What's the worst thing you've ever heard?

[fisha]

@erie774

Thanks :dubious: .

We’ve all seen and heard horrible things that rip us apart inside and are unforgettable. But when something happens to you, you can feel your soul tearing and your mind collapses. The sounds and images stay with you forever in a way far worse than events that happen to others.

I, too, heard the recordings from 9/11 and will never forget the images of people leaping from the towers. I saw the Daniel Pearl video and has horrified. I watched footage of atrocities in Rwanda or orphanages in Romania and my heart broke. But the effect of seeing or hearing something that personally effects you creates a psychic trauma on such a different plane. I in no way mean to minimize the horrors and sufferings out there, but events seem so much worse when you are directly impacted.

Perhaps that’s why people responded with sounds that weren’t personal. I know that’s why I did.

[The_Why_Bird]

I’m a police 999 operator so I’ve heard some pretty unpleasant things (though thankfully witnessed very few in person).

@Marlitharn

Another one that I found disturbing was a man calling 911 to report that he’d just stabbed two people to death. He was so calm and matter-of-fact about it, until he realized that he wasn’t getting the response he wanted from the operator; then he started getting agitated.

Not me personally, but one of my colleagues took a call from a man who said he had just murdered his wife and daughter with an axe. We get a lot of people with mental health problems who call up and say things like this, but the operator just knew this wasn’t a hoax. Turned out to be an elderly man- both he and his wife were terminally ill and his daughter was disabled and totally dependant on them. He didn’t want to see his wife suffer, or see his daughter left behind and so… the most disturbing part was when he said to the operator ‘Wait, I think one of them is still alive…’ and walked away leaving the phone off the hook.

One thing that chills me every time is when I get a call from a suicidal person, or someone who is suffering from domestic violence, and they’re calling from a mobile phone. Often they can’t or wont tell me where they are, and because they’re calling from a cell phone, it doesn’t give me an address. I’m frantically searching through all our computer systems to see if we’ve got any records at all of where the caller is, but the pinpointing system is grossly inaccurate and most other methods only work if the person has called and given an address in the past. A few days ago a woman called me hysterical because her ex was trying to break in and get her. She wouldn’t tell me where she was because she believed we would take her children away-we never found her. I have no idea what happened that night but her sobs have haunted me since I took that call. I feel like I let her down.