When you work a job like security – especially if your shift extends overnight – you’re bound to have seen more than your fair share of stuff you really wish you hadn’t.
Which means that, if something stands out as the weirdest or most disturbing – or really if you remember it at all after some time as passed – it must have been really bad.
So what I’m saying is, you’d better prepare yourself for these 14 largely NSFW stories of the worst security shifts ever.
14. There was no stopping him.
I was working on a railroad bridge in Fort Dodge, IA when a guy jumped off the bridge 140 feet down into a shallow river to kill himself.
He walked right past my co workers who asked him what he was doing and he said calm as day “I’m jumping off this bridge”.
They aren’t allowed to do anything but call the police in case the person tries grabbing you. He didn’t waste any time, he was fully committed.
13. Definitely not a cat.
Not my current security Gig but when I did security in Obetz, Ohio. I was training a new guard, an Immigrant from Somalia, I can’t remember his name but he was very unfamiliar with everything about america.
One night around 3am we saw a skunk walking around outside of our guard shack, My trainee had never seen one before and asked what it was. I explained that it was a Skunk and exactly what would happen if he got too close to it.
Well he didn’t believe me and decided it looked like a cat, he got sprayed and I made him stand outside the shack.
It was also his first winter in Ohio.
12. I would have walked out.
(Ex security guard here) Someone had covered an entire restroom with feces.
11. So many stories.
I’ve been in healthcare security for just over a decade. I’m in the technical side of it now, but spent about five years as a uniformed officer. Man, I have so many stories. We work directly with mental health patients (ranging from drunks in the ER to full blown psych unit patients), workplace violence situations, domestic assault between patients and their families, assault, theft and robbery, and so. so. so. many other things.
The biggest one that stands out to me as the most fucked up…hm. That’s tough.
So, one night we got a report of the sound of broken glass in the parking deck. Me and a coworker go out on foot to investigate as our mobile unit was off campus. Sure enough, we hear it. Turns out it’s someone trying to steal a car (if I recall correctly he broke into several before finding one he was able to hotwire). We catch him in the act.
Cue the Scooby Doo scene of running around chasing him trying to corner him until PD arrives.
We get him on the third level up. Mobile unit (who had finally come back) is coming down the deck, coworker is going up, and I come out of the stairwell at the center, directly across from him.
I start calling for him to give up. He’s caught. PD will be there any moment. It’s over.
What does dude do? He climbs over the edge, and tries to drop down and catch himself on the next level down. This middle aged, overweight dude.
Nope. He falls straight down there stories. Lands on his feet. The sound was nauseating. We rushed down, got an ambulance en route. Dude lived but would likely never walk again. Got a look at his X-rays in the ER while getting information together for my report and talking with PD (who eventually showed up after the bus took him around to our ER).
I choose that story because he wasn’t a patient to begin with. There are many many many things I’ve seen in my years is that hospital.
10. Nothing to see here.
Worked night watch at a lake resort once. This lady went into the public women’s restroom we have around 1 A.M. I think nothing of it other than people usually aren’t going into the bathrooms so late.
Later when I’m doing my 4 A.M. walk through I go into the restroom and notice she’s still in one of the stalls. I ask if she ok and she says yes.
She comes out of the stall totally wrapped up like a mummy in toilet paper and just strolls by me like she isn’t completely covered in toilet paper.
9. This is a wild ride.
I worked as a mall security for a bit years ago. One of the 9ther guys heard a lady scream but didn’t see anything, so he took note of the time and area.
So, we had this mentally handicapped kid that got out of his group home and ran around the mall for a couple hours that same day before the cops finally got notified and caught him… screaming about Jesus while sprinting around the food court.
Back to the scream. We looked at the cameras later to see if we could find out what had happened. This kid walked right up to this younger woman and cupped his hand between her legs for a second and then walked off like nothing happened.
She had pretty clearly screamed there, stood there for a second afterwards, then started laughing as she walked off. I mean, what else do you do when some obviously mentally handicapped kid grabs a handful of genitals and then walks off, I guess?
8. A little recognition is nice.
I worked security at a hospital for two years. One afternoon we had a ‘code grey’ to remove an unruly guest from the property. He was basically about to start punching doctors in the ER according to dispatch, but right when I got there two police were coming through the front door and the guy bolted.
He practically threw an elderly nurse to the floor on his way down the hall but I knew there was a T intersection he had to go through if he wanted to get to the fire exit door. I am 280 pounds semi-muscular 6’1″ and I tackled that guy into the wall so hard his head literally went through the drywall.
It turned out he was a domestic abuse repeat offender so it’s too bad I couldn’t help him find a wall stud.
Anyway I actually got a nice bonus and little award plaque that year so… good year.
7. I think that would be it for me.
My 3rd shift as security, working at a motel around a big music event over a weekend.
Guy that had been nice all weekend got super drunk last night, and when his family from out of town came to bring him home because he worked the next day he went into a drunken rage and punched the window to his room, sliced up his forearm pretty hard, bleeding all over the place.
Guy threatened to kick my a$$ for offering first aid. Group of early 20 somethings came out of their room and offered to kick his a$$ if I wanted them to.
Guy ended up seeing the cops coming, running around to a friends room, cops followed the blood trail to the room and arrested the guy. He got first aid and I think went to the hospital. Nice intro to security.
That same weekend, what could have been f**ked up, a couple hell’s angels were staying in one of the ground floor rooms, had their bikes parked right outside their door.
Guy pulls me aside while I’m patrolling and tell me if I see anyone f**king with their bikes to alert them, not the police and they will handle it. Second night of the event a drunk kid got lost and forgot where his room was, knocked on their door at like 3:30 am. They were not happy but luckily the HAs realized that it was just a dumb drunk kid so just scared him off.
And last, a serial s*%tter. Not just any s*%ts, massive crack head shits. Like as big (around and long) as my forearm. He’d drop them in stairwells all over a property I was watching. It was unbelievable to me how the guy didn’t die dropping those deuces.
Did eventually run into the guy, crazy French dude. He was peeling the dead skin off his feet in the middle of the winter. I got within 20 feet of him and he started yelling at me to f**k off and saying he was going to kill me. Tried to spit on me and ran at me a couple times before running away across the street.
6. Well that’s terrifying.
Worked a low risk security job at a historical building on my university campus. The guy who had my position before me was fired because he was bringing his girlfriend and friends in after they hit the bars and let them walk around the building (very beautiful and cool place but also lots of priceless and important old books and records for the state among other things).
He was disgruntled and my boss warned me that he had took his keys with when he left. If I see him I’m supposed to call the cops, everyone in the building knows about it and there’s flyers with his photo at every desk. It’s about 9 and the night shift guard comes in around 9 to relieve me. I’m walking down from the 4th floor to go meet them and hear a bunch of noise coming from the 2nd floor bathrooms.
Walk in to find the guy drunk off his a$$ just spraying bleach and other cleaning chemicals all over the women’s bathroom and ceiling. I start to back up from the door to call police but tip over a wet floor sign. He saw me and screamed at me then started chasing me. He’s covered head to toe in these cleaning solutions and I’m BOOKING it downstairs.
These stairs are old and super worn down and marble and slippery on their own. He’s still chasing me and screaming and I hit those stairs in 4 wheel drive, he’s right behind me and there’s 2 sets locked doors on every exit, so I know I’m not gonna be able to unlock them and get outside fast enough.
I grab the fire extinguisher and hide around the corner of the stairs so I can whack him when he comes down them. Just as he’s on the last flight, he slips on a step and eats it on the ground knocking himself out.
I run to the exit and get outside and call the cops while the noc shift guard (this big huge dude we called Duke) comes running from across the street.
Watching that deranged drunk dude covered in purple cleaning fluid chase me through that building is burned in my memory.
5. I see why he left.
This was two years ago. I have since left security. My very first shift/post. My first night on the job I had to do “firewatch” at a scummy 2 story hotel with about 40 rooms in it. The entire hotel was condemned because the back stair set that separated each floor was about to collapse. Code enforcement and fire department condemned it.
Anyway my job was to get everyone out of the hotel to move to another hotel the owner had. The entire motel was full of mostly crackheads and near homeless people trying to survive in it making weekly payments. The parking lot was full of junky cars not running. It was run down and derelict. It was something out of a movie, bad part of Stockton California in the middle of summer. Needles everywhere around the property. And oh my god the roaches.
The f**king cockroaches these rooms had. I had to knock on every door with a code enforcement guy (wore a body cam) and a fire department guy. Everyone that answered the door to their rooms was clearly an addict and not all there. (No judgement) I remember knocking on the door of a woman’s room. She had 5 kids in there with her. Single mom and trash bags piled to the ceiling inside it. Cockroaches f**king crawling everywhere. It was a horrible sight.
Every single occupant had four hours to get what they can carry and leave. Most of them tried to pack up their lives but they couldn’t. Alot of stuff was left behind in those rooms. So many people asked me for help or what they need to do, I didn’t have answers. I was just the guy needing everyone out.
I couldn’t believe the living conditions these people lived in to keep from being on the streets. It made me realize what I had. I burned my pants and boots when I got home. I washed my uniform shirt about 6 times. I threw my gloves away I was so scared to bring cockroaches home to my own home. I still think about it to this day.
F**king millions of roaches infesting this place and they all slept in it.
4. This is one of my greatest fears.
An old man get skinned by an escalator.
To cut to the main point he fell trying to help someone and the machine skinned him a good amount. Seriously I got there when he was on the stretcher already but there was legit blood on the escalateor and his nose was barely hanging on.
3. Haunted.
Jumpers, I used to work security for a downtown high rise condo and the amount of suicides while I was there was haunting. There were roughly 4 per year the 8 years I worked there.
The worst one for me was and elderly lady. She went to the top floor and jumped. Fell through a tree and splattered on the sidewall. She left a body sized hole in the tree. The fire department came to hose off the sidewalk. Little did they know a good sized chuck of her liver was under the parked car she landed next too. It wasn’t found until the next morning when that person left and the liver was just sitting there.
Her sons had to fly in to take care of her estate. On the table in the dining room was the suicide note. She explained that because they weren’t going to visit her that year. She didn’t need to exsist any more. They both broke down sobbing when they read that. We almost put them on suicide watch.
Over the next 3 weeks they would come into the office and demand the security footage that shows their mom going into the elevator, getting out at the top floor, and throwing herself off, then landing on the ground, our general manager and attorney both refused to release this footage to the sons.
Shit still haunts me to this day. Those loud deep sobs of just pure sorrow those grown men let out will forever be in my memory.
2. Not her finest moment.
We used to get one of the security guys send around recordings he made of shenanigans he captured on the car park camera’s.
The office was in a fairly rough part of Essex in England and there was a nightclub over the road.
There were plenty of people who thought they were sneaking off for a secret shag but the funniest one of all was a young blonde who stumbled out of the night club, staggered into the office carpark and proceeded to squat directly under the camera for a wee.
The look of relief on her drunken face will be with me forever. That wasn’t even the funny part. When she stood up after her wee she subsequently took her shoes off and flicked them around as she has obviously pissed in her shoes.
I laughed so much I had tears.
1. He did what he had to do.
Many years ago I worked armed security. I was patrolling at an abandoned refinery late one night when a silent alarm was tripped. I went to investigate it when a kid, no more than 19 drew down on me.
I tried talking him down, but was unsuccessful. I tried so very hard.
He was convinced that the copper he was trying to steal was worth more than his life. He shot at me and I returned fire.
He missed me and I struck him in the head. Not one of my favorite memories.
Y’all, I’m honestly sorry that I read some of these but it’s too late now.
If you’re a security guard (or ever have been) our comments are open for your stories, too!
