Just like the title says, what are some of the most vile things people have ever seen?
No links to unsafe for work pictures please, as (besides being forbidden here) everyone knows about those and I would rather hear real-life anecdotes anyway.
IANA doctor or a coroner or an EMT or a police officer or fire fighter, I’m sure they’ve seen much worse things. My “most vile thing” is very much in the realm of the ordinary, common experiences.
It would have to be that time I got rats in my attic one winter. The darn things were too smart for their own good. I tried live trapping but even with baiting the trap with fried chicken I caught only one (young) rat. So I resorted to poison, as much as I hated to. That poison is not a quick death. I saw one rat leave a blood trail (from its mouth? its rectum? it must have been in agony and died a prolonged death) across the length of my garage.
But the worst thing I have ever seen in person was when I was up in the attic collecting a dead rat. I put a plastic bag over my hand and reached for what I thought was a dead rat. When I put my hand on it, it was writhing and humping beneath my hand. I’ll tell you I drew that hand back like it was in scalding water.
Then I took a closer look. The rat was “blown”, actually partially disintegrated. There was no way it was alive. So I took another closer look – as much as I didn’t want to, I had to know – the rat was filled with maggots. So many of them, that they were causing the motion.
I had to have a very serious talk with myself before I could bring myself to pick up the rats and maggots and throw them away. But it’s not like someone else was going to do it. And it sure as hell wasn’t like I was going to leave it there.
Ew. Maggots. This is pretty mild in comparison, and I seriously doubt it’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s still fresh on my memory so I’m going to share. A few days ago, I decided I wanted pancakes. Hey, there’s pancake mix in the pantry! Hot damn! I picked up the box and pulled out the bag. It was black. Well, mostly black. There were a whole helluva lot of white things in there…hey, are those things moving? Ew. Maggots. Then the smell hit me. Man, that was nasty. I mean, I was gonna eat that!
D:
My mother die of liver cancer.
It was back in 1997, and I was working thru a temp agency at a HORRID job that had so many safety issues it wasn’t even funny. I don’t think a night in that hell-hole went by without at least one person being injured badly enough to be sent to the emergency room.
I was at my usual job, shooting screws into ping pong tables , and we heard the most blood-curdling scream I have ever heard, like something out of a horror movie. One of the women from another department came staggering toward our area, her face drenched in blood. But the worst part of it was her face itself- it looked as if it were melting, sliding downward. And her hair was gone from the eyebrows up. Just… gone. Bare blood-covered bone showing.
She had had her hair pulled back in a ponytail , and leaned over to take something off of a fast moving conveyer belt, and her ponytail had fell over her shoulder and got caught in the rollers, which literally scalped her. It was truly horrible.
And the manager made one of the other workers go PLUCK HER SCALP OUT OF THE BELT. >shudder< It was almost as bad, seeing him come by with a plastic bag with her hair sticking out of it, dripping blood.
I will never, never forget that.
i spent a year running the tongue saw in the offal section of a slaughter house…
Honestly, the most vile thing was on Christmas Eve of this year.
I work in a hospital (graveyard shift), and the only entrance open at night is the ER. I walked in past security and was heading toward the elevators, when I saw what can only be described as someone’s insides, only they were no longer inside them, they were out. Apparently it was someone with a bleeding ulcer or something, and there was a pile of something very chunky on the floor surrounded by about a gallon of blood. It stunk of infection and feces. Seriously fucking awful. I thought I’d never eat again. I had to walk right past it, too- at least I didn’t have to clean it up, though. I felt really bad for whoever it came out of.
ER nurses of the world, I salute you.
I’ve seen so much eccch I don’t know what story to relate. But I think I’ll fall back on one I’ve told here before, the good ol’ “KD Cocoon”.
One night, years ago, I decided to make Kraft Dinner for supper. Got the water boiling, opened the box, absentmindedly fished out the cheese pack. Then I went to pour the noodles into the water. But instead of the usual casade of loose noodles, this huge cocoon made out of sticky white silk and all the noodles in the box slid out and hit the water with the velocity of a cannonball. Somehow none of the scalding water hit me, but I probably wouldn’t have noticed, as I was too busy staring at the cocoon in horror. In about 2 seconds after hitting the water, it broke open and spilled forth hundreds of yellow maggots. Writhing and boiling to death. I screamed.
I haven’t had KD since.
A brief lookover tells me that maggots have it here–thus far–for the biggest gross out. So, I’ll tell my own maggot story.
I used to work for a veterinary clinic. A dog came in with a huge lump on the back of its neck. The veterinarian said it was likely fly blown. Hmm…I guess she could tell by the way the lump was literally moving. Being the assistant, I was told to shave the area and prep it for eviction and extermination of the ugly little creatures.
I began to shave the area. As the electric razor came to the apex of the lump, the razor struck what was likely the scabbed over entry, pulling loose the scab. It was like a volcano spewing its molten innards–only these were warm, crawly maggots! They hit my hands and arms, and scattered and crawled in all directions…gads…on meee. I screamed and threw the razor down. It continued to run and vibrate as I was running in circles and slapping off the creepy, squirming beasts.
Hearing my screams, the veterinarian came running around the corner, and began to laugh as she realized what had happened. Between chuckles, she asked if I was going to turn off the electric razor. Well, I won’t repeat what I told her that she could do with the razor! That brought fresh howls out of her. I calmed down some until she pulled one out of my hair. God, I practically came unglued!
The good news is that I was able to overcome my revulsion and we continued with the procedure. I don’t know how I did it with my eyes closed… 
When I was a teenager, was just walking down the road and witnessed an awful accident; an elderly man had a heart attack, lost control of his car, swerved into the path a Ford Pinto; the surfboard on top of the car went through the windshield and decapitated the heart-attack driver. The heart-attack driver’s wife also died in the crash
Still, 25 years later, I sometimes wake up in the wee hours of night and see that playing back, decapitation, vivid. Wish I knew some way to make it go away.
I’ve cleaned drains in morgues and the stuff that came out on the end of that cable wasn’t pretty.
Also, once I was working in a fast food place and I removed a toilet to gain access to the drain line. I went out to my truck for another tool and when I came back there was a giant turd left in the toilet for me.
Watching my co-workers eat french fries with their dirty hands, and watching their fingertips become cleaner and cleaner as they ate the greasy fries. Yummy.
Standing hip deep in grease in a hotdog plant.
I don’t think I will either. :eek:
(I used to look after IT for the local fire brigade.)
A picture of a dead, burned, child.
Nuff said, really.
The pictures, circulating in Thailand, of the tsunami victims. Photographs that didn’t make it into the western news media, though no doubt are in the underbelly of the internet somewhere.
A gigantic raft of floating wreckage alongside a ruined beachfront hotel: bits of wood, bits of furniture, and like so much flotsam, dozens and dozens of blackened bodies; five corpses lying on a beach, washed up in a star pattern - bloated, eviscerated, prolapsed; dozens more bodies lying across the pristine sand in their beachwear, heads stoved in and blood everywhere; and “this is the worst”, the interior of a makeshift tent, in which lay the bodies of fifty or so babies and children.
Injury and illness haven’t bothered me in years. But, when I was 18, a corpsman in the Air Force, one of the docs asked if I’d like to see something I’d never see again. I said sure.
He took me to the morgue where the bodies of 6 crew members of a KC-135 that had crashed and burned on the runway, had just arrived. Three weren’t recognizable as human, the other three had vague man shapes.
The one thing that stuck in my mind, was the pathologist telling us that the ones that looked like gingerbread men died on impact, but those that were unrecognizable balls of carbon, had curled into the fetal position as they burned to death.
When I was a little kid I found a dead elephant seal on the beach. That gave me nightmares for a while.
Either the mass grave I was present at the opening of or the disembodied face we found on the beach after the tsunami last year. Both savory.
You’ve mentioned that before, in another thread long ago (some sort of “worst jobs” thread, I think). I had to visit one of those awful places once but became horribly, morbidly fascinated with learning about what goes on inside. Care to tell more?
As for me - I worked as a veterinarian’s assistant one summer. I cleaned diarrhea and piss and vomit out of cages all damn day. The grossest thing I ever saw was probably eye surgery she did on a dog. I loved watching the surgeries. This dog’s eye was beyond repair and it had to be removed. When she cut the eye out, the whole socket filled with blood. When she went to put the eyeball on the other end of the table, she dropped it. It landed on the floor with a little splat and I just kind of stood there, and then started laughing. It was surreal.
Also, one time I had to dig trough a dumpster full of Og knows what in the middle of July to find - get this - a tumor. It had accidentally gotten thrown away. I ripped open every damn bag in that dumpster, but I finally found it.
Why did you have to go sifting through the trash for a tumor?
I caught sight of my own reflection in a department store mirror once…
I’m sorry to hear about your mother, but yes I know what you mean. I watched my grandfather die from lung cancer.