This popped into my inbox the other day from a throwaway email account. I don’t know exactly why it was sent to me, but it’s… an odd story, assuming it’s true and not somebody trying to submit creepypasta to me. Well, whoever you are that sent this, you’ll be seen by the subscribers to this Substack, at least.

I got a job as a hospital custodian right before COVID hit. It was the worst job I ever had, but it paid better than anything else in the county, gave me damn good insurance, and meant I wasn’t spending the day languishing at home on unemployment that was swiftly running dry. I was on second shift, meaning my interaction with patients was minimal, so I had less chance of catching COVID, and didn’t have to put up with the… colorful personalities of patients that screamed at you about our mask mandate as their lungs collapsed.

 Most of my job involved cleaning patient rooms after they left, whether it be getting discharged back home, or being moved to somewhere else in the hospital, like another room, physical therapy… or the morgue. We got a lot of elderly patients who should have been in hospice.

One of the last rooms I cleaned was in July of 2020. It was a COVID isolation room, number 209. The patient in there kept screaming about facemasks loud enough to be heard from the other end of the floor. They must have put him on a ventilator at some point, because he stopped screaming two days before I cleaned the room.

Room 209 had a lovely view of our hospital’s parking lot. More importantly, it had an ‘airlock’ system where there was negative air pressure in the room itself and an anteroom outside where staff and visitors could suit up before entering. A window looked in from the anteroom so that the occupant could more easily be observed, and what I saw through it had the makings of a patient rights lawsuit.

The room was squalid, basically uninhabitable. There were bags of soiled linen and trash all over the room, apparently not collected by any other custodians or housekeepers for days. A fitted sheet with a massive, brown stain running its length was on the bed, along with tubes from a ventilator. An IV tree leaked fluid onto the floor, and I could see a yellow substance in the sink I hoped was vomit. When I peeked inside, I could see there was bloody linen and toilet paper on the bathroom floor. The stench within made me dizzy, even through an N95. 

I shut the door and went to the nurse’s station, which was in view of the door. They looked at me with the same exasperated ‘oh god, what does the help want now?’ look they gave every custodian. “What’s up?”

“209 looks like it hasn’t been touched since the patient got in there. Why weren’t we told it needed to be cleaned?”

Panic crossed her face as she looked between me and the door to 209. “Did you touch anything in there?”

“No, I just looked inside. It’s a COVID room, isn’t it?”

She chewed her lip for a few seconds, and then shook her head. “209 was a code gray. We weren’t allowed in there, just people from the CDC.”

Hospitals have codes for various emergencies; ‘code blue’ pretty much universally means ‘cardiac episode’, while ‘code yellow’ meant ‘biohazard spill’. This was the only hospital I’ve heard of that used ‘code gray’; it meant ‘unknown infection, strict quarantine needed’.

“The CDC?” I laughed in disbelief. “You’re joking.”

“Swear to god.” She held up her hand. “I recognized some of them from the COVID orientation earlier this year.”

I swore under my breath.“Is it even safe to go in that room?”

“It’s been three hours since the patient… since the room was vacated.” Her face paled as she paused. “The CDC said that the contagion can’t survive outside of a human body for more than two. You should be good.”

“Okay.” My shoulders slumped. “Got any gowns?”

A few minutes later, I was in a gown, mask, face shield, gloves, and booties, re-entering the room. I sent a picture of the room to my supervisor before I started disinfecting it, just so he could see the state that the nurses left it in; they were supposed to do daily check-ups, and let us know when the room needed cleaning. Telling the nurses here to ‘respect the custodians’ was like telling the sun to stop shining, and it just made my job harder.

The first step was stripping the room of all trash and linen. After the first two trips, I just took the trash and linen carts out of the soiled storage area and pulled it to the room. That’s when one of the trash bags ripped open, and I noticed something weird— it was full of facemasks.

Face masks were mandatory except in the cafeteria. We had to conserve them as much as possible; masks came in boxes of fifty and were strongly encouraged not to use more than two in a day so that the patients that needed them could have them. From what I could tell of the trash bags, someone had dumped at least five boxes worth of them into this single bag, and had left them here for days.

To be fair, all of the masks were soiled, most of them with mucus, but some of them had what was clearly dried blood. I got out biohazard tags and put them on every bag I could find; all of them were filled to the brim with masks. Where they came from, I had no clue, but the trash cart was full before I got all of the bags out.

The last bag was the one still in the can. It tore under its own weight, and the only thing keeping me from launching into a flood of frustrated curses was the fact that someone was being wheeled into another isolation room next door. All the same, my eye twitched as a torrent of masks covered the floor.. All of them were soiled, and as I picked them up, I saw that some of them were imprinted with… I don’t know if I would call them designs or stains. But there was one mask that I picked up that looked like it had an ear on it. Another seemed to have pictures of molars printed onto it. 

One of them made me stop cleaning and just stare at it for a few minutes. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first, kind of a triangular shape, but then I found another one that matched to it, and my brain, addled by months of doom-scrolling that I justified to myself as getting educated about COVID, recognized it as a cluster of alveoli— air sacs in the lungs that inflate to let us breathe.

I marked all of the trash as biohazard and moved on to the linen. The bedsheet was stuck to the mattress by whatever the stain was; probably blood, judging by the way it chipped and peeled off. The mattress had an impermeable plastic cover on it, but the instant the sheet was removed, I drowned it in bleach. 

The only thing wrong with the bathroom was the pile of bloody toilet paper and towels.  The rest of the room was immaculate; there was a strip of paper we slipped over the toilet seat to show that it’s been sanitized, and it was still there. There was just a random, massive puddle of blood on the floor. When I flushed the toilet paper and put away the linen, I found another mask on the floor in the middle of the puddle, with what looked like a finger printed on it.

Most discharge rooms take about half an hour to do; it took that long to get the room stripped. It should have been pretty easy after that. I just had to wipe everything down, douse the room in bleach with a sprayer we had, let it sit for ten minutes, wipe everything down again, make the bed, and mop the floor. Unfortunately, I kept running into hiccups.

I ran the sink to try to clean the yellow fluid off of it, and it overflowed. It was clogged by a piece of blue paper beneath the drain cover, unmistakably part of a facemask. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how it got in there. Nothing I could do about it other than tell maintenance; the whole room would have to be delayed in any case, with the state it was in.

The IV tree was one of the messier parts of the room; it looked like one of the bags of saline had fallen to the floor, sprung a leak, and was now mixing with a grayish stain by the bed. After asking the nurses three times to help me take it apart, one of them came in, stopped at the door, and asked me a question. “Did you find his glasses?”

“Sorry?”

“The patient came into the ER with glasses, but by the time we were putting him on the ventilator, they were gone.”

“Does it really matter?” I asked. “He passed away. Does his family want his effects?”

“That’s not it,” she explained. “We were instructed to destroy his effects. They could have spread whatever he had.”

I swallowed.“What… did he have?” 

She just shook her head. “CDC wouldn’t say. I heard them say something about skin peeling off, so… maybe a flesh-eating bacteria?” She sighed. “Weird it took so long to call you housekeeping, though. It’s almost five, but he must have died during the night shift.”

I didn’t mention that another nurse said the room was vacated three hours ago. “What makes you say that?”

“Because I’ve been up here since 7:00 AM, but nobody from the morgue came to collect a body.” With that, she took apart the IV tree and left.

Ironically, decontamination may have been the easiest part of this. I just took up a motorized sprayer and used it to spread a bleach solution all over the room. We had to cover everything: the walls, the bed, the floor, the IV pump, the chairs, the bathroom. If there was even a chance that COVID (or whatever this patient had) could exist on a surface, it had to be disinfected. Halfway through this process, I saw another gray stain behind the bed. I figured it was nothing a magic eraser couldn’t fix, so I grabbed the supplies and moved the bed out of the way.

It took me five minutes of scrubbing before the stain, whatever it was, started to vanish. My supervisor texted me to ask how much longer I would be; I responded with another picture of the room. He sent back “Christ alive”, before saying that he would send someone else up to help with discharges.

It took me ten minutes to get the stain off. As I moved the bed back into position, I noticed something on the floor: a pile of facemasks that I had somehow missed when I stripped the room. I looked at the photo I had taken of the room originally, and it wasn’t there.. At first, I thought that it maybe got stuffed under the bed somewhere, or in between the arm rests, but I didn’t see how that was possible. After spending almost fifteen minutes scrubbing the bed, I would have noticed stray facemasks falling to the floor.

All of the trash was already in the cart, so I picked them up, double-bagged them, and put them in the trashcan on my custodial cart. My supervisor dropped off the linen I needed for the room, and after I made the bed, I started mopping.

Somehow, I had missed one last facemask. It was under a cabinet by the sink used to store blood pressure cuffs and vomit bags, among other things. This one also had a design on it— a pair of green eyes with some horn-rimmed glasses around them. The eyes were unfocused, pointing in different directions, and the mask was wet in a place that almost suggested the eyes had been crying.

I threw it in the trash with the rest of the masks, and right before I shut the lid— and I opened it again just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things— the eyes swiveled to focus on me. The bags of facemasks in the trash cart began to rustle. One of them started to moan, and then another. They would pause for a moment, then moan again, then pause, as if they were running out of breath.

I just stood there in shock as a code yellow was called by one of the nurses. The next thing I really remember, I was standing naked under a decontamination shower and being instructed to scrub with ‘anti-contagion’ soap; not antibacterial or antiviral, just ‘anti-contagion’. While my next paycheck had a $500 bonus marked as ‘hazard pay’, I didn’t last much longer there.

For the next month, the room was marked as unusable; every time I went to clean on the second floor, there were men and women in hazmat suits, carrying biohazard bags full of facemasks out of the room. Most of them were quiet, a couple of them moaned.

I gave my boss my badge and keys after one of the hazmat workers dropped a bag of facemasks, and the contents of the bag started to scream.