Not totally sure if it was a dead body, but I was visiting my parents in Lexington KY in 1986. My uncle also came to visit. My father, my uncle, and I decided to go visit my father’s office and on the way I saw a man lying sprawled on the sidewalk by the intersection of Vine and Limestone. I yelled to my Dad about it: he and my uncle thought it was just some old drunk. I could (and yes, should) have called 911 when we got to the office, but by then I had decided that yeah, he probably was just passed out drunk. (Even though I still had the feeling something was wrong.)
A couple days later I heard that they found the body of a homeless man at that intersection. He was probably a goner by the time anyone even noticed, though I still feel bad for not having at least called for help.
In July of 1984 I did what most college kids do on a sunny Sunday morning, which was to head for the shade trees at the college so I’d have a place to sit and read Nietsche. A couple guys who lived in the apartments across the street from me were being hauled away in body bags–they had tried to combine a drinking binge and a swim in the apartment pool and it hadn’t worked out too well. Odd coincidence: a couple Sundays earlier I had seen a man dressed as the Reaper ride down that street on his skateboard.
When I was 11, my great-grandmother had a stroke. She refused to go to a hospital, or bee seen by a doctor. She couldn’t swallow. She had been blind from cataracts for many years, and I had been her “seeing eye child.” A few days after her stroke, I heard her call, so I went in to her room. She was a waxy yellow and no longer looked “right” I knew she was dead. I called my grandmother who said “no she’s just sleeping” I then went for my grandfather, who agreed she was dead, and called the proper people. Then I was sent off to someone’s house to be “protected” :rolleyes:
Of course, as a nurse, I’ve seen more than enough.
I watched the retreivial of one of the Green River Killer’s victims from my home care patient’s back yard
I’m not quite sure if this counts as discovering a body…
But I was once riding the A uptown in Manhattan and got into the car only to discover that there was a dead bum sprawled on one of the benches. He wasn’t breathing, his skin was very very pale, and there was this cloying stink that I will never forget, it was almost sweet but it made me gag. Not quite like vomit, but somehow similar.
The stench was actually so bad that people had formed a circle around this guy’s bench and nobody could stand to go near it. Surprisingly I was one of the few people to switch cars at the next stop and move to one that didn’t reek of death.
To this day I wonder how long that corpse rode around on the A train before someone contacted the proper authorities.
EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!! That would just freak me out.
I got to walk through the sets of SIX FEET UNDER once, and even being on that morgue set was a bit much for me. Yowza.
A friend of my wife’s works for the CA gov’t, and her job involves following up on the property of people who die and have no one in their lives. That is, no next of kin, no friends, no family, etc. She has to go through their houses and catalog eveything they find in there. These folks being eccentric loners, that usually includes weapons, drugs, and just some plain old weird shit.
Some people made a documentary about her office last year, and she’s got some interview bites in it. Weird job, that’s for sure.
Yeah, odd phenomenon that. We could literally smell a mortuary cop from a few feet away. It’s as if dealing with death permeated his clothes and his body.
And Seven, that must have been a really shitty experience. Sorry to hear about it.
Wasn’t me, but when I worked at Cala/Ralphs, one of the baggers found a guy with his throat cut when he was taking a load of garbage out to the dumpster.
I worked at a movie theater where an employee found a murder victim near the dumpsters behind the theater. I wasn’t there when it happened though. I’m nearly 29 and I’ve never actually seen a dead body except some mummies in a museum exhibit. Not in a big hurry to see a fresh one, either.
I walked my kid to kindergarten (good grief, it’s been 5 years!) and on the way back I noticed a guy sleeping in his car. Not unusual, this was on a street where a lot of people came to have lunch as it was next to a field with a good view of the mountains. But what struck me was how totally relaxed this guy was and how he could stay asleep with the sun shining in his face, and then I wondered briefly if he lived in his car, because I could see a lot of stuff in there.
So. Two and a half hours later, I walk back to pick up my kid, and the car is still there, and the guy is still there, still in the same position. And at this point the day has heated up, not that it wasn’t warm before (60s) but now I’m thinking, sheesh, that guy has his windows rolled up, and he’s still there. In fact he’s so relaxed, doesn’t look like he’s even moved…
About that time it hit me that perhaps somebody ought to go knock on his window. At that point I sort of split in two. Part of me remembered that I had a kindergartner to pick up and kept walking. The other part pulled out the cell phone and called 911, apologized for calling 911, explained the situation, the 911 dispatcher said this was the kind of thing they would indeed like to check out.
So. Picked up the kid and I saw a police car turning onto the street in question just before we got there, walking (kindergartners don’t walk real fast), and as we passed I looked down the street and there were two patrol cars there, lights flashing. So we took a different street, and I never did know. Of course I wonder still if maybe I should have looked a little more closely when I’d passed him at noon.
I think the smell of decomposition depends a lot on the humidity and temperature.
Back in 1990, my mother found her employer dead in his house one Monday morning. He was a HVAC contractor, and she managed the company from a small finished garage office. When he hadn’t come out of the house after 10am, she let herself in the back door. He was very dead; the police figured he’d died within a few hours after she’d left the Friday before. This was June in New Orleans, and he’d turned off the air conditioning before he began drinking and huffing freon. (I think this qualifies as what used to be termed “death by misadventure.”)
My mother had been storing a lot of her personal stuff there on the property while her house was being worked on (long story), and we had to clear her stuff out that night because of estate probate or something (another long story). So I was there in the house later that evening. The smell was just beyond anything. It smelled like sweet rotted cheese. The worst part was that the awareness of what had caused the stink wouldn’t allow your consciousness of the smell to fade.
When I was in college I was inside my apartment, heard a horrible scream, and ran outside to see a woman take a few steps then hit the ground. She had been stabbed. I called the police, went back to help her, but by the time they arrived she was dead. It was something that took me a long time to get over. I was also considered a suspect for a while.