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A grocery store in Texas once shut its doors with all the food still inside, and then everyone basically walked away.

That sounds like the setup to a horror movie, but it really happened in Fort Worth in 1999. The store was called Mexia Supermarket, and for a short time in the late 1990s, it operated out of a 36,000-square-foot building on Hemphill Street.

Then the business ran into serious financial trouble.

Reports differ on the exact closing date. Some accounts say it shut down in July 1999, while others place the closure near the end of August. Either way, the important part is what happened after the doors were locked: the food was still there… All of it.

Meat, dairy, produce, canned goods, packaged items, and whatever else was sitting on the shelves and in the coolers stayed inside the building. The company behind the store filed for bankruptcy in late September, and somewhere in the confusion between the owners, the bank, the trustee, and the city, nobody dealt with the very obvious problem of a full grocery store slowly becoming a biology experiment.

Then the electricity was cut.

Without refrigeration, the perishable food began to rot. The smell eventually got so bad that nearby residents started complaining. One person reportedly said they got a headache just walking past the building. Another described the odor as something like dead animals, which is probably not the scent profile any neighborhood is hoping for.

By the time officials and cleanup workers got involved, the store had become a biohazardous zone.

Flies, cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and dangerous air conditions had taken over the building. Workers who entered had to wear hazmat suits with air filtration systems and go through decontamination when they came out.

Inside, the cleanup was as awful as you’d imagine.

Crews used loaders and shovels to remove rotting food and liquid waste, loading it all into sealed trash containers. One small mercy was that much of the food had remained in plastic or packaging, which made the job slightly easier than feared. Officials were also relieved that there were no hanging cuts of meat left behind, which had apparently been one of the scarier possibilities.

Still, the cleanup took weeks. Food removal was mostly finished by late November, and the building’s sanitation was completed at the end of the month. Even then, officials later said foul odors were still lingering.

Some items that normally might have been salvageable, like canned goods, could not be saved because they were covered in bacteria and contamination.

A grocery store is supposed to be one of the most ordinary places in modern life. But leave one sealed up, full of food, without power, and it becomes something very different.

Yup, that exists.