Paramedics Describe The Creepiest Calls They've Ever Had
Paramedics easily have one of the hardest jobs out there. Every day, they come face-to-face with death, pain, and crime - all under a great deal of stress. However, we don't really get to hear about the really dark stuff that these medical professionals also see in their line of work, and if you think you've heard it all, you're about to be proven wrong.
We've gathered the creepiest calls that EMTs and paramedics have ever been sent on. And trust us, the stories make even the grittiest episode of House look like the Care Bears.ÂWoman tries to kill herself with an old saw
"This woman was clearly struggling mentally. She went into her basement and started sawing at her wrists horizontally with a rusty hack saw, bleeds a good amount, and then starts walking around the house. She wasn't dying quick enough, so she sat down in a chair in the middle of the living room, and started going at her wrists again, this time with a pair of scissors.
I was the second person inside the house. It looked like a massacre. We searched the house top to bottom, fully expecting to find multiple dead bodies in there. I've never seen so much blood in my life. Every single room had a trail of blood in it.
The woman was found on a chair in the living room. Rigor mortis had contorted her body into a really strange, unnatural pose, and her face was haunting. Literally the stuff of nightmares. Her wrists had huge chunks of skin/veins/muscle missing from them. Saying she slit her wrists is inaccurate. She ripped them to pieces."
Woman cooks herself in scalding-hot bath
"We responded to an apartment building when the caretaker had called us. His initial report was that he went to check on a suite because water had been reported flooding into the hallway. He informed us there was a deceased lady in the tub. He said he saw her and immediately backed out without touching anything.
We entered the suite. It was filled with steam. The humidity had started peeling the paint off the walls in sheets. There was also the smell of cooked meat.
Upon entering the bathroom we found the supposed deceased, seated in the tub, with the hot water running. From the looks of it she had been there a while. The skin on her body, all the way from toes to sternum had started separating. Much like the paint on the walls, it was bubbled and coming up in sheets.
I checked for vitals while someone turned off the water and the others went to get a bag and radio for a can (when a body is badly decomposed, we put them in a sheet metal box).
I almost shit my pants when I found signs of life. The lady had a pulse. She wasn't really responsive, but she was breathing shallow, had a heart beat, and was looking at us. We had to get her out.
We radioed for EMS and informed them we had a live patient with at least 80% burns. They were a few minutes out so we started to get the patient ready for transport.
I don't remember what we were doing when we noticed the water draining from the tub. But what we saw was her torso essentially degloving itself as the water receded. We immediately plugged the bathtub and continued working her.
When EMS arrived we had to transfer her to the stretcher. That's where things got ugly.
We planned to gently lift her out of the tub, and place her on the stretcher. However, as soon as we touched her, her skin was coming off in sheets. I remember saying, 'Sorry ma'am, but we have to do this' as I picked up my section and came away with almost all of the skin I contacted stuck to my arms. That was the only time she made a sound. She probably couldn't feel it due to the nerve damage, but I'm pretty sure she knew she had lost almost all of her skin from the chest down.
The water was still extremely hot, so we were also getting burned while doing this.
We managed to get her onto the stretcher and EMS took her away.
When the bathtub was drained, there was a sheet of skin stuck to the bottom. We had to scrape it off and bag it. I still can't each certain chicken dishes because of this.
We figure she was in the tub and the water got cool. So she turned it on with her toe. She must've had a stroke and could not turn it off again. Being an apartment it had pretty much unlimited hot water. So that poor lady sat there for approximately three days, cooking.
Between a stroke, and severe burns, it wasn't likely that she'd make it. But we treat every patient like they have a chance. The human body is a weird and wonderful thing. Sometimes people do make it through some pretty terrible things."
She did not survive. We don't get a lot of follow up on calls, but I heard she passed away.11-year-old lives with mother's corpse for days before calling 9-1-1
"One call that will always haunt me was on an unresponsive female at around three in the morning. We get there and do some pointless CPR along with the fire department... She had been dead for a while; no shock-able rhythm, and clear rigor mortis. The most disturbing part was that the original caller was her 11-year-old daughter, who had just spent three days with her mother's corpse and called 9-1-1 because she was 'lonely'.
It also didn't help that the victim was completely naked when we arrived."
Woman with dementia lives with her husband's corpse for three weeks
"The call was for an older woman, lying in bed. When we get there, the smell is horrendous of a dead body. There are millions of flies everywhere and a little old lady in lying in the bed, alive. About five feet away, there is a body covered up by a sheet. The lady was a dementia patient, and her husband (the deceased) was the primary caregiver. Based on the number of flies and state of decomposition, the police estimated the guy had been dead for about three weeks. The woman must have been getting some food out of the refrigerator, but it was totally empty by the time we arrived.
The creepiest part happened on the way to the hospital with the woman, she said, 'I hope that nice man on the floor is OK'."
Church janitor crushed by cross
"I responded to a call where a janitor was dusting quite a large stone cross in the middle of a church. He had been up on a ladder cleaning, when he slipped off, and proceeded to try to hold onto the cross to keep from falling. Unfortunately, the weight of the 200-pound man was too much to support. The cross fell towards him, landing on his left arm, with a part of the horizontal stone of the cross, pushing his muscles and tendons out of his wrist like a squeezed toothpaste tube.
Then the cross fell completely on him splattering his brain across the floor. Quite disturbing, and definitely the most horrific and gore filled call I had ever witnessed."
Woman found slashed open on her doorstep with no clue as to who she was
"Got a call around 2AM for an 'unknown medical' which is always a kind of 'uh-oh' thing for us. As soon as we pulled up all the cop had to say was, 'Well, I don't even know.'
I walked up to a lady, unconscious, in front of her house that had her face cut similar to the joker and her throat slit. She was in her pajamas, no bag, no ID, no belongings at all outside. Her door was locked and there was a dog barking inside, all the lights were off. No one knew what the hell happened and no one seemed to know any information about this lady. No name no age, nothing.
She was alive when we got to the hospital, I hope she's all right today but I often wonder who did that to her and why."