A WOMAN fell ill from breathing in the fumes from her neighbor’s corpse which was 3ft away from her for eight weeks during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Reagan Baylee took to TikTok to reveal what happened to her – but she warned her followers that the horrific story involving bugs and a rotting body was “gross.”
Baylee described how she was living in a 250 square-foot studio apartment “24 hours a day” in Los Angeles during the peak of coronavirus in the United States.
She began to notice a bad smell, lots of spiders, and felt sick around the middle of May 2020 when she began to experience “nausea, dizziness, wasn’t sleeping through the night, headaches, light-headed.”
“I started to call my mom and tell her that I wasn’t really feeling like myself,” she said. “What I meant by that was that I was having headaches, I wasn’t really sleeping through the night, I was feeling nauseous a lot.
“And honestly we all kind of wrote it off as me just feeling a little lonely and going a little crazy during quarantine, just like everyone else was.
“It was really unlike me to not be able to sleep through the night, so I thought this was really strange but again I just wrote it off because I just thought I was really sad and depressed.”
‘DEAD FISH’ STENCH
She told her manager about the unusual number of spiders as well as the nasty stench, who blamed it on the hot weather.
Baylee continued: “Towards the middle of May I started to complain about a bad smell that I would get whenever there was a heavy breeze, but again it wasn’t anything I could put my finger on.
“It was just something that I was smelling occasionally. Truthfully my best description of this smell was kind of like a dead fish.
“So I thought that maybe a bird had caught a fish, which in retrospect is the most stupid thing ever, because there’s no lakes anywhere near me.
Although her manager was reluctant to check out the source of the smell, Baylee said she started to worry about her neighbors and even speculated about a dead dog.
“I had this really bad feeling something was super wrong and the smell was getting really bad every time it was windy, and I was really, really worried,” she continued, adding that her boyfriend also noticed the “horrific” smell.
DISTURBING SYMPTOMS
He too began to experience nausea and disturbed sleep after staying in the studio, so Baylee called the police to perform a wellness check on one neighbor.
“It was very hectic and honestly me complaining about a smell and some spiders was the last of anyone’s concerns, especially the police,” she said in the TikTok video, noting it was the middle of the George Floyd protests.
Eventually, Baylee convinced her landlord to send the the maintenance man around – but within “minutes,” he was vomiting from the smell.
“He had walked up the stairs and he couldn’t even make it up the stairs without starting to vomit,” Baylee said. “He ripped off his mask and he said I am going to get the master key someone is dead.”
“Within a few minutes there were eight cops that were all inside my apartment gathering information, and they said they were just going to start busting down doors,” Baylee recalled.
“The logical answer was to start with my neighbor who lived to the left of me because we already talked to the neighbor who lived on the right of me. And this is when the most disgusting, craziest thing happened.”
‘LIQUIFIED’
“Long story short they said this was the worst decomposed body they had ever come across and they see a lot of decomposed bodies,” Baylee concluded.
“Not going to go too into the specifics of it, especially for the privacy of the person, but let’s just say they were liquified and they’re basically just a skeleton at this point.
“All the symptoms my boyfriend and I were experiencing were simply because of the fumes and toxins releasing from the body and natural gases that were making me extremely sick during pretty much all of quarantine.
Baylee’s neighbor was about 74 years old and didn’t have anyone checking on him, she said.
She speculated that the manager didn’t notice he wasn’t paying rent due to the LA County temporary eviction moratorium.
‘INFESTED WITH BUGS’
“Once the autopsy came back many weeks later they ruled out that it wasn’t Covid, which was nice,” she said, noting the coroner concluded his death was caused by a heart attack.
Baylee acknowledged that microorganisms and bugs “had most likely infiltrated my apartment as well” as she slept feet away from her neighbor’s body.
“The only thing separating the body and me, where I slept every night and keep in mind my apartment was 200sq ft was this thin wall,” she said.
“They had said most of wood furniture was already infested with bugs and they highly recommended just throwing away everything that I could.
“I was truly honestly so disgusted that I threw away 99 percent of the things I owned and only kept keepsakes and I moved out that night, left half of my stuff on the side of the road in Los Angeles and never looked back.”
“Immediately all of those symptoms went away and I didn’t have any lasting effects other than just honestly having nightmares at night and not being able to sleep because I was terrified,” Baylee continued.
“But it was pretty instant, honestly the night that I moved out, everything went away, so it was obviously from all of the gases and toxins being released from his body, which is disgusting.”
