Creepy Encounters I Had While Cleaning Up After Crime Scenes

A True Horror Story from My Time as a Crime Scene Cleaner

I’ve cleaned up blood that’s soaked through old pine floors. I’ve scraped bits of brain tissue off tile, and carried mattresses that sloshed when you moved them. Working in crime scene cleanup isn’t for those with weak stomachs but honestly, it’s not the gore that sticks with you. It’s everything that comes after. The quiet. The strange little moments you can’t explain. People ask me about creepy encounters I’ve had on the job, and over the years, there’ve been plenty. But three of them still keep me awake sometimes. They weren’t the most gruesome scenes, not the worst I’ve seen by a long shot but they were the ones that made me feel something watching from the dark corners. Something that never really left.

The House That Smelled Like Metal

The first one happened on a gray Tuesday morning. A man had shot himself in the kitchen, and his body sat there for three days before anyone found him. When I walked in, I could smell that metal tang right away—thick, sharp, impossible to ignore. I’ve smelled it so often you’d think I’d stop noticing, but this one was different. It was heavy, like the air itself had weight. Usually, I play music while I work it keeps things moving, helps drown out the noise in my head. But that morning, I’d left my phone in the truck. So it was just me, the mop, and the sound of liquid somewhere. Drip. Drip. Drip. The faucet wasn’t on. The floor was dry. But the sound kept coming, steady and rhythmic, from behind the wall. I pressed my ear to the drywall, and I swear I heard breathing. Just faint slow inhales, slower exhales. I told myself it had to be rats. Always is. But when I pulled the fridge away to clean behind it, I saw something scrawled across the wall in a thin, sticky brown that could’ve been old blood or something worse. Still here. I froze. The landlord claimed no one else had been in the house since the police sealed it. I finished the job fast no breaks, no calls, just worked until I couldn’t stand it anymore. But before I left, I opened the fridge one last time, just to be sure everything was clean. And there it was again, written inside the condensation on the back panel: Still here.

The Woman Who Laughed From the Attic

Not every crime scene cleanup job is bloody. Some are quiet, sad, almost peaceful. But those are the ones that get under your skin the worst. This one was out in the suburbs a middle-aged woman who’d ended her life in her home. Nothing particularly unusual. The smell was faint. The scene was simple. My coworker James and I were just pulling up carpet and prepping for repainting. After an hour, James froze mid-step and looked up. “You hear that?” he asked. At first, I thought he was screwing with me. Then I heard it too a laugh. Barely there, high-pitched, but unmistakably human. It came from the ceiling. We figured animals again. Probably raccoons or rats in the attic. I grabbed a flashlight and climbed up the pull-down ladder. The air up there was thick with dust and cobwebs, boxes stacked everywhere but no movement, no eyes staring back. When I started climbing down, something brushed the top of my shoulder. Dry and cold, like paper skin. I flinched so hard I almost fell. I told myself it was insulation. Then James pointed at the wall by the attic hatch. There were handprints small ones pressed into the wallpaper below, faint but clear, dragged in a line like someone sliding down the wall with dirty fingers. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. We packed up early, left half the supplies behind. That night, James called me. His voice was shaking. “She laughed again,” he said. “Outside my window this time.” He quit the next morning.

The Basement Apartment

This one wasn’t technically a crime scene, more of a biohazard cleanup. A tenant had died alone in a basement apartment and hadn’t been found for almost two months. That kind of job hits different. The smell doesn’t just sit in the air it sinks into your clothes, your skin. I was cleaning the walls when I felt pressure in my ears, the kind you get on an airplane. The air in that basement got heavier, thicker. My chest felt tight, like something invisible pressing down. Then my partner stopped scrubbing and just stared at the far wall. Deep gouges ran across it five feet above the floor. Dozens of horizontal claw-like scratches tearing through plaster down to wood. Too even to be random. At the far end of the room sat a mattress, sunken in the middle, stained dark. The air above it shimmered like heat off the road, even though it was freezing. We both saw it. No one said a word. Then the light started flickering, faint at first, then faster. A low sound rose from somewhere something between a whisper and a groan, echoing through the concrete. That broke us. My partner bolted for the stairs, and I followed, heart hammering, hands shaking. As I hit the top step, the light below went out and for half a second, the room glowed faint gray. In that glow, I saw it. A figure standing beside the mattress, face pale and thin as chalk. It looked up at me. And it smiled.

What Stays Behind

People always ask if crime scene cleaners get used to it. The blood. The horror. The smell of death. You do, kind of. You learn to separate the job from the person who died there. But what you don’t get used to is what the houses keep. The quiet. The feeling that something’s still there, just beyond where you’re cleaning. Like you’re scrubbing the surface of something deeper that never goes away. I tell myself the things I’ve seen and heard are just exhaustion, stress, an overworked imagination. But late at night, when I close my eyes, I still hear those drips. Still see those words appear on cold, fogged glass. And in my mind, as clear as the day I saw them, I can still read what was written. Still here.