TikToker shares how bugs, foul smell in her apartment alerted her to neighbor's corpse

Bothered by the sudden increase of bugs and a persistent foul smell inside her home, a Los Angeles woman called the police and made a shocking discovery: Her elderly neighbour had died and his corpse, which was in a badly decomposed state, was lying in his home just a few feet away from her small studio apartment.

In a series of TikTok videos, Reagan Baylee detailed her horrifying experience. It all began when she started having headaches, feeling nauseous and being unable to sleep for nights as she was hunkered down in her LA Valley apartment amid the COVID-19 lockdown.

"It was around the middle of May and I started to call my mom and tell her that I wasn't really feeling like myself. 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," Baylee said.

However, she just brushed it off. "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," she recalled.

Afterwards, she noticed an uptick in bugs inside her home, which surprised her as she always kept her place tidy. She brought it up with the building manager but he said it was likely due to humidity.

Not long after, she began noticing a foul smell, which she likened to that of a dead fish.

"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," Baylee continued.

She was starting to get worried. Unfortunately, the manager was unwilling to send anyone over to check what the problem was due to the pandemic.

"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 added.

Her boyfriend also experienced similar symptoms of nausea and headache after staying with her.

"It's the middle of the pandemic and we had been home 24 hours a day seven days a week, so I think I had kind of gotten used to the smell," she said further.

It was only after she complained to the police that the building manager sent a maintenance worker to check what was really going on.

But the smell was so intense that the worker "couldn't even make it up the stairs without starting to vomit." The worker ripped off his mask and said, "I am going to get the master key someone is dead."

It turned out that Baylee's 74-year-old neighbor, who had lived alone, was lying dead in his apartment. His body was found after cops forced their way into the unit.

An autopsy revealed the man had died of a heart attack, Baylee shared.

"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. And that is the story of how I slept three feet away from my dead neighbor," Baylee explained.

According to Baylee, cops advised her to move out of her apartment because it was likely contaminated.

"The only thing separating the body and me, where I slept every night ... was this thin wall so they had said most of [the] wood furniture was already infested with bugs and they highly recommended just throwing away everything that I could," she said.

"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," Baylee added. "But it was pretty instant, honestly, the night that I moved out, everything went away, so it was obvious from all of the gases and toxins being released from his body, which is disgusting."