When I was a Police officer, a big part of my job was responding to suicides on the train tracks, people would regularly stand/throw themselves in front of trains to end their lives. It was often my job to find the body, search the body for ID, pick the body/body parts up, place it in a body bag ready to be taken to the morgue.
I have lost count on how many of these types of jobs I attended. Most of the time, the impact of the train obliterated the body and I was there picking up pieces of flesh that were indistinguishable. No matter how gruesome each one was, they have all kind of blended into one memory in my mind (maybe a coping mechanism)…. Except for one.
I was working the night shift and got a call on my radio about 3am to a person struck by a train. My team and I were all sitting in the office at the time, as soon as the call came in we all jumped up and rushed into the police van. We drove on the dark quiet roads of London to the train station. None of us said a word to each other the whole way there, it was silent.. we were all too busy thinking about what we were potentially walking into to.. what we were going to see.
Once we arrived at the station, I saw the fire brigade there as well as the London Ambulance Service. Not many people realise it’s us police officers that have to pick up these dead bodies… it’s us.. unfortunately.. it’s us.
Once the power on the train tracks was off, I walked onto the tracks ahead of my team with my torch to look for the body. I remember it being freezing cold and silent, the only noise was my feet hitting the rubble on the train tracks. After a long walk in the pitch black, I saw the body. I approached the body to get a closer look, what I saw has stayed with me ever since and I don’t think the memory will ever leave me. The man’s eyes were staring right into my soul, his body was not smashed to pieces like all the jobs I had been to before. Instead this man had placed his head perfectly on the rail tracks so that the train decapitated his head from the rest of his body.
At this point, I waved the rest of my team over, we all kitted up with the correct equipment to do the body recovery. We were all there in the pitch black in our white body suits picking up his remains. I was the one who had to pick his head up from his hair and place it with the rest of the body in the body bag.. he was still staring into my eyes as I was doing so. Once the body was in the body bag, four of us carried the bag on the tracks, to get the body out of the station. While we were carrying the body bag our arms started to get really tired, so I suggested to the team that we all swap sides to give one of our arms a break.
As we gently placed the body bag down, laughter came from the bag… a really high pitched slow laugh… the kind of laugh that was laughing right at me. Chills went down my spine, I was so frightened that not only was I speechless, I could not process a thought, i was completely frozen. We all stopped and looked at each other… I just picked up this man’s decapitated head how could he be alive??how could he be laughing at us??? I could see the fear on my colleagues faces, time seemed to freeze in this moment and no one knew what to do.
Eventually, we opened up the body bag, whichever officer searched the body didn’t see the man’s phone that was in his inside jacket pocket. The man received a call from an unknown number and his ringtone was his laughter (which we found out from the family later on). The laughter still stays with me till this day.. and as a believer of the supernatural, I can’t help but think…. Who made that call?