After reading these, I really don’t think I would last three days as a police officer. Thank goodness there are people out there who aren’t afraid of the dark.
This piece is based on an AskReddit thread. Link on the last page.
I was working the late shift on Halloween night. I was out by a small lake just outside city limits which is surrounded by some very nice houses. Kids love to go out there to drink.
When you go through the neighborhood, each of the roads ends at a small two-lane road that surrounds the lake. I’m slowing to the stop sign, starting to look to my right to make the turn.
When my headlights start tracing the rock wall that surrounds the lake, I catch something out of the corner of my eye in one of the large trees that dots the walk path.
I back up to take a look and see a guy hanging. At first, I think it’s a Halloween decoration so I stop. As soon as my flashlight hits him I realize… he’s dead.
As I’m standing there, getting ready to call it in, I notice a gaggle of kids coming down the street trick-or-treating. As soon as they see my car, they start heading my way faster.
So I book it up the block to meet the parent walking with them and tell her she needs to take the long way around the block. She can see it on my face that I’m not kidding.
That one really got to me.
CaribbeanLounger
We responded to a burglary alarm at a mortuary and found that one of the rear doors was left open. Policy now dictates that the entire building needs to be cleared (searched) to confirm that it is in fact a false alarm. And it almost always is.
It’s the middle of the night and totally dark in this mortuary. We only use our flashlights to search room-by-room and never turn on the lights. We walk into one of the rooms and see a body on a table. It appeared that it was waiting to be processed (possibly embalmed) by the mortician. It smelled like a mildly decomposing body – which you might expect.
Suddenly, I see a shadow to my right. I swivel my flashlight around to illuminate that side of the room.
To my surprise, I find nothing out of the ordinary. But then I immediately smell a really strong whiff of perfume blow by me.
The search was completed more expeditiously than normal after that. Nothing (and nobody) was ever found.
hadrian217
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 told her to stop and turn around.
When she turned around, I saw that her lower jaw was gone, and she was totally dazed. Her tongue was sticking straight out the top of her neck, and she was trying to talk. She ended up surviving, but she needed tons of plastic surgery.
tallfescue1983
My dad was on the freeway, and saw a guy in a big truck who was swerving and driving crazily. He pulled him over. The driver’s hands were shaky and covered in blood. It turns out he had a sex worker in the back of his truck whom he had killed not long before.
olympicsized_starfsh
I got a call that there was an abandoned truck on the highway. I was only a mile or two away, so I headed there. It was in the middle of these curves, with a mountain wall on one side, and a drop off to a creek on the other side. It was dark, probably around midnight.
I pull up, and there it is. An old 50’s pickup truck. Light blue. Sitting there. I have no backup. I have no idea where the driver is. I walk up, gun out, inhaling strong alcohol vapors. No one to be found. I call for a tow truck.
Meanwhile I have to wait, in the dark, in the middle of blind curves, with no idea where the driver is or why he left it. My adrenaline was at an all time high for sure.
We towed the truck, ran the plates, got his home address, and found him there. Did the usual “I have no idea why my truck was out there” routine. Not much we could do.
TheSlamAnderson
A few years ago we had an apparent suicide (pedestrian struck by a train). A man in his early 20s left a note and decided to lay down on the tracks. But this is the creepy part.
The family claimed we missed some things out there. Personal property of the deceased. According to mom and grandma, this kid had a big gaudy gold cross neck chain he loved more than life itself. We searched for it and never found it. We even came back out with a K-9 unit and tried to find it on an area search. No dice.
At this point it’s just gone. Disappeared into thin air.
Well this guy’s little brother is a 17-year-old kid with a chip on his shoulder. He goes out there at night a few hours after we clear to look for himself. Before he went out he told his friends and family the cops were worthless and we weren’t trying to help.
While out there, he gets hit by a different train in almost the same spot on the tracks.
I rushed to the scene and… we find this poor kid, over a hundred feet off of the tracks and he’s got the missing gold chain clutched in his hand.
k00ni3
The police had to be called several times out to a house for domestic abuse. The creepy older guy who lived there had a friend who he would pay for the guy to swallow certain objects like paper clips and human hair. The friend would poop it out into a bag and the older guy would sift through the feces like a treasure hunt for the items. He would then put them in an envelope and file them.
Walkensboots
I got called to assist an ambulance at an address because they were struggling with a woman who’d had an apparent seizure. We got there and discover this tiny Singaporean lady being held down on the floor by a paramedic. She’s hissing and struggling against her and repeatedly trying to bite the paramedic. Her eyes are all black and red – no white.
All the time, she’s struggling and trying to bite with veins popping out of her neck. She’s looking past us at the corner of the room screaming at something that isn’t there, telling it not to kill us.
Her husband (who seems weirdly unfazed by the whole thing) tells us this has been happening since she went to Singapore and got sick after visiting a holy site. Usually her sister has to stop it by putting this powder on her forehead in a cross, but unfortunately she’s out of the country.
In the end, she was taken to hospital for a mental health assessment by the paramedics. I often wonder what the outcome was but have no way of finding out. I hope she’s okay.
Pleassay
An elderly woman had called in reporting that a man carrying a drawstring bag was walking around her and her husband’s property. She described the man as walking “like a zombie” and said he was looking down towards the ground the entire time.
She wasn’t able to tell if the man was attempting to break in or not.
My partner and I were about fifteen minutes away when the call came in from dispatch. When we were about halfway there, the elderly woman had reported that her husband, who was downstairs watching the front yard with a shotgun in hand by the front door, told her that he watched the trespasser disappear into a cornfield that was across the street from their house.
My partner and I quickly searched the area around the cornfield then went to the house. As I took down some information from both the husband and wife, my partner searched the property for any signs of tampering but found nothing. We then patrolled the area for a good ten or so minutes hoping to find the man but didn’t.
jelly_ultra
Man this was probably 2010. I was really new. Call came in as an “unknown problem.” Basically that means the 911 was so garbled that even dispatch didn’t know what to call it.
It turned out that this guy had just murdered his step-father and then walked to his grandparents’ house to kill them as well. He stabbed his grandmother in the head.
Amazingly, 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 head. My brain literally went “that’s not real.” She survived and we caught the guy in a stroke of pure luck.
Aardvark1292
I stopped a 25-year-old 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.
ctmacdon84
Don’t worry. This one has a happy ending.
I got a call that someone’s neighbor was hanging their dogs. Horrified, I went over to the neighbor’s house and told him about the claim. He walks me outside and yells, “Swallow, get ’em!”
I see a pit bull run and latch into a rope swing. Apparently pit bulls are huge fans of latching onto things and swinging around. No harm, no foul.
mrtylerrr
A man called us because he saw another man going into a sealed mine.
Since these mines are sealed for a reason and it’s dangerous to go in there, we decided to check it out.
So we went in there, just me and my partner, in this pitch black mine with only flashlights. We went in pretty far to look for the guy but we couldn’t find him. What creeped me out was that we heard some whispering. My partner heard it too but we couldn’t make out any words. We shrugged it off and kept going.
And then we saw the chain. There were chains hanging from the top and they obviously weren’t moving. Why would they? But one specific chain was actually swinging. I don’t know why it swung and it wasn’t a slight swing either that might’ve been caused by wind or something. It was full on swinging back and forth and when I saw that, I was pretty spooked, I must admit.
So I said “we’ve looked enough” and got out of there.
The whispering, okay, that probably has an explanation but I can’t think of one for the chain swinging around.
pmaama
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.
The son is questioned and confesses to killing both parents and burying them in shallow graves.
On the night he he killed them he said his dad tore into him pretty good – calling him a loser this and a loser that; he was a mistake; shouldn’t have been born. But he said what threw him over the edge was his dad calling him “half a man.”
His girlfriend helped clean up the bodies and dispose of them. She flipped and testified.
thisisnotmylocker24
I’m a military police officer, so I worked both law enforcement and corrections for a bit. In corrections, the main office was also the police services desk. Often it would ring and no one would be at the other end.
One time it rang and instead of a number it had a descriptor that I don’t remember exactly. Something like “Emergency Phone 11”. I was new and immediately called my superiors about it. They told me to drop it and never report anything like that again. Ominous right?
Some time later, while I was on patrol, I got dispatched to essentially an abandoned side of the base to respond to an emergency phone call. There was no location relayed at first because the dispatcher didn’t know where “Emergency phone 11” was and was new to the base. I guess he didn’t get the same memo I did to not report those calls.
The dispatcher then went on to say that the caller had sounded frantic and thought they were being chased, meaning that someone had actually been on the other end. The dispatcher eventually manages to dig up some old maps that label an “Emergency phone 11” location.
He relays them to me and my partner; we drive there in a hurry. When we get there, we discover that there is no phone, just a broken pole where one had once been. That was a fun one to report.
Ephino
My buddy responds to a completely naked man standing in the middle of an intersection punching at cars as they drove past. They arrive and shut down the intersection and have something of a stand-off with this guy. At some point the guy decides he longer cares for his genitals remove them with his finger nails before the police can restrain him. This guy wakes up in the hospital the following morning with no recollection of what happened.
Moral of the story: stay away from drugs.
Anonymous
Around 3am I got called to respond to a suicidal female in her apartment. Me and my partner find the unit and I knock on the door. It creaks slowly open showing pitch black from the inside. I identify myself: “Ma’am it’s the police, were coming in.”
We got no response, but I could see the shadows bouncing from a candle. I step in the doorway and see the woman sitting on the edge of her bed. She is wearing filthy stained pyjamas and her legs are kicking rapidly.
“M..M..Ma’am this is the police.”
That’s when I notice a noose hanging in the closet, swaying slightly.
Her face snaps towards me. “You can’t help meeeee. The devil has meeeee.”
Lets just say I wasn’t worried about falling the sleep for the rest of that night shift.
Northwesthip
Shortly after the Sandy hook shooting, I got dispatched to respond to a man at a school with a gun. The school was put on lock down. When I arrived on scene, parents stated he was in an orange orchard which is right next to the school.
Right before I go to enter the orchard, a man comes walking out with a rifle in his hand about 60 yards away. I yell at him to drop the gun several times before he finally drops it.
Apparently, this guy thought it was a good idea to shoot squirrels with a pellet gun in the orange grove next to a school during school hours.
OhhDavie
Got a call for a missing child. I arrive at the home to find the mother highly distressed, and Im not sure what to do. I called in everyone to first search the home and property. I decided to search the backyard since it was a large wooded lot with no visible fence.
After about 10 minutes I found the boy. He was caught on an old chain link fence in the woods that was blocked by a bunch of trees, so you couldn’t see it from the house. He had basically strangled to death on the fence. He must have been climbing, fallen, and gotten his hooded sweatshirt caught.
Suckydog
I worked in a High Tech Task force agency conducting computer forensics investigations. We were doing a multi-agency search warrant sweep in large metro area in California. We serve a search warrant for distributing/possessing child pornography at a residence in a semi-decent area.
The suspect lived with his disabled wife. She had mobility issues and had not been upstairs for years.
We go upstairs. The master bedroom was dark, the windows were covered, and he had baby dolls with their butts cut off all over the room. Some of the heads were removed and scattered on the floor. This guy had serious issues. Im glad we put him away where he cant hurt anyone else.
smw2102