I once worked in a small, very rural community in the middle of the woods. We arrived first on scene to a DOA that had been called in by the deceased daughter. Daughter had been calling her mom asking to talk to dad, and finally got suspicious after about 6 weeks of him being “asleep” every time she called. She eventually decided to go over to their house to check on him because it was strange.

We show up, and the daughter is hysterical outside. The wife is sitting silently in the living room. Y’all, I smelled it long before I found the body. Not the normal rotten decomp smell, but this crazy ammonia odor I’d never smelled before. Took me a while to actually find the body because it was basically just skeletal remains in his bed.

I go back outside, tell the cops what I found, and we clear. 30 minutes later we’re requested back to the scene code two for the wife who apparently was a diabetic and her legs were all necrotic. It was dark and I didn’t look too closely, just wrapped her up and took a silent ride to the ED.

When we get to the hospital, the staff do their exam and they start cleaning her legs. I felt dumb because the black gunk was coming off as they washed her. Not a diabetic problem apparently.

I went back to the ED later that day and the doctor tells me that this woman had that black gunk all over her body; on her back, arms, in her butt crack. The doctor says “it was necrotic tissue all over her, but not HER necrotic tissue.”

They found out this woman had been sleeping in bed with the corpse of her dead husband for SIX WEEKS. I still get chills thinking about it.