Home Is Where the Horror Is: People Share the Weirdest Things in Other People’s Homes

I was at a house for a cable TV service call, customer wasn't home so I called him. He said, "I will be home in five minutes, and don't freak out, but I have a tiger on the truck".

When he got there, he had a tiger in a cage on the back of his truck. I got to pet the thing, feed it a little, and then went on to see his venomous snake collection, his hand grenade collection, and his hot sauce collection.

The very next day, I was at another service call, and asked the customer to get to the pole in the back yard, and he told me that he has a tiger in the back yard, so don't freak out. I got to pet the thing, and feed it a little.

I had been working cable for 18 years to that point, and had never encountered a tiger in all that time. I have been working cable 7 years since, and have had no further encounters with tigers in that time. But, for two days consecutive, I visited homes with tigers.

When I worked as a building inspector we saw a house that had not paid their water bills and had their service disconnected. So naturally their solution was to get a bunch of big blue storage bins from Walmart, cut a hole in one end of the lid, and take a dump in those. They had 5 lined up in the living room. There was also 4 dead dogs in a closet. I puked for the rest of the day. We condemned the house.

I shadowed a home health therapist once. We went to a house where we had to tuck our pants legs into our socks because of fleas. We drove down this dirt road, and I thought we were going past these abandoned single wide trailers, but then we parked in front of one. This trailer didn’t have steps to enter, you had to boost yourself up. The floor was rotten through to the ground in places, and there was a grandmother with 6 young kids in there. Including the one we were seeing who had hydrocephalus, but the mother never got it treated, and neglected the child nearly to the point of death till grandma found them and took the “baby.” Grandma was really trying her best, but this place was the most unsafe place I had ever ever seen

Went into a woman's house that had a lifesize replica/mannequin of herself mutilated & murdered.

Turns out, she's a semi-pro actress. She's been an extra in a dozen or so motion pictures. One of which was a B level hack film. The special effects crew made a latex replica of her for a couple scenes in the movie & let her keep it afterwards.

It was very real looking. From a foot away, you'd think it was a real mutilated corpse. Creepy, but I can't blame her for wanting to keep it.

My dad's business partner bought a home on our street after the lady who lived there passed away— she didn’t have any living relatives. My dad was tasked with getting the place cleaned out and ready for contractors since we lived across the street. The woman who passed was always a nice lady and we’d often go hang out with her on her porch, where she taught my sister and I to knit. We were never invited inside and never really asked to be— at my age I didn’t really think anything of it. Anywho, my dad was REALLY excited to show us the place but kept a secret what was so “crazy” about it. We walked in to find out she was a hoarder! The entire house was filled with 6 feet tall piles of junk, save for the walking paths thru each room which were actually quite neat and the bathroom which only had a pile as tall as the toilet seat. What was strange is that it didn’t even smell much at all! I’d seen hoarding tv shows and they always noted the horrible stench. It definitely didn’t smell good but all the junk was basically brand new things still wrapped up in their packaging or their store bags. It seemed she just had a shopping addiction but was still a neat lady?

A friend of mine in middle school had a giant pig in their house! Apparently a family member was allergic to dogs and cats so they got this little pot bellied pig as a pet. They let it into the yard for the summer and the thing turned into what looked like a giant boar, tusks and bristly hair and all. They still loved it very much so in the cold winter months it got to live indoors. They had a grand piano and a swooping curved dark hardwood staircase and this giant pig in their home.

I used to install Dish Network for a living.

I was installing for an elderly lady, who complained that her "sister's" TV always showed the same thing hers did. I had a 2 tv installation order so I figured that would be OK.

I finished the installation and was demonstrating the system when she looked at the full length mirror and complained that her sister's tv was still showing the same thing.

Noped out of there as quick as I could, and left notes on the account in case she called in.

My husband's experience relayed to me: he was renting a small two bedroom apartment with his now ex wife. Her sister came to stay with them for a while trying to get on her feet and get into school, work etc. After a heavy storm the landlord came to check on the apartment and went into the basement. It was completely flooded with several feet of water. He said there was no way the storm did that and found that there was a burst pipe as well coming from the bathroom. Turns out the sister was flushing those wet wipes down the toilet and it finally overloaded it. They found her closet full with wet wipes, used. Hundreds. She never showered apparently, just wiped down with wipes, piled them in the closet or tried to flush them.

I do pest control and when I climbed an attic ladder and switched on my flashlight I saw a person up there waiting for me. Turns out they kept a mannequin in the attic to scare squirrels. Didn't work, the squirrels were nesting two feet away. Scared the living daylights out of me. Also found Her Royal Majesty, The Queen of England, in life sized cutout form in a basement closet. Also scared the hell out of me.

My childhood best friend grew up in an extremely messy house. He was one of about 8 children. We were digging around his house for a VHS (I was 12 in 2000) when I found a styrofoam takeout container. Something hard was rattling around in it. I feared that it would be old dried up food but succumbed to my curiosity and proceeded to open the box. Inside was a small brown shriveled up snake looking thing. I stared at it for a few moments trying to process what it was when I hear my friends mother call out "Oh that's just name's umbilical chord". I was completely shocked. Especially because that particular child was already about 3.5 years old at the time.

This reminds of something that happened to me recently. I was over at a friend's house -- just him, his wife and their dog live there. We were doing nothing in particular, just hanging out late at night. It gets to the time that I'm going to be heading out, as they're getting ready to go to bed. His wife is brushing her teeth as I'm putting my coat on and I hear her walk into the kitchen while still brushing. She calls for her dog, leans down, and takes the toothbrush from her mouth and begins brushing the dog's teeth. After a good minute or two of thorough brushing, she proceeds to take the toothbrush out of the dog's mouth and goes right back to brushing her teeth. Without rinsing it off. I just stood there mouth agape.

My friend from middle school had a massive fat Buddha statue in his living room. an otherwise completely normal American household, but with a hecking massive, gold colored Buddha that almost touched the ceiling watching over this white Protestant family. I never asked why.

First time I went to my friends house for dinner his parents gave me a bowl of mayonnaise to eat. They all had one too. And out of sheer politeness I ate it. Half an hour later my bros mom comes in with fried fish and veggies

Have you ever been into the home of someone with OCD?

The lady that used to live across the street from us was OCD. At 7:00am she would emerge from the house in perfect hair and makeup and begin her routine.

Her lawn was immaculate. The grass was mowed with this ridiculously expensive lawn mower, which is something that would be used to mow the grass on a golf course. The curb was lined with brick, and she would go down the curb with a toothbrush and clean between the bricks every day. She would sweep her grass. Her son was not allowed to play in the grass. The shrubs and flowers were perfectly trimmed.

The first time I visited the inside of her house I was afraid to move. I remember looking at the rug in the entry foyer, which we were not allowed to step on. The tassels on the end of the rug had been perfectly straightened out, and it looked like they had been ironed. You would have never known that a child lived in that house. It had to be pretty miserable for him.

This happened to my girlfriend when she was in Uni.. She's over at her friends house staying the night. This is her first time there and everything seems normal, parents seem nice. While they're getting ready for bed, her Mom shouts up and asks if either of them would like a cup of tea. My girlfriend declines the offer but her friend shouts back, "yes please... And will you put it in my bottle??" At first, my girlfriend thought maybe she misheard. But sure e-hecking-nough her Mom comes upstairs with some tea in a BABY'S BOTTLE. My girlfriend and her friend were around 20 at the time and she said it was one of the strangest things she's ever seen.

When we were dating, my wife had a roommate that "collected" Snoopy things. She would get boxes delivered with various Snoopy memorabilia that would go straight to her room. She was very protective of her room, I never saw inside and my wife only saw it from the hallway sometimes, apparently there were stacked boxes up to the ceiling.

The only spot it spilled over was her "comic" collection. She'd save newspapers that had the Snoopy comic in it, but she wouldn't save just the cut out comic, she's save the entire newspaper. There were piles of newspapers under the stairs that were making their way into the living room proper by the time my wife moved out.

I played with a chicken skin for an entire summer. My mom had taken it off the chicken she was going to bake and gave it me, which I now presume to give to the cats. However, in my ignor-innocence, I thought she gave it to me to play with and she didn’t notice that I made off with it. I played for a few hours and left it on my bedroom floor. It had kind of hardened up so I ran water over it and got it all soft again. I hung it over the bathroom sink in the kids bathroom (mom rarely in there) and there it stayed when I wasn’t playing with it for about three months. When she discovered it she was so disgusted that she didn’t talk to me for a week.

Walked into my friends kitchen, he says I could grab anything I wanted out of his pantry. I see boxes and boxes of expired food. I'm not just talking about food that expired a month ago, or even a year ago; I'm talking about expiration dates from 1995! There were plenty of different snack foods with similar expiration dates.

He thought this was completely normal, and that the food "still has taste". I was afraid of opening anything I found.

When I was 5, I went over to a friend's house. She offered me a snack, and I accepted. The snack was cinnamon graham crackers that she dug out of the depths of the couch. And I don't mean a package of graham crackers -- she just fished out the bare crackers themselves, and we had a yummy snack.

At the time, I just thought that was very convenient. In retrospect, I can see where I might be mistaken.

When a great grandmother of mine died, they found stashes of money throughout the house, plus every social security check she ever got, cashed and the money placed back in the envelope and hidden. She was mean as hell, too. Very controlling and anti-social. She never threw any food out, either. She cooked it and ate it no matter how bad it had gone.

It sounds like she was crazy but she had fled Poland as a child during WWI, walking with her family through to England, immigrated dirt poor through Canada, then to the US where she survived the Depression and WWII supporting herself and two kids. All those experiences made her distrustful of governments, banks and other people. She wanted to make sure she had cash if everything crashed and was afraid of ever going hungry again. All of those experiences made her into that person.

It always make me wonder what are the back stories are to some of these people.

I worked for a moving company and we went into a lady’s house and kept finding needles everywhere. Behind the furniture, down in the couch and chair cushions. We stopped after a couple minutes and refused to finish the job. Turns out her teenage daughter was diabetic, and would just toss the finger prick needles, and syringes everywhere. She honestly didn’t understand why we refused to touch the furniture after one of the guys carried some cushions and wound up with a needle stuck in his shirt.

I saw a large catfish in the only bathtub of my Vietnamese friends house.

He told me they fatten them and purify them for a few days before eating it by feeding it a special diet.

Oh, and they showered with it.

Working as locksmith, get a call to rekey house. Talk to client before I show up, she seems like a completely normal lady. I show up, we talk for a moment outside, completely normal house from all looks, she's an RN, 0 warning signs. She goes to open the door and let me in and starts acting sheepish, she starts apologizing and says something like excuse the mess. The door can't open all the way, there's 3-4 FEET of trash everywhere. Not hording boxes or collecting weird stuff but just garbage, rotting stuff, piss, poop, piles of it. There's a 9inch wide walkway through the garbage that's 6inch deep of compressed garbage, to-go boxes, fast food bags, magazines, you name it. She goes in walks through to the living room sits down on a couch that cant be seen, garbage everywhere, a cat appears out of nowhere and sits on her lap lovingly. She seems for all practical purposes like a completely normal functioning adult. I looked it up it's some weird form of the hoarding condition but just rotting waste. She seemed so normal. I did the job and left, felt bad for her. still kinda freaks me out like there's no way you're guessing this nice nurse lady is actually a garbage troll.

Just recently had a client who was fairly normal on the outside: clean cut, steady factory job, decent car, etc. Inside his house, the roof was rotted through, there were holes in the floor, dead rodents in the kitchen cupboards, etc. The weirdest thing was that he kept talking about his "wife", but it was abundantly clear that no one lives there with him.

This guy has a completely normal life on the outside, but is definitely off.

As a loan officer I had to go to a person's home to get loan docs signed. She was a surgical nurse in a big hospital. The house smelled so bad. I had to use the restroom and there was a huge cockroach smashed on the wall just above the sink, literally 2 inches from a toothbrush. The tub and toilet had a black ring of dirt like they had never been cleaned. The dining room table was full of trash and empty cat food cans where they just opened the can to feed the 4 cats sitting on the table. It was absolutely disgusting!

Where to start.

During my plumbing apprenticeship I worked in north London for the local authority. Our job was to go into houses and update their boilers to new high efficiency boilers.

One home was a top floor flat and we were told in advance that the guy who lived there went by the nickname of "birdman". He was called this because he left his windows open year round allowing all the pigeons to roost in his place. On approach via the stairway, you could smell the ammonia from the bird droppings. By the time we got to the door we were gagging and called the job off. The local council had to call in deep cleaners in hazmat suits to clean the place before any work would go ahead.

Another place a guy lived who I'm pretty sure had some mental health issues. When we got in he had broken computer parts covering every single square inch of the floor. He said that he wanted us to remove our boots to work there but we flat out refused on health and safety grounds. Whilst we were there he spent most of his time on the phone calling local zoos asking what they did with their "spare" porcupines. He was calling because he wanted to eat them. When they refused he accused them of being racist as he claimed to be from Africa and it was a delicacy for him. He was a white guy with a north London accent. Not saying he couldn't have been born in Africa and emigrated, but it sounded made up.

Lastly, there was a very friendly family but their place was a mess. When we got in they offered us tea which we politely declined. When we got into the kitchen there were dirty cups and plates stacked head high and decomposing fish on the floor. It was gross. The worst part was having to get in the bedrooms. One room, which was barely big enough for one adult, had 3 adult men staying in. It smelled of old mildew and sweat. When one of the guys got up out of bed to give us the room, his toenails were so long that they made a tapping noise on the laminate flooring, kind of like the velociraptors in Jurassic park.

I'm not sharing this to make fun of any of these people. They were clearly living close to or on the poverty line. If anything I think these types of people need more help from society, better mental health resources, more living space and just general wellness checks could all help these people.

I thankfully don’t have to go into people's homes, but my dad does as he works for an internet company in the Midwest. The area he works in is full of…. interesting people. I know I’ve heard dozens of stories of the horrors of other people’s houses but aside from the elderly men that brick their computer with porn and claim “they don’t watch that stuff” or clear hoarders with feces everywhere insisting he takes his shoes off in the house, (he never would he always tells people that it isn’t allowed by his company for insurance reasons) one story from my teenage years sticks out more than others. He visited a middle aged woman’s house who was complaining about her internet not working, pretty standard stuff. He showed up, noticed the inside of the house wreaked of shit and was told the modem is downstairs and led to the basement. The lady told him, “careful, we’ve been keeping our puppy downstairs because he likes to bite” bit of a red flag but my dad still decided to go downstairs. Told us that everything in the basement was soaked in urine and covered in dog shit, but found it a little odd that after 10 minutes or so the dog hadn’t appeared. Didn’t think much of it and continued to work on the job at hand, as he tracked some of the cables he stumbled upon a python he described as being about 5-6 feet long, and soon saw another in the basement. One was moving freely but the other had quite a large object in its stomach that kept it mostly stationary. He then left the home, without fixing the internet, citing it to his work as a danger to his safety and never had to return.

I am an installation tech for a small WISP in Florida. I get to the home and greet the homeowner, seems like a decent guy. I take a look around the property to find the best place for the installation. There is only one spot on his house that is absolutely perfect for installation.

“What room is this here? Can we install it here?” Guy freezes with a deer in headlights look in his eyes. “Oh that room, it’s nothing. Just storage.” I reassure him that I don’t judge any messes and explain to him that the room would be easiest to install. He reluctantly agrees and opens the door.

Full blown sex dungeon.

Whips of different sizes. Full size X cross with chains at the top. Crazy alternative artwork all over the walls. Plus many more things that I have never seen before.

All I could mutter was “Oh”.

Got his internet installed and he was happy. At my wireless company, we don’t kink shame.

Never had to go INTO someone's house for the job, just delivering onto their roof (roofing shingles). But one house always sticks out to me.

We get there to deliver, should be there 45 minutes at the most. Semi small town (maybe 2000 pop. max surrounded by nothing) so the house isn't anything crazy. Homeowner greets us and says he'll be in the detached garage and some friends will be coming over. He looks to be around 50, long white beard, a little overweight with overalls. Pretty normal for the area.

Tall lanky guy in his mid 40s comes over, fits the same rural Midwestern America look as the homeowner. Then a kid no older than 16 or 17 who seems to be trying to look like a gangster with a pitbull shows up and walks into the garage. I just think "Huh, he doesn't seem like the type to be friends with these guys but whatever."

So I'm on the truck next to the garage sending shingles up to my partner who is on the roof of the house. Suddenly dense white smoke is coming out of the smoke stack to the garage and smells like cat piss. My partner asks "Does that smoke smell like cat piss?" When I tell him yes, he says "They're definitely cooking meth in there."

So we decided to kick our pace up a notch and knock out the job in less than 30 minutes. As we're strapping the truck back down, the home owner strolls out to thank us and the tall lanky dude walks out behind him SMOKING A METH PIPE in the open. No care given. Like holy smokes, dude, is this okay? Are we in danger? Is this homeowner about to tell us not to mention anything we see here? Just noped the heck outta there.

P.S. - As an added bonus while delivering, we heard the neighbors across the street yelling, glass shattering, a woman running away, then a guy sitting on the front porch pretty obviously holding a pistol. Glad I never went back to that town.

I work as a caregiver and when I was new to the house this guy wouldn't talk to me. He sometimes wanders into the staff bathroom and he can use it but he has his own bathroom. We mainly make sure he isn't going to drink soap or another cleaning supplies. I went in to see what he was doing and to see if he needed help with anything. I found him in there with the lights off. After asking him if he needed anything he motioned for me to come closer. And when I leand in he whispered "I am the night" it through me off and I backed away he then motioned for me to come closer again and whispered "watch your back" he then walked out of the room looking at me and then laughed when he got to his room. He still doesn't talk to me but will look at me and laugh.