"You hear about bloating, but do you know what happens when a body sits in a bathtub for two weeks and soaks up all that water? It explodes."

I'm an Associate Editor on BuzzFeed's Pop Culture team who spends my days fangirling over all my favorite TV shows and movies.

Just a heads up: some of these stories can be quite gruesome. And some stories deal with topics like drug use and suicide. 

"Even where there weren't piles of folders, there were just loose papers, magnetic cards, surveillance cameras; it was just the weirdest thing I've ever seen.

And of course, some of these documents and folders had blood and brains spattered all over them, but it didn't matter to me, since the detective on scene had said it was fine to take the body. The police had to clear a path by collecting the papers from the route we would take from the door to the apartment to where he was.

A couple of months later, it came out that the guy had over a million dollars in cash and bitcoin. Apparently, the state police were onto him."

"So, to perform the act, she removed her glasses and placed them on the water heater. She doused herself in gasoline and set herself on fire. You could see that she ran around the room, bumping into things and knocking things over, before finally falling down at the center of the room, meeting her fate."

"The entire inside of the home was covered in flour.

It was thrown against the walls, poured all over the floor, tables, and chairs, and even on the TV, and there were even patches of flour on the ceiling where someone took fistfuls and tried to cover the damn light fixtures.

I didn't go through the entire house, but every room I looked in as we went to the bathroom, where the deceased was found, was also covered in flour.

Whatever you're imagining, multiply that by ten. I couldn't tell you the color of a single thing in that house. We eventually were handed masks because it was becoming difficult to breathe. Anytime we'd turn around or take a step, it'd send clouds of flour into the air. Empty flour bags are thrown everywhere.

In case anyone is curious, the deceased was a middle-aged woman. I overheard an officer tell my boss to wait before collecting the body (I think they were calling in a different investigator?). They originally assumed the death was natural because she had heart problems (not sure how they knew this), but the condition of the home suggested someone was attempting to cover up a crime."

"Oh, my GOD. The smell...I'll never, ever forget the smell. I've dealt with bodies in various stages of death and decomposition, but holy shit, this was on 10 other levels. Now the morgue has HVAC, air filters/fresheners, and all that, but they weren't effective at all for the smell. It was so bad I gagged (which I've never done before) and almost threw up in my mask. It was the purest, worst, most concentrated, extremely pungent ammonia smell you could think of. I had never smelled anything like that in my career at that point. The smell stuck to us too, on our skin, for about a week, no matter how hard I scrubbed. I can still smell it if I think about it. The texture of the body didn't help either...it was so slippery and wet that flecks of the ammonia fluid splashed onto my skin. It was the worst autopsy of my life. It took about three hours because we kept having to take breaks, and the body was difficult to work on because it was so fragile."

"People will warn you bodies will bloat, and touching them the wrong way will make them leak. But the image you're conjuring up doesn’t even hold a light to what it can be like. Insects skittering when you delicately lift a deceased onto your cot, because one wrong move and they will start oozing.

Oh, and the ones who had pets that were so desperate they had to eat their owner. Staring into the eyes of a big, brown-eyed mutt who is happy to finally receive human contact, and all you can think about is how the deceased is missing their entire face. Poor things were just hungry, but it’s unsettling."

"So... You know how flies swarm decaying things? Yeah, it wasn't blackout curtains in the bathroom. The windows were caked in so many flies that sunlight couldn't come in. My boss also failed to mention that he died in the bathtub. You hear about bloating, but do you know what happens when a body sits in a bathtub for two weeks, soaking up all that water? It explodes.

The entrails and remains of this... Soup was all over the table, the walls, the door... It was everywhere. There was no water in the bathtub, just this sickly pink colored stew. That was the most disgusting cleanup I've ever done. I can't even imagine what it sounded like when that happened."

"Most disturbing, though, was his pickup. We chose to take it to our company wash bay to pressure wash it and make sure it was as clean as possible. I cleaned it myself and was satisfied that I had done a good job. Inspected for blood and couldn't find anything, so I began driving it back to the owner's garage.

On the way back, a light drizzle began, and I switched on the wipers. Imagine my horror as a chunk of brain streaks across my newly cleaned windshield! I pulled over quickly and cleaned it up, but it still makes me sick to think what would have happened if it hadn't rained that day."

"The first was a broom. Sure, you think, kinda skinny, right? Can't be THAT bad. Well, it was the depth of the grip of it that we were concerned about. This man definitely had his bowel perforated by how deep this thing went. The second object of note was a baseball bat, its contact end. Again, pretty deep, but significantly wider in girth. The final and most stand-out of the objects was a guitar. A really nice Stratocaster, too. The tuning end of a guitar. The tuning knobs were all covered in a thick paste of fecal matter and blood.

At autopsy, the findings were obvious. However, what I had to do was something I'll never forget. After the primary evisceration was complete, the doctor wanted to completely excise the rectum. So I had to don a chainmail glove and, after rolling this poor guy onto his side, press inside his abdominal cavity to press his rectum out towards his anus so the doctor could pull it taut enough to cut out. After she had his guy's rectum out, which resembled one of those jelly-filled toys that when you hold them, they kinda fall inside themselves and through your hands (my '80s/'90s friends should recall these guys). We then cut it lengthwise to unfold the rectal tissue into a large rectangle and assess the extent of the internal lacerations. Needless to say, deep, extensive, and numerous. 

So, that's the story about how I had to cut out a guy's butthole, for science, medicine, and law."

Responses have been edited for length/clarity.