Someone died upstairs in the house next door where my crew and I are working.
A firefighter who lives on the other side said that the guy was a bit of a recluse and no one thought it was strange not to see him for several days. After 3 weeks someone called the cops and they discovered him dead in bed.
Apparently, his body fluids soaked through the mattress, then soaked through the floor/ ceiling and finally destroyed the kitchen flooring. The firefighter neighbor said he’s seen it happen like this before when they go out on calls.
Could this be right? What the heck is this stuff made of?
Bacteria, water, salt, urea, fecal material, blood, stomach acid, bile…if it’s in you, it will leak out of you, eventually. Imagine if you took a large garbage bin liner full of blood and piss and shit and you stabbed a bunch of tiny holes in it with a fork and left it on the kitchen floor for a month. That’s pretty much going to wreck your flooring. Heck, my neighbor’s overflowing bathtub wrecked her floor, our ceiling and our floor, and that was only a dozen gallons of nice clean tap water.
That said, I’m guessing he was a pretty large dude, if the mattress didn’t absorb most of it.
Many years ago I saw a program, it was so long ago that I don’t remember what it was all about exactly, but the bit that stayed in my mind was about a woman living in one of those old flats that had service pipes on the inside walls of the flat running up through all the floors.
The story was that someone had died in the flat above hers and not been discovered for long time and the body fluids from the dead person were seeping through the joints by the sevice pipes and running down into her flat.
I find it hard to belive that the fluids after soaking through a matress would be enough to actually ruin more than a small patch of the flooring. I guess though if I was the next person living there I would prefer they rip up a large chunk and replace that. If it is going through a bed we are talking about a top mattress and a box spring. I have spilled 32 ounces of liquid in maybe a square foot or well maybe two (a bit hazy) and it never made it through to the other side of the matress. I guess it wouldnt take much of bodily fluids on a hardwood floor though to make it smell for quite awhile.
An average man has around 40 litres (10.5 US gallons) of water in his body. That’s a lot of liquid to leak out. Have you ever seen strawberries or tomatoes that have gone off? They can leak a surprisingly large amount of smelly sticky stuff.
I used to work with a woman who had once been employed at a funeral home. She told me of the Bucket Lady. It seems a woman had been lounging in her very hot hot tub, drinking wine and having taken a tranquilliser, and drowned. She was bubbling away for two weeks before someone found her. Had to be taken out with a bucket. (A ladle would have been too slow.)
Who…does that? I mean, what sort of job title is it when you’re “the guy with the bucket who drains the hot tub of dead lady soup”? Are they in the Yellow Pages?
I mean, I’m very, very glad there is someone who does that, I just can’t imagine how I’d find them were it ever to come up…
I’ve heard them called “crime scene cleaners” too, though obviously it’s not always used due to crime. And I think it was on either This American Life or Radiolab where I heard a story about one of these companies that has franchises all over. (Probably the one referenced in the Amazon link above.)
And as to the absorbency of mattresses, gravity alone will probably keep a good amount of the fluids heading straight down - once a large enough area of the mattress is saturated, much of the fluid in the center of the stain will head downwards rather than seeping sideways. Plus any limb hanging over the edge of the bed may act as a “downspout” for stuff there.
I would suspect the ceiling and floor below did have to be replaced, not because they were completely destroyed, but because of strict laws on how human remains can be disposed of.
The “human” part of the remains are not particularly dangerous, it’s all the microbes (?) that can live and grow in both living humans and their remains.
(I don’t know that microbes is the term I want, though.)
