I’m a sanitization specialist for the city I live in. It’s mostly just a fancy name for garbageman. I guess the city tries to give us some pride with a more formal title; to be honest, I don’t really give a shit whether people call me trash pick-up or garbage worker. It all means the same in the end.
I ride on the back of garbage trucks all day and pick up people’s trash for a living. Most of the time it’s a pretty easy job with early but long hours. I don’t have a family at home, not even pets, so it works out for me.
It’s not exactly my dream job, but it’s humble work and it keeps me out of trouble. I’ve been doing this for 15 or so years now, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of insane shit I find in people’s trash.
I have so many stories and most people don’t believe me when I tell them, so I figured I’d share them here. There seems to be a lot of crazy things that happen on this page, which is fine with me; it ain’t no different than what I deal with everyday. Here are a few incidents I think you all will be interested in:
— Every morning at exactly 7:23 a.m., there’s a man who watches us from his window when we pick up his trash. Tom, the guy who drives the truck while I load the garbage bags, pulls in at around 7:20. Just exactly as I start moving his trash bins, I see a curtain move from the window. He is always hunkered down and hidden; we can only see from his eyes to the top of his head. Why this may not seem strange to most of you, it’s creepy for Tom and me.
I know it’s common for people to watch the garbage truck from the safety of their own homes, but this dude hides himself like he doesn’t want to be caught. He watches from the time we get there until the time we leave, his bright, wide eyes following my every move. That’s the one thing that sends a chill down my spine every week we pick up his trash. His eyes are always so painfully wide open and bulging like they’ll pop out any minute. He has these deep, dark circles under his eyes like he hasn’t slept in months. His skin is sunken and ghostly pale. I’ve always been too creeped out by him watching me to go check on the guy, so I usually just let it be.
— Once, Tom couldn’t come to work because he was down with the flu. The city couldn’t find someone to cover his shift, so I had to go at it alone. That day took double the time because I had to drive and load the trash. Most days I get off work around 5 p.m., but this day I was out until after 8. I remember it was late fall when this happened.
I had just finished the last of my schedule and was driving back to city hall to pick up my car when there was something standing in the middle of the road. Now, the way our trash pick-up schedule works is we start in town and make our way out into the deep country toward the end of the day. I know it really doesn’t make sense, but Tom has been driving the truck long before I started work with the city, so I just follow along with what he wants. So, I was just following the usual schedule that day, albeit it was later. It was almost completely dark outside (thanks to daylight savings time ending unfortunately) and here I was, in the middle of nowhere, in a shitty, old garbage truck with someone standing in the road. Expect, it wasn’t really a someone, more like a… thing?
I slammed on my breaks to avoid hitting it before I was able to get a good look. The thing was tall. I’m talking 7 feet or taller. It was completely stark white and naked, no clothes, nothing. It really didn’t have a face either, just a vertical slash through the center of where it’s face should have been. Its arms were so long it dragged its fingers on the blacktop. I was so in shock that it took me a solid moment to notice the red liquid seeping from the bottoms of its feet. Was it blood? Or something else? All I know is, I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I swerved to the right and slammed my foot on the gas pedal and got the hell out of dodge.
Whatever that things was, I wasn’t going to take my chances. As I flew out of there, driving at least 80 on the backroads, I heard this ear-piercing screech from behind me. It didn’t sound like anything that would come from an animal, so I figured it came from the creature I saw. It sounded like it was in pain. The next day I told Tom all about it and saw the realization flash in his eyes. One second he was frozen with fear and the next he acted like I was crazy. Said I was just seeing things. I didn’t press the issue seeing his reaction and we went on about our day.
— This story might be a bit more on the tame side; it’s definitely still creepy, but less so than the other stories I have. One time, Tom let me drive our regular route for practice in case he missed a day or something. This was when I first started working with the city, so I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to learn. Tom rode on the back of the truck, and as we made a stop, he would load the trash. Except one time we ran into a problem.
There’s an old woman named Mrs. Cleery who we pick up trash for in the middle of our route. She usually just has one bag, but this time she didn’t have any. The first time we saw this, we just figured she didn’t have any trash for the week and went on with our schedule. The next week there still wasn’t any trash. At this point, Tom and I were getting pretty worried. We went on ahead to our next house, but I called Mrs. Cleery when we stopped. She answered, but something seemed off. I let her know that there hadn’t been any trash pick-up at her house for two straight weeks and that we were worried something might be wrong. Right off the bat she seemed super confused. She told me she was setting our her trash like normal and someone was coming to get it because it was gone only a few minutes after she set it outside on the curb. I thought this was strange so Tom and I took a detour back to Mrs. Cleery’s house. When we knocked on her door, she let us in and offered us a drink and some cookies like any grandmother would.
We declined her offer because we couldn’t stay long and explained to her that we weren’t the ones who were collecting her trash. Luckily, Mrs. Cleery had her son set up a Ring doorbell a few weeks ago because she noticed her hydrangeas were being destroyed by rodents and she wanted to catch them. She hadn’t looked at the footage since her son installed the cameras, but when we all huddled together on the couch, we saw exactly what was happening. As soon as Mrs. Cleery shut her front door from taking out the trash, someone would crawl out of the utility building she had outside. It was a small man. He had wild hair and tattered clothes.
He was skinny and short and he twitched when he walked. He made it to the curb where the trash bag was and hauled it over his shoulder. On wobbly legs, he waddled back to the utility building with the trash in tow and shut the door behind him. There was definitely a squatter living in Mrs. Cleery’s building. I called the police while Tom consoled Mrs. Cleery. They arrived shortly after and arrested the man. Turns out he was just some homeless dude who was sleeping in her building and eating scraps from her trash. The police also found hydrangeas laying around a makeshift bed the squatter had put together. Mrs. Cleery always kept a lock on her building after that.
— I’ll leave you with one last story, but I do have plenty more. When Tom and I were finished with our shift one time, and we were dumping our truck in the landfill, a thick, black sludge fell out on top of the pile. At first we thought it was just build-up of the gunk and grime that accumulates in the back of the truck, but the more we looked at it, the more we realized the “blob” was moving. First, we noticed the smell. It was pungent, like a skunk rotting on the side of the road. If I could use one word to describe the smell, it would be death. Unequivocal death. As the smell grew stronger, the sludge would move more and more with such fervor that we were sure the thing was going to burst. Except, it didn’t. One minute it was wriggling and squirming and the next minute it went still. Tom and I waited for a moment, looked at each other with wide eyes, a silent “what the fuck” passing between us.
That’s when we hear it, a loud popping noise like someone opening a champagne bottle. We look back quickly at the blob to see that it’s no longer a mass of thick, black sludge. In its place laid a boy, a human boy, pale and naked. He lay there shivering and whimpering like a puppy abandoned on the side of the road. Tom, in his deep, gruff voice just sighed and said, “Fuck this, bro. I’m out.” He walked away leaving me to investigate what in the actual world I was looking at. Should I have called the police? Should I have called child protective services? Maybe. But you know what I did instead? I reached my hand out to touch the boy slowly.
I needed to get him help somehow. But just when my fingertips almost grazed his shoulder, he shot up on all fours. He glared at me with frightened eyes, his mouth hanging open. I jumped back, bracing myself for a possible attack. The boy backed away, scooting on his hands and knees, growling at me like a dog that hadn’t eaten in days. “It’s coming,” he said in a throaty whisper as he continued to back away. I continued to watch in awe until he twisted his body in what seemed like the most painful way until he was standing upright. The boy gave me one last look in all of his nude glory and took off running toward the woods. I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t know what was coming. But what I did know is that I needed to get out of there. I ran like my life depended on it and made it back to my car in record time.
I peeled out of that parking lot faster than Jeff Gordon during the Daytona 500, afraid to look back in my rearview mirror. I drove at least 20 miles over the speed limit all the way home. I double checked my locks once I was inside my house and stayed up all night, worried that something was coming for me. But it never did.
To this day I’m still not sure what the boy/sludge monster meant. And I don’t really want to find out. If you’re interested in hearing more stories about my job as a garbageman, I have plenty more. My life may be a monotonous string of collecting trash, but at least I’m never bored.
Edit: Part two is up! https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/wp2qkr/ive_been_a_garbageman_for_15_years_ive_seen_some/