As of this writing, I have been a crime scene cleaner for 5 years, 11 months, and 22 days. It’s not a pretty job, as I’m sure you can guess. The technical term would be “biohazard remediation”, but I’m all fancy like that. I clean up nasty shit. I work for an independent cleanup company that is hired by both law enforcement and private parties. I’ve done it all, homicide cleanup, suicide cleanup, decomposition cleanup after an unattended death, hazardous materials removal, industrial accidents, infectious disease contamination. Everything. But I’m not really writing this to talk about the job itself. I’m here to talk about the bizarre, unexplainable, downright *wierd* things that have happened to me in my almost 6 years as a crime scene cleaner. Though 6 years isn’t exactly the longest time to have been doing this, I have quite the collection of experiences to recount.

 

• My third job was a suicide cleanup. The victim was a 26 year old woman who had taken her father’s shotgun and discharged it with the barrel in her mouth. She did it in the “family room” of her parent’s home while they were away. Before her death, the room was *entirely* white, save for the TV mounted to the wall.  Though the family room was the primary scene, we were told that detectives believed that the victim was practicing self-mutilation through cutting shortly before her death, in the basement bathroom of the house, Since I was new, I was tasked with assessing and cleaning the blood in the basement bathroom.  
  
  I made my way over to the door to the basement and opened it. Looking down, I could see absolutely nothing but pitch black. I flipped the switch to the stairwell light and nothing happened. I had a flashlight in my equipment so I retrieved it and turned it on, but even with the light I couldn’t see the floor at the bottom of the stairs. I began my descent down the basement steps, and this is where it gets weird. I kept walking, and walking, and walking down the stairs, but never going anywhere. I would look back up and be farther down than I was previously, but it’s like the stairs never stopped. I turned around to go back up, convinced I was just tripping out or something, but as I walked back up the stairs, I never got any closer to the door at the top. It’s like I was walking the wrong way on an escalator.
  
  I turned around once again and flashed the light down the stairs, once again into perpetual darkness. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a voice behind me ask *”What are you doing?”*. I collected myself and turned back around, realizing I was about 4 steps down the stairs, looking up at my superviser. I looked back down the stairs and flashed the light down, and saw the floor. My supervisor said in a sarcastic tone that this house does indeed have lights, and flicked the light switch at the top of the stairs, illuminating the stairwell. I didn’t bother explaining what had happened, and went about my job.

 

This first example happened about a year into my career with the company I’m at, and was the first job I was ever on that brought up some unexplainable questions. I’d heard a few stories about impossible happenings, but besides the weird staircase incident, which I just chalked up to nerves at the time, I’d never encountered a strange situation like this before.

 

• We had gotten to a murder scene where two people were victims to shotgun blasts to the head. We began the cleanup and this required picking up pieces of skull and brain matter. The strange part came when we just kept picking up pieces of skull, finding them *all* over the place. Places they shouldn’t have been. Like, across the room in the opposite direction of the blast. Not only that, but we found enough pieces of skull to form *at least* 4 full human skulls. There had never been any reported murders here, and witnesses at the scene said the room was clean before the incident happened.
  
  Forensic investigators or whoever would have the job, tried piecing the skulls together but to no avail. There just happened to be 2 or more extra skulls blown to pieces at the crime scene. Never did get answers for that.

 

The last one I’ll talk about happened recently actually, just a few weeks ago.

 

• We normally get jobs done within a 3 day time frame, depending on the size and details of the job (small jobs take a day or less, big jobs take around 3). This particular job was at a laundromat in the inner city, where a gang slaying had taken place, leaving 5 bodies, both inside and outside the building. We got there and immediately knew it was going to be a 2 day job. Me and one other guy were on it, because our other guys were at some industrial cleanup that required a lot of manpower.
  
  The weird thing about this one is that I spent hours cleaning up puddles of blood, and then we left for the night. Upon returning the next day, the puddles of blood were back in their original spots. It was as if neither of us had done any work the previous day. It made no sense. We cleaned it all again, explaining to the client we ran into a problem and would need a third day to complete the job.
  
  We worked for a while and took an hour for lunch. We got back, and once again the blood had returned. I knew I wasn’t crazy, we had buckets of soiled rags and half-used bottles of cleaning materials right in front of us. We cleaned it all one more time, and this time, it stayed clean. I have no explanation for how the blood kept coming back.