture. Lady has mannequins EVERYWHERE in her home doing various tasks. At the dinner table, watching tv, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, playing cards in the game room, IN HER BED. Every single one was dressed up very nicely as well. She had us move "Gavin" from her bed to replace the mattress. When we were done she pulled a wad of money out of her bra, flipped through about 30 $100 bills, several $50's and gave us $20 each.
Not homes but I go into customer's cars all the time for work. Usually it's mostly stuff like left over drugs or whatever. The best one though was these two chicks who had locked their keys in their SUV. They look really stoned and I think they said they were at a Wiz Khalifa concert the night before. Understandable. I unlock the car and the keys are nowhere to be found. Now I would figure most people would be discreet about this and thank me for coming and send me on my way, but these girls right in front of me began opening every compartment in the car. The glove box was filled with small bongs, pipes, blunt wraps and weed grinders. The center console was filled with sex toys and a few ounces of weed. They were just dumping all this s**t out for the world to see in a public parking garage while they rummaged through the car for their keys. All I could say is "uhhhhh...nice collection" they said thanks and went back to looking for the keys. I just decided to shuffle away from that nonsense.
Walked in on a p*rn shoot once. Owner's assistant forgot to tell me they rented out the house on the same day I was supposed to work on the aquarium.
I work for a company that contracts work for utility companies. Mostly gas companies. Anyway, right now we're on a contract inspecting residential gas meters. I wouldn't say I've really seen anything "weird", but there's definitely been some interesting s**t.
1.) I work in Idaho right now which has a major meth problem, and I was assigned a huge trailer park for my route one week. I saw some truely horrific houses and met some really f****d up people that week. One guys trailer was just torn to s**t, broken windows, siding missing with exposed insulation, real dreamboat. I get around to the back of his place and he's got a wire running out a back window, across his lawn and its spliced into the power line running to his neighbors house. It was obviously hot because it was melting the snow around it in his yard. So I call the sheriffs, tell em what I'm seeing, and move on to the next house. Literally next door lady has two of the most neglected looking dogs I've ever seen. Back on the phone with the sheriffs. Two sheriffs deputies and an animal control officer show up at the same time, deputies go to look at the cable, AC officer goes to talk to the lady. Deputies come back after a minute and say no ones home, so they'll have me sign a witness statement and they'll contact the power company to take it from there. As soon as they finish up there they walk next door and arrest the lady who owned the dogs while the AC officer loaded them into his truck. I felt bad it was animal control taking them and not our local humane society, because they were more than likely just put down. I doubt the state would spend the money trying to rehabilitate them and then adopt them out. But, honestly, I think a quick death was a far better ending than what they had in store if left at that house.
2.) A week or so after starting with this company I was using a flathead screwdriver to try and chip some ice off the top of a meter ( I don't know what I was thinking). Sure enough I punch about a dime size hole right through the meter and get blasted in the face with natural gas. I get on the phone with the gas company to have them dispatch someone for repairs and had to walk around front of the house to get the house number. I come back and the old lady whose house it is is standing about 3ft from the meter with a lit cigarette in her mouth. I was kind of frozen because I thought we were all about to die in a giant fiery explosion when she takes a drag off her cigarette, and, with cigarette still between her two fingers, points down at the hole in the meter and says "Now has that always been there?". It was one of those moments you could feel your heart seize up in your chest. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Took about 4 hours for my b******e to fully unclench.
3.) I met a guy who was turning a huge old church into a house. Got to walk trough a bit of it on the way back to his meter. He'd done a pretty good job so far, but I was curious why would he take on such an endeavor? "Well, I have a lot of children." he says. I'm like "What like, 10 or 11?". He sort of chuckles, "No, 23... 5 biological and 18 adopted. 15 of them live here now, and 6 of them are disabled.". Ho-ly s**t. I don't believe in god, but I was like somebody or something bless this man. I mean, this guy had to have surrendered any kind of personal life outside of his kids and that house so that these kids could have parents and a home. The more I talked to him the more I kind of just wanted to hug the guy. Really cool dude. Me and the gf have been hooked on Fixer Upper so I sat and talked with the guy for like an hour about his family, and home renovations. I know his wife is a nurse but I never did bother asking what he did.
I used to deliver mattresses. People don't seem to care about someone they will probably never see again coming into their home so they don't really make an attempt to hide anything. Also, people hide everything in their beds. I've found money, guns, sex toys, drugs. The cooler things seem to have happened to me when I worked there. More than once, a customer has smoked weed with me, and given me some as a tip. I delivered to a house where they were having a party, and offered me shots. One time a Filipino family was having dinner and offered me and my partner dinner. We sat down and had these mini egg roll things with them.
I'm an EMT and I think I've seen it all by this point. Extreme hoarding situations hidden in what appears from the outside to be a beautiful luxury home, literal herds of cats, dead animals (ew), trash, bizarre decor, houses completely devoid of any furniture for some reason.
And then, there's the clown house. Holy f*****g s**t. There's a bizarre old lady in our district who occasionally needs assistance getting out of her recliner... whose house is packed to the ceiling with clown memorabilia, including a 5 foot tall Murano glass sculpture of a crying Bozo that stands at the end of a shadowy hallway. I'd call myself a tough cookie, but I get the creeps every time.
Well just food deliveries. This dude answers the door in just a speedo.(you'd be surprised how many people answer their doors with little to nothing on) I didn't acknowledge it so he says you may have noticed I don't have any clothes on.I just didn't expect you so quickly. So when I didn't mention his attire he had to make sure we talked about it then he asked if I would like to come in for a beer and a hit of his bong.
Had to shoot an interview with a former homeless man. He was living from a tent he set up in his livingroom.
I volunteer for hospice in stl. This one house had a collection of beanie babies like no other. Among the collections, there were beanie babies dressed up and placed in family scenes, action scenes and in small workshop type scenes. All over. They were covered in dust like they'd been placed there a long one ago. Hundreds. The creepy part was, when I went to throw a soda away, I opened up the cupboard under the sink and found a bunch of beanie babies in cages under the sink. The ones I could see had their eyes ripped out. The dude was 76, dying of COPD stuff. I didn't see any pictures of kids or family. Just a couple photos of him in the 90s with beanie babies. I wish he spoke. We're all without answers on this one.
Cats.
No, you don't understand.
So many f*****g cats.
These people had a literal breeding program set up. Their living room was a maze of floor to ceiling cages full of cats. Wire cages with p**s and s**t filtering down to the cats on the bottom. The smell was horrific. I walked in their house *once*. I almost couldn't register what I was seeing.
I found out later they were running a similar operation, this one with puppies, out of a barn on another part of the property
I deployed as part of the military's response to the Black Saturday Fires in '09 here in Victoria Australia.
We had permission to enter homes to check for bodies of those who might have died from smoke inhalation.
We entered a property in Flowerdale and Jesus Christ. Every room had a layer of clothes ankle deep, animal faeces everywhere and children's toys, so obviously kids lived there.
Out the back were animals of all sorts, no water and still locked in cages.
We used our own water to hydrate the animals and of course reported what we saw to the police we were working with.
I used to work delivery and we went into this one house where an old lady had a ridiculous amount of birds. Every corner seemed to have a cage in it. It smelled like she never cleaned any of the cages. The stench was so bad that we had to occasionally stop to go out side and get a breath of fresh air.
This is late but in my old job I had to always be in people's homes for quality checks and repairs for Internet related issues, had a request to fix a PC, we'll I had to install new wireless drivers so I eject what's in there and of course it's a porn DVD. Well knowing this is a teenage boys room I discreetly lay the disc face down on his desk and install my drivers while putting the DVD in one of his game cases and just wrote a sticky note telling him I put his game back in its case after fixing his drivers. Signed the note, You Welcome.
Probably saved him from at least being grounded cause hey, we were all little dudes at one time.....
Even worse - my computer broke and I took it to a shop to get fixed. They used a paperclip to eject my Twilight DVD from the player. Yes Twilight. And no I wasn't a teenager - I was about 35. Oh the shame! :)
I work for a remodel company and this lady who lives all by herself in this huge three story house had an exorbitant amount of dream catchers in basically every room of the house. There was one particularly large dream catcher (about the size of a smart car) hanging down in the middle of the dining room. I never got the nerve to ask what her fascination with them was.
I'm currently a sub contractor working for health canada. I go to military homes and install radon gas detectors. I have a ton of horror stories and some great ones.
Went into one guys basement and there were piles of cat s**t everywhere. I mean everywhere, over 50 piles easily. It looked to neat and tidy to be natural. either he was placing the cat poo in those spots, or it was his poop. Still a mystery.
Rang the door bell and a woman yelled from the living room for me to come in. Take my boots off, turn the corner and the couple are having sex casually on the couch while watching tv. No blanket, I see everything.
After finishing the work, I come up from the basement and the guy is standing there, massive erection, asking me questions about radon gas. I think they were F*****g with me. Or the guy liked showing off his huge d**k.
Another home I went into seemed super normal. Older man, 50s, very polite and his house was super clean. He appeared to be living alone. As I walk through the living room to get to the basement, I notice the very polished stripper pole in the middle of the room.
Former door-to-door telecom salesman. Once entered the home of an elderly lady who I am 100% certain is a serial killer. The insider of her house was COVERED in thousands of dolls of all kinds, mostly porcelain dolls. All the walls, floor to ceiling. Every piece of furniture. Every table, every shelf. She had a china cabinet full of little dolls. Her floor was covered in big dolls. Her garden was full of ceramic dolls. It was terrifying.
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I'm sure I would appear on this list from one guy. We had pet sheep and one little runt we rescued had alopecia and lost most of his fleece and had pneumonia too, so he lived in my house. He was toilet trained to a litter box so wasn't messing round my house and wore dog clothes to keep warm. A guy came to install a hoist system for me (I'm in a wheelchair) and Tip the lamb was snuggled on my lap asleep wearing a blue dog hoody. He looked at him and was like "that's a cute dog, what breed is he?" and when I replied that he was a lamb the guy laughed not believing me. Tip woke so I placed him on the ground and the guy could see he was indeed a lamb and I explained about his health issues and how it meant he wouldn't survive in the paddock with the other lambs (they had a stable full of hay and straw and were all bottle fed rescued lambs living their best life) and so I had litter trained him to allow him to live in the house. Tip got better and moved to the paddock too
About 1989, working for a paint store in downtown Denver. I had to do a delivery to an apartment complex that would eventually be raised because it was so worn down. Anyways- after trudging up two flights of stairs- elevator broken- I get to the manager's office. She cracks open the door and leads me through a labyrinth of stacked newspapers that were at least 5-6 feet in height. All the time I am following her I here a clicking on the hardwood floors, like a dog following us. I walk past an open door- the bathroom with the tub in view , filled with potting soil and plants growing out of it. Sure, why not? She asks me to place the paint buckets next to her desk, and that is when I see that she has on flip flops, and her toe nails have grown over the ends and that is what was making the clicking noise on the floor.
My husband was in construction and built an appartment building. By the time they got to the fourth floor they noticed a bad smell from an open window at the neighbouring building. They called the police because they thought there must be a dead body inside. The police came and couldn’t get in, so my husband decided to go in through the open window. One of the cops even suggested he’d take his gun inside the appartment. My husband refused, obviously. They placed a plank and my husband went inside. He saw a lot of junk, piles of chicken bones and other food left overs. There was an old man sitting on the couch and my husband was sure he was dead. But suddenly the man moved and turned out he was just living between the junk and everything was filthy and a health hazard. The police took the man to a shelter and a team came to clean the house. Couple of weeks later he was back there and the whole story started again.
I'm sure I would appear on this list from one guy. We had pet sheep and one little runt we rescued had alopecia and lost most of his fleece and had pneumonia too, so he lived in my house. He was toilet trained to a litter box so wasn't messing round my house and wore dog clothes to keep warm. A guy came to install a hoist system for me (I'm in a wheelchair) and Tip the lamb was snuggled on my lap asleep wearing a blue dog hoody. He looked at him and was like "that's a cute dog, what breed is he?" and when I replied that he was a lamb the guy laughed not believing me. Tip woke so I placed him on the ground and the guy could see he was indeed a lamb and I explained about his health issues and how it meant he wouldn't survive in the paddock with the other lambs (they had a stable full of hay and straw and were all bottle fed rescued lambs living their best life) and so I had litter trained him to allow him to live in the house. Tip got better and moved to the paddock too
About 1989, working for a paint store in downtown Denver. I had to do a delivery to an apartment complex that would eventually be raised because it was so worn down. Anyways- after trudging up two flights of stairs- elevator broken- I get to the manager's office. She cracks open the door and leads me through a labyrinth of stacked newspapers that were at least 5-6 feet in height. All the time I am following her I here a clicking on the hardwood floors, like a dog following us. I walk past an open door- the bathroom with the tub in view , filled with potting soil and plants growing out of it. Sure, why not? She asks me to place the paint buckets next to her desk, and that is when I see that she has on flip flops, and her toe nails have grown over the ends and that is what was making the clicking noise on the floor.
My husband was in construction and built an appartment building. By the time they got to the fourth floor they noticed a bad smell from an open window at the neighbouring building. They called the police because they thought there must be a dead body inside. The police came and couldn’t get in, so my husband decided to go in through the open window. One of the cops even suggested he’d take his gun inside the appartment. My husband refused, obviously. They placed a plank and my husband went inside. He saw a lot of junk, piles of chicken bones and other food left overs. There was an old man sitting on the couch and my husband was sure he was dead. But suddenly the man moved and turned out he was just living between the junk and everything was filthy and a health hazard. The police took the man to a shelter and a team came to clean the house. Couple of weeks later he was back there and the whole story started again.
