Dealing with the remains of someone recently deceased seems like the beginning of a handful of horror movies, but for some folks, it’s just a job. However, familiarity doesn’t mean that people in these sorts of professions don’t encounter weird things, as human remains have their own stories and quirks.
Someone asked doctors, morticians and other medical workers to share some of the creepy, morbid and unnerving things they’ve seen. Be warned, some of these stories are pretty dark. So settle in, upvote the eeriest examples and be sure to add your own stories and experiences to the comments section down below.
#1
My mom works in the transplant field, and two of my aunts are in medical. One Christmas I was home, they were passing around the table a pic on their phone of this guy on the autopsy table with his a*s rotted off to the bone. Turns out he was a paraplegic in a nursing home. The nurses just neglected cleaning his a*s for so long that it rotted off and he couldn’t feel it, and it wasn’t discovered until he was on the table (how??). I got pissed off because they were debating if they should report it. Like f**k yes you should, you’ll be in one of those homes soon so you should really give a d**n about the treatment.
Image source: PastelPastries, eugeneshemyakin9
#2
In school, we actually did dissection on human cadavers.
One cadaver had a pair of hand-cuffed hands tattood on him that said “when this convict dies, send him to heaven because he has already been through hell”.
We had a student that had been a mortician in St.Louis and with a career change was becoming a doctor. He had embalmed that cadaver. No family would claim him so they sold him to our school.
Image source: kriegeson, rawpixel.com
#3
My dad did autopsies for a while. Said the worst was a little girl who’s charred in the fetal position. Supposedly when her house caught fire she crawled under the Christmas tree, which then turned into a furnace.
Image source: BenicioDelPollo, freepik
#4
The undertaker conducting a funeral service at a church where I was organist told me that he had to prepare a woman for viewing at a wake who had been killed by a gargoyle falling from the tower of an old church and making a direct hit.
Apparently, it did extensive damage – the kind that took him several days of reconstructive preparatory work.
Image source: anon, Stephanie LeBlanc
#5
This guy commit s*****e by shooting himself in the back of the head two times and then hanging himself. I have no idea how he managed it. Not even sure how it’s possible but who am I to argue with police?
#6
My dad is a mortician, and I sometime work for him even though I don’t intend to inherit that job.
Anyway, we had a baby with the Down syndrome. We were told that he died of suffocation since he slept with face down.
However, I noticed few scratches around his mouth. They weren’t noticeable unless you see it really closely.
I was paused for a moment because he could be m******d, but I didn’t tell my dad about this bc I didn’t wanna make any fuss.
This is the first time I shared this. The truth has been covered but I’ve been forcing myself to think that i saw it by mistake.
Image source: Laf1, The Yuri Arcurs Collection
#7
My dad told me a few stories.
1) A guy had shot himself in his upstairs duplex, and he was up there for so long that his blood and other decay started to leak through the ceiling below. It was only when that happened that the people downstairs went to check on him.
2) Another guy from my town committed some crime and decided to skip his court date. He went on the run and his body was found many days later in the river. My dad said pieces of the guys skin would fall off if you touched him and he was extremely bloated. I remember the stench on my dad when he came home from that one.. He had to throw his clothes away.
3) He picked up another body who had slipped and fell under and oil drill thing (don’t know the appropriate name) and the guys head was cut clean off.
These were regular stories told at our dinner table. I had an interesting childhood to say the least, but it was always fascinating!
#8
My mom grew up in a funeral home. She refused to let us climb trees as kids because her father buried a local boy who fell from a tree and impaled himself on a branch. I’m not sure if she saw the body or if she knew the boy, but it seems to have shaken her pretty badly.
Fortunately and unfortunately, my mom became a nurse and spent a good long time caring for people in a busy Philly hospital. She has saved a lot of lives, but she has also seen a lot of people die. I do not envy her, but I’m glad she does what she does.
Image source: DrDudeManJones, freepik
#9
We once had a lady that came in looking like she had died in a war. Burn marks, lacerations… what i imagine it looks like if you get hit by a grenade or a mine.
I asked the ME, and apparently she had been discharged from the hospital earlier that day for a hip replacement. They had given her a bottle of oxygen and strict orders to not smoke.
Well ol Mrs Joe Camel sits right down on her sofa on her porch at home, plops the oxygen tank down next to her, and- oxygen tubes still in her nose- lights up her very last cigarette.
Boom.
Image source: TooMuchPretzels
#10
Doesn’t exactly fit the criteria but I’m gonna tell the story anyway…. I come from a smallish town. We have one mortician and everyone knows him. His daughter dated my cousin during this period of time.
One year, a different cousin got into a bad car accident right outside of the county and died on impact. Of course, they called it in and he was asked to come down to the scene and retrieve the body. He was told the estimated age of the girl, the make of her vehicle and which direction she was driving on the highway. The age and vehicle make matched that of his daughter who was visiting her boyfriend at the time. He couldn’t get a hold of his daughter so he showed up at the scene fully prepared to be picking up his own child. Sadly enough, this scared him so badly that this was the last funeral he ever performed. 8 years later and he still visits my deceased cousins parents regularly, just to check in. It’s clearly stuck with him.
Image source: Lonestarmami
#11
This is a huge, huge, HUGE tangent, but I gotta tell this story.
My maternal Grandfather was not the smartest man. He ran a successful funeral home, so he did have that going for him. One day, he decided he was going to get into politics. Does he decide to run for the local town council? Nope. He decides to run for coroner (despite not being a qualified meidcal examiner; that was ok back in the day).
Only problem was when he made all of his political signs. Instead of the signs saying “Grandpa DudeManJones for Coroner,” they all said “Grandpa DudeManJones for Corner.”
He lost the election, but he would’ve made a d**n fine corner.
Image source: DrDudeManJones, Esra Korkmaz
#12
Not a mortician, but I used to read Death Certificates for my job. The weirdest and most puzzling one was a man in his late 60s who died of a pulmonary embolism as a result of crushing his own p***s in a vise. I’ve tried to think of ways it could have happened accidentally (naked woodworking?) or what his thought process could possibly have been even if disordered.
Image source: Ed98208, pressfoto
#13
Am both paramedic and mortician, so I’ve seen some real doozies. One of the most bizarre was the fellow who, upon autopsy, had his cause of death declared as electrocution, despite the fact that the abandoned farmhouse he was in hadn’t had electricity in decades. Lividity and decomp both supported the conclusion that he died where he was found, so it wasn’t a body dump, but there was no possible way for him to have been electrocuted there.
#14
Not a Mortician or EMT/Cop/Fire etc. Just a Dad who chaperoned his 15yo kid for their class tour of the local county Sheriffs Dept Forensics department. Kids were morbidly curious at why this car with front end damage and no back windshield was in the warehouse. Tech offhandedly said a guy committed s*****e by kicking out the back window, tied a long rope to a tree, ran the rope through the empty window, tied it around his neck, then floored it across this field, decapitating himself when the rope snapped taunt.
Image source: hermarine, EyeEm
#15
Mortician here. The most f****d up case I ever handled was an elderly woman and her 40-something son. They lived in the same aparment and he cared for her 24/7 because she was paralyzed from the neck down. He had a heart attack and collapsed, dead, beside her bed. After about 3 weeks the landlord became suspicious when the rent had not been paid and found them. It gives me nightmares thinking about that poor old woman laying there starving to death while smelling the stench of her dead son. Her cause of death was “inanition” which I had to google.
Also had a lady last week who was rather large (not tryin to be mean…I’m a big gal myself) and fell in the bathtub and could not get up. Due to the way she had fell she was sitting on her legs. When they found her 3 days later and picked her up her legs were dead and the dead blood and toxins seeped up into her body and sepsis killed her. Imagine laying in that bathtub for 3 days watching your legs turn black. *shudder*.
Image source: sandycheeks454, rawpixel.com
#16
A friend from work was in the army. They were on field exercises in Germany. An artillery piece failed to fire. A gunnery sergeant bent down to eyeball something on the gun. It went off. The recoil of the big gun decapitated the Sgt. immediately. A human line was formed to look for the head. A soldier finds it some distance away. Holding it up be it’s hair, the soldier yells “Capt. look what I found”. Soldier was given a general discharge.
Image source: anon
#17
I’m a firefighter. One of my buddies told me a story of his first fire. It was a single story, single family house. He made entry in the front door and started searching for victims while pulling a hose line to the fire. When he made it to the fire room he opened the door and went in. In a chair on his left there was a cpr mannequin sitting in a chair with a teddy bear right in front of it. He moved past it and got closer to the fire. The fire had fully engulfed the room and was a pain in the a*s to put out, but after about 10 minutes he was able to knock down the bulk of the fire. When it was completely out and he started to leave the room he noticed that the mannequin wasn’t actually a cpr mannequin. It was a 3 year old boy who had been burnt so badly his skin was melting. When he grabbed the kid and tried to pull him away the kids skin sloughed off and stuck to the chair. The teddy bear was melted to his chest. He pulled the kid out of the house and started cpr. The kid ended up dying from the burns. There was a five year old girl with him who also died. The parents had left the kids alone that night to go to a party. When the 3 year old fell asleep on a bean bag chair he knocked over a lamp right next him which caught the chair on fire. Soon the kid was on fire as well. He started running around the room burning. He tried to open his bedroom door but the door had one of those plastic childproof things on it so he couldn’t get it open. Eventually the kid gave up, grabbed his favorite teddy bear and sat in a chair. That’s where my buddy found him. The girl died of smoke inhalation.
Image source: Yummmi
#18
A lady ate herself to death on 5 containers of duncan hines frosting… and that was just last week!
Image source: TheModernMortician
#19
Dad was a coroner, IIRC, before switching to doctor. I can never remember the details correctly for the medical stuff but pretty much the body getting examined was a former birthday clown. There weren’t any external wounds so he figured the cause of death was internal. The guy had gastroparesis which to my dad meant, “cool, stomach contents should be in good shape”. His team opens the dude up and sees this flurry of f**k.
There’s partially digested birthday cake, that edible confetti stuff, f*****g streamers, and about a dozen pills of xanax next to all of it. Dad sifts through the stomach some more and sees what looks like a sponge of some kind. He pulls one out and it’s a f*****g sponge-dino that comes in those capsules you drop in water. He finds more, about a small biomes worth. He thought he was getting f*****g pranked. The story pieces together as the clown decided to end it with the xanax and booze, he gets a store-bought cake and eats it with everything on it, then chases down some dino-sponges just for the hell of it.
Image source: ThrowawayFUCKTHEJETS
#20
Heard on the news a friend from my youth had been killed. I was terribly sad for him, he never could escape his demons and it led him down some terrible paths. Came into work a few nights later and there he was face completely bashed in by a rock. This wasn’t the first time someone I knew ended up in our morgue, but certainly the saddest.
Image source: anon
#21
My ex inlaws were in the death business. They told me a story once about the county attorney whose wife passed away. The family was very wealthy and she had a mouth full of gold fillings. The attorney demanded that my inlaws retrieve the gold from her mouth. This required using a dental drill to drill down her teeth and dig out the gold. My ex father in law complied with the attorney’s wishes but was physically ill about having to do such a needless step to this lady.
Image source: aylandgirl
#22
I was a student at the time but my first ever bloater was brought in and once we “popped” him insides were outsides and everywhere.
Would not recommend.
On my first night shift I thought staff were f*****g with me because I kept hearing what sounded like breathing… fresh body brought in and was releasing gas. I’d never dealt with anyone dying in the hour being brought in so it was scary hearing this body “breathing”.
I’ve been there when family members have passed and witness breathing and limbs moving so I know it’s normal but as a student, the staff like the f**k with you.
Bizarre one was piecing a guy back together after he committed s*****e by gunshot to the face. Family wanted an open casket. Had to try our best then ask one family member in to see if they still wanted open casket because we just didn’t feel like it was right. Dad come in, sees that no matter how we tried we couldn’t make him look the same as before and agrees that family shouldn’t see him this way.
The day we delivered him to the funeral parlour, family changes their mind and has open casket anyway… found out rest of family didn’t know he shot himself in the face. We ended up getting a letter of complaint from other members of the family for the open casket.
I finished as a student a few days after but
Would still love to be in that career though.
Image source: darkerthanmysoul
#23
Licensed embalmer here. I’ve worked for large funeral homes and did coroner removals for a decently large city and currently work as a trade embalmer. Ive had lots of suicides embalmed a 4 year old that a cop blew a stop sign and tboned their mini van, that one really hurt. But the one that was weird was this. 18 year old girl hung herself. So I do the embalming like normal even though it sucked having to do that. Now the weird part I get a text from my friends a few hours later saying that another one of ours friends fiances sisters killed herself and if I knew anything about it, which really really sucks because my friends wedding is in 4 days. Turns out that 18 year old was the sister to the bride. So I have to go to the wedding 4 days later while everyone is still grieving the loss and keep my mouth shut and I’m the one that embalmed her. This was in a town of about 250,000 people.
Image source: woody1594
#24
I work with the dead (procure eyes and corneas for transplant). While I was working on one guy at the medical examiner’s office, they brought in another guy who’s cats had eaten his face clean. Just his face, nothing else. It was a sort of decaying (but still somewhat normal looking) dude, with a bright, Halloween-looking skull picked clean.
Lots of murder victims, gunshots, car accidents, even one train accident. A guy who hanged himself in front of his kids with a dog leash, which was still in the bag with his body. High caliber self-inflicted gunshot wound to the face, with teeth and jaw and bits everywhere and a bunch of gauze stuffed into the remaining hole. Let’s not forget the guy in the decomp room who was just a pile of bones, hair, and leathery tissue paired with a bucket of goo.
Crazy stuff! But never a dull day.
Image source: batheinsriracha
#25
Oh man, I might be late but this is good. We picked up a s*****e on a major holiday Thanksgiving or Christmas I can’t remember. Took her back to the funeral home. Undressed her and had to wait for Medical examiner. Family decides to cremate. We had dressed her for a viewing, everything was normal. Later that day she was ready to be cremated, I put her in started the machine and went back inside. I had to embalm someone else. About an hour in I heard like five loud pops. First thought was a pace maker, brain stimulator, something I had missed. I let it finish swept it into the tray. And a f*****g small hand gun came out. Now I had seen all of her… Seriously where did she have that at? The only spot is inside her v****a. The question is why. It’s been 10 plus years and I’m still wtf.
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#26
F**k, I got another one. This is a sad one, and I realize it’s not all that mysterious.
My one uncle is a funeral director out in a community with a lot of Amish and Mennonites. There was an Amish father who accidentally killed his son when they were tilling the field. The father’s one request was that he be allowed to bury his son himself after the ceremony. That really f****d my uncle up.
Image source: DrDudeManJones, Pablo Merchán Montes
#27
My dad’s a police officer, not the same, but there was a guy that was running from the cops and jumped off of an overpass to try and get away. He ended up being decapitated by a spiked fence that was below.
Image source: Vani11aGori11a7, EyeEm
#28
As an EMT I always tell people to remember to close their visor completely when not using it. Seen one too many scalpings.
Image source: Draconian_Savant
#29
My ex was a cop, he got called to a s*****e by chainsaw, they arrived after the ambulance so were spared having to see the scene. Apparently the guy just started the chainsaw and let it fall back into his head.
Image source: MrsSBell
#30
Idk this fits here but I saw a guy hit a deer on a motorcycle while on the highway, face-plant, be ran over by his gf behind him on her motorcycle and then she eats s**t. Long story short, he had no face; no teeth, no eyes or nose. She was really bad too, basically no face as well. Word of advice: wear a full face helmet.
Image source: anon
#31
My brother told me a story of when one of his friends was mortician’s assistant. One time he had to work on a guy who had shot himself in the head with a shotgun. He said the guy kinda looked like Sid from *Ice Age.* That wasn’t the worst, however. The worst part is how he felt about the whole situation. He apparently felt disconnected, not registering that this body was once a living man and not just something to clean up. My brother said he quit that night.
Image source: Hi-MetalAlien
#32
So many. But you get used to it.
Fat people purge when they die, and usually end up with vomit all over their face from the weight on their gut.
I end up feeling resentful of some very overweight people because I know I will have to pick them up when they die, and there’s a chance it’ll throw out my back.
Summertime=maggots.
Babies just look like they’re sleeping. Very peaceful.
Coworker unknowingly picked up his own estranged son who had overdosed in a car.
Picked up a 4 year old boy in Batman pajamas. Won’t ever forget that. That one was the worst
Also since I have you, I’ve noticed an uptick in young teen suicides in the last year. If you have someone in your life who is a young teenager (or anyone really) check in with them. Let them know they’re loved. I’m tired of picking up dead bullied girls.
Image source: Whaddupmuhglipglop
#33
Well this was not really a mortuary, but I was a student many years ago in the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Bill Bass, a sort of P.T. Barnum of Forensic Anthropology (not a faker, but a hell of a promoter) was the department head and a major focus of the department was forensic anthropology. (This was also before DNA testing, so skeletal forensics was essential in identifying bodies that were partially decayed.)
Dr. Bass would get about 15-20 cases every years–decayed or skeletal remains to hopefully identify or at least profile (race, s*x, approximate age, any distinguishing characteristics, and sometimes, cause of death). Usually these were vagrants, crime victims, or just historic or prehistoric (Native American) remains.
One time in West Tennessee they found a clothed but fully skeletonized body in a patch of dense vegetation in a little town in West Tennessee. The local sheriff and coroner loaded the body in the back of a pickup truck and drove the corpse all the way across the state (400 miles) to Knoxville so Dr. Bass could do an ID.
When the truck arrived, Dr. Bass went out and opened the body bag to find a complete skeleton that remained fully dressed. He looked the body up and down and then reached into the front pocket of the corpse’s jeans and pulled out a wallet, which he opened to read off the name, address, race, height and hair and eye color of the deceased. The Sheriff and the Coroner were a bit embarrassed.
It turned out the dead guy had only been missing for about a week, but in the dense foliage of a West Tennessee thicket in mid-summer, the bugs and Beatles had completely stripped his bones of flesh. (Bass did do a follow-up to make sure the driver’s license and the corpse were a match.)
Dr. Bass had many interesting cases… He founded the infamous Body Farm, has written several books (fiction and non-fiction) and has is featured (in fictional form) in many of Patricia Cornwell’s crime novels.
Image source: anon
#34
I came across one death certificate that said they died of “nothing serious.” Given that that’s the condition in which I currently identify myself, I’m not sure if I should change that.
Another one was written as “self-murder.”
Lastly, there was a guy we had buried, pretty normal and all. A few months later we received his hands from the FBI. No explanation, of course.
Image source: LeopardTwins
#35
Not a mortician, but my neighbors dad passed away recently. Cause of death is still unknown. He went to sleep and just didnt wake up. His mom thought he was sleeping in, but dialed 911 after 4 hours. They did a full blood work, toxicology, etc. Everything came back normal. He literally just went to bed like normal and died and cause is still unknown. Average guy, didnt drink or smoke, wasn’t on any medications.
Image source: anon
#36
So not so mysterious but my family use to live in a mortuary when I was a child. We could live there for free but my father would have to be “on-call” for periods of time; which meant going and picking up the deceased from wherever they may be.
One such instance a large apartment complex started smelling something terrible coming from a particular room. Landlord found the old lady that lived there dead in the bathtub. Not so disturbing, right?
Well, my father goes to pick up the body. Apparently she was getting in the tub to take a bath and had a heart attack. The water was running, already hot, and she accidentally knocked loose the drain with her foot. So what happened for the next two weeks (they estimated) is she lay there in marinating in hot water. Now, you’d think the water would eventually cool, right? Nope. They had those industrial hot water heaters since it was shared by the apartment complex and it easily kept up with the hot water demand.
So she had been sitting in this hot water for a couple of weeks basically cooking. My father said that when they went to try and move the body it was similar to picking up a marinated chicken. “The meat fell right off the bone.”.
Image source: Ephialtis
#37
Not a mortician, but I was present when a dorm-mate’s body was found. He was still in his closet after having died from auto-erotic asphyxiation three days before.
It was the smell that had led us to the discovery.
Image source: anon
#38
I always think of the person who was eating some fish that hadn’t been properly de-boned and a sharp bit of bone he’d swallowed pierced his bowels which lead to sepsis, which eventually killed him. Oye. Since that day I have always been extra paranoid and careful when eating fish.
Image source: TrocarTony
#39
A mother curled up around a toddler. However, that’s too normal, no the mothers skin melted so the child was *inside of the melted mothers body*. Worst/best part? The kid was still alive. I found out after cutting the melted skin away and hearing a scream. Holy f*****g hell. Oh, and now, 8 years later, that kid has a scar on his arm where the surgeon ( the one for living people ) couldn’t get the moms skin off. He says he always has a part of her in him. He’s so dark, he could be my friend.
Image source: Secretly_psycho
#40
Not me, worked with a guy whose family’s business was a mortuary. He worked for them a while. One picked up a motorcycle victim who had flown they the air and hit a stop sign sideways. From the waist down was directly under the sign. Torso was 30 or so yards away in the road. He was a biker and gave it up that day.
Image source: anon
#41
Sorry for c**p formatting, on phone
Not me, but my best friend works in the death business… so, since she doesn’t have a reddit account I’m going to steal her karma because this is my favorite story. She tells me all sorts of lovely things about her job and the recoveries she has done but my favorite involves a gurney and some stairs. To set the scene, a family called in that their mother had passed in her apartment. Third story, narrow halls and no elevators. Anyways, she goes to pick up the body to take back to the funeral home with an assistant. So they get up there and lift this woman who is close to 300 lbs on to the gurney and begin their journey down to the van. Mind you, the whole family was there and pretty much in hysterics and crowd around as they make their way to the stairs. With family watching, they make it about halfway down the first flight of stairs when the body starts to slide. There’s no way to reposition so my friend who is at the foot of the gurney is now about a*s level to the freshly deceased. So, trying to make the best of the situation they continue their way down and try not to shift the body anymore. The thing about dead bodies is that gas starts to exit pretty quickly and I’m sure you know where my story is going. The body started letting out farts straight into my friend’s face. Pfffft, Pfft, Pfft, Pfft with every step down they take, and this poor girl has to keep a straight face while getting crop dusted by a dead lady with her whole family watching.
Tl;dr Nothing worse than dead a*s.
Image source: sweetoklahome
#42
Uncomfortable? Being trapped in the morgue alone during a hurricane, our morgue was basically in a basement type situation and the hospital was near a main waterway that flooded…I had to move all the bodies to the highest cabinets, pray the generators would keep everyone cold and was standing on my desk for about 2 hours when someone finally came for me.
Bizarre would be drowned guy who was DOA and once locked up in the cabinet a tapping noise started coming from him..it was a crab that had made itself at home inside him and when it got cold he wanted out.
Creepy was when we got some people who were doing bath salts and had eaten other people..they looked crazy even in death.
Image source: anon
#43
Not a mortician, but a journalist who spent his fair share of time at inquests.
It isn’t particularly strange, but one that stuck with me was a man who was a h****n a****t. Coroner ruled that it wasn’t actually the h****n that killed him, but his pillow.
The man injected so much he lost control of his body and fell face down onto his bed. He was completely paralysed and eventually suffocated.
If I hadn’t already decided, hearing the details and seeing the faces of his family made me swear to never go anywhere near that s**t.
Image source: anon
#44
The cause of death of my uncle is “witchcraft.” This is on an official document in the Phillippines.
Image source: anon
#45
Not a mortician but this is related. My dad is a Property and Evidence Custodian at our state toxicology lab. He received some body fluids the other day from an autopsy that declared the man had accidently hung himself on his Life Alert necklace. Like, the guy just rolled out of bed, and the necklace got caught on something and suffocated him.
Ironic death but silver lining, good to know those necklaces can take a lot I guess.
Image source: CypressPhoenix
#46
Hit by a blimp. It was taking off and he was hit by the bottom straight in the head. I wonder if he’s the only person who has been hit by a blimp.
Image source: Fridge68
#47
Not a mortician but in middle school my friends‘ dad was. This wasn’t a situation about a body, just the mortician himself. He was a single dad and my friend’s sister was going to a school dance but hadn’t put on much makeup before and she didn’t want to be late. So the mortician dad volunteered to do it for her because “I put on peoples makeup every day.” When he finished she looked in the mirror and freaked out “I look like I’m dead!” He just nonchalantly said “what did you expect? I’ve only ever worked with dead people before” and just walked away.
I wish there was a picture of it, she looked like a deranged undead clown.
Image source: archlaw007
#48
A writing professor of mine used to work in small town journalism and decided to interview some folks from the local retirement home to get a close-up view of his town’s history. One of his interviews was an ancient, retired mortician who told him a rather interesting story.
Shortly before 1920, two teens were going to a school dance in a blizzard. The carriage they had taken got stranded and the boy went for help. The girl unfortunately, froze to death in the carriage, in an upright, seated position. Apparently the mortician had to sit her in a rocking chair in front of the fire to thaw her out before he could go about his usual business.
Image source: DeathFrisbee2000
#49
Mom was a mortician. Of the stories she’s told me, creepiest would either be the guy that had his face eaten off by wild boars while hunting(guess he wasn’t that good at it) or the guy that fell into a wood chipper. Funny(ehhhh….poor word choice) thing was, I was at a breakfast a few days later where fellow high schoolers were trying to gross out the girls at the table, and when they pointed out that I wasn’t really bothered by it, I kept chewing and said, “Yeah, my mom got that guy. Said it was f*****g gross.” Everyone goes silent, I stopped chewing and looked up to everyone looking pale. Shrugged, “Oh, y’all forgot she’s a mortician didn’t you”, and kept eating.
Uncomfortable for her was one that was also kind of sad. This woman was morbidly obese. Like, when they somehow all got her on the gurney at her home, when they were pushing it out, the wheels were pushing indentions down into the wood floors. Now this woman is what some bullies would call “a whale”. I wouldn’t, but we all know a******s. Well, apparently this woman loved the s**t out of some blue whales. Family kept going on and on about it. So the time comes for them to bring the clothes for her wake, they bring a big blue muumuu and a gaudy blue whale brooch. Then they hand her the cd to play. Usually it’s church hymns or sad country songs etc. No one listens to it before, because why would you. So the service starts, Mom pops the cd in, *boop* G*****N BLUE WHALE CALLS fill the funeral home. My mom was very professional with her job, but every funeral director had to excuse themselves to compose themselves.
Image source: borderbox
#50
Story from a friend of a friend:
She (the mortician) met some guy at the bar. They hit it off and she gave him her number. Within a couple of days she finds out that the guy died in a car accident because his body ended up at her place of work.
Before the funeral service she receives several calls from an unknown number and whenever she picked up there was no response. Eventually, she got the eerie hunch that it may be ~him~ and proceeded to address him by name. Tells him to pass in peace and to stop calling, it worked.
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#51
Most bizarre- Particularly difficult family. None of them could agree at all on what to do with their dad. One faction wanted burial, the other was demanding cremation. After much shouting they finally agreed on a compromise- they wanted us to cut their father’s body in half. That way one half could be cremated and the other half buried. I had to explain to the unfortunate arranger, who at this point looked beyond exhausted, that no, we could not saw a human body in half because that would be very illegal and very messy.
Most uncomfortable- I’m 5’3 and was about 120 at the time. I was sent on a removal at a private residence with my supervisor. We get there, and the family of the deceased consisted of half a dozen or so very tall men, every one of them well over six feet tall. Coincidentally, my supervisor was also male and unusually tall. They greeted him cordially, but as soon as I entered the home it was like a switch was thrown. Every single one of them looked at me with pure contempt. I was not spoken to, only stared and glared at. They would not allow me to touch their father/grandfather. I was shouldered out of the way and blocked by the grandsons. I don’t intimidate easily, but I had a wall of hostile giants staring me down from inches away. Once the deceased was on the gurney they refused to even allow me to push. They assisted my supervisor themselves. It was really, really uncomfortable. The only thing that my supervisor and I could think of was that they didn’t think I was strong enough to lift the body. Being small I got that from time to time, but people were usually trying to be helpful. This was pure anger and hostility.
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#52
I work in the industry. The creepiest thing I have seen/ had would be one of my first ‘pick ups’ there was a humidifier in the room, but I didn’t know about it. I thought the deceased was still alive and wheezing.
The most uncomfortable would probably be a guy in a halfway house style place and there were people everywhere. Just strange situation. Or a lady that was a crazy hoarder.
Or the time someone died at a huge party in the front yard.
You ain’t experienced life until you see a 2+ week decomposed body that’s been in the heat. I didn’t know maggots could be so big.
Have a colleague that had a person who had passed away 6 weeks earlier. Said it was mostly liquefied.
I have to say it has been the most humbling experience personally. There are some bad eggs but overall most people are amazing and you really appreciate those people that have lived such good lives.
Don’t leave your family for granted. I see it all too often when someone dies, family tear each other up over money and petty fueds. Give your loved ones love and respect.
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#53
The most bizarre happened when I was apprenticing. I worked with a senior funeral director on Sundays, just me and him. I’d been working for about 2 years when he passed away suddenly from simultaneous kidney/liver failure. The most surreal thing was transporting his body after the embalming was done, back to the funeral home where we worked.
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#54
I had a pretty awful case with r**e/murder. Luckily the guy got caught but I’ll leave it with he had a knife and wanted some more holes other than the original two.
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#55
Lady I work with used to pick up the bodies for the coroner. One time they had to collect a woman that was laying in a very hot attic apartment for a couple months. All her liquids ran out onto the floor and dried and when they tried to pick her up she started coming apart like an overly tender turkey. Her coworker sent her to the van to get more bags and when she got back he had finished bagging the lady. Classy. Changed how I think about turkey.
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#56
I’m still working on my licenses, so I’m not officially a funeral director and embalmer yet, but I’ve been going to the medical examiner’s office to practice embalming with my school for several months now.
The people we work on down there are not in very good shape, usually dead at least a month before we get to see them. Needless to say, it’s not a one-artery, low formaldehyde job. Each week we raise a minimum of six arteries (both carotids, both femorals, and both axillaries), plus the two radials if there’s some trouble getting fluid distribution to the hands and forearms. To put into perspective, a typical funeral home case would only need one, maybe two arteries depending on the embalmer’s preference.
There aren’t a lot of “creepy” or “bizarre” cases that stick out in my mind, but uncomfortable things definitely come up. Whenever there’s a young person on the table is sad. The degree of decomp can lead to a lot of difficult nights. The smell alone can really get to you.
The thing that always spooks me, though, is when I’m raising an axillary artery. The site that we look for it is the area directly distal (towards fingers, away from body mass) to the armpit. There are a lot of tendons and such in there, as well. When you’re holding the person’s arm up, digging around near the tendons, sometimes their arm will move. It happens a lot, but I still get momentarily terrified when the person “grabs” me.
Other than that, there’s not much I can contribute to this question. I know some second-hand stories from other people, but anything directly from me isn’t too exciting. I have lots of stories of conventionally gross things, but nothing really bizarre.
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#57
Not a mortician, but a gravedigger.
I was 18, it was my first full-time job. I was learning the ropes and the boss-man told me to mark out a grave. A wife was joining her husband, many decades after his interment. My co-worker taught me how to spec out an adjoining grave site: split the tombstone in half, move over six inches, then plot the new grave with string in the prescribed dimensions. I did that.
Then the backhoe arrived. As the backhoe guy dug the grave, a problem emerged. We could see bones in the dirt. My coworker stopped the backhoe guy and started yelling at me. I told him I marked the site exactly as he said: six inches to the left of the center of the marker, then three feet wide, eight feet long, etc. I did as I was told. But it appears the husband wasn’t sited correctly and was not buried in a vault. His cheap pine coffin had rotted and he was…everywhere.
But it was still all my fault, apparently. The backhoe dug down an extra foot into the husband’s side of the site. I was tasked to jump in and re-inter all the bones on his side of the site. So I jumped in and packed all those bones and dirt into his side. My coworker and the backhoe guy had a laugh while yelling at me about bones I had missed and making me pack them in.
We walled up his side of the grave nice and even, then over-packed it a bit and finished up the wife’s grave. It was some grisly s**t, man.
But hey: it was 1982 and I was making $10 an hour, which was big money. With great wealth comes great responsibilities.
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#58
My dad is a mortician. We had actually lived above the funeral and my life had been just like My Girl, he has been a mortician for over 40 years and has tons of stories!
The worst by far is the human soup guy. Apparently this elderly gentlemen passed away while having a bath… with the water still running, He was living alone in the house with very little family. I don’t remember how long he was in the bath before before someone found him. My dad goes to pick up the body and it’s human soup. The hot water constantly running and the amount of time cause his body to turn to mush.
He said the smell was the worst he ever smelt. He got back to the office later that day and his boss told him to throw away his suit and he’d buy him another!
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#59
Not me, but my cousin… he works at a funeral home and helps pick up bodies, do the “preservation” steps and make up. Anyways. The most disturbing story he told me was about this about 30 year old woman who came into the place and planned out then paid for her whole funeral. Few mornings pass then my cousin gets a call from the boss telling him he needs to go and pick up a body… of that same woman. My cousin asks where the body is, and the boss replied with “out back.” Turns out the lady had planned to commit s*****e, she paid for the whole funeral, laid out a big tarp behind the building, and shot herself. The silver lining is my cousin said that it made for really easy clean up… That story still haunts me.
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#60
Not a mortician. Had a very bizzare case of death in my appartment building. On the second floor, there lived a completely crazy old h*g. She would stand on the balcony naked from the waist down, throw s**t at people below, loudly swear at anybody she met. Almost killed me with a glass jar to the head, missed me by the inches when I was walking out of the building. And she somehow had gotten herself a seventy year old lover who lived with her (God knows why).
Anyhow, there was a sudden lull in her appereances, and after a while her neighbours noticed an unbearable stench coming out of her flat. Police got involved, they broke down the door, and inside was a very horrifying scene. There, on the bed, was she and her lover. She was dead for two weeks, her lover was dead for AT LEAST three months. Apparently, she kept his death secret to receive his retirement benefits using his documents and slept with his corpse in the same bed. And the flat itself … It was just a garbage dump, with metre-high piles of rags, refuse and rubbish laying around. And in the center of the room there stood a big a*s (50 kg at least) open tub of dairy butter.
Image source: constantterror
#61
Okay so this isn’t exactly matching the question, but close enough. About 7 years ago, my friend took a gig as a custodian for a funeral home. The job description itself sounded great from what he told me.
It was graveyard shift and not full-time, but the pay was good. The funeral home was pretty small (actually been to some funeral services there before), basically a small-medium sized chapel, an extension on the side room to seat more people, and then a hall with bathrooms and a few offices.
Next the funeral home was a separate garage looking building where the mortician would take care of his business. Okay, now let’s get to the story.
The guy only worked the job 6 days before leaving. Here’s how he described it to me. First few days went okay. He was nervous about working there at night, but was able to brave it out. His 4th day, he finishes the the main building and goes to quickly check the second building. From how he explained it to me, he actually didn’t really need to clean in there as much as do a quick walk through.
He goes in, quickly looks around and then starts to leave. Then, at the last moment he hears something drop and hit the ground. He stops and stares back for a moment, and decides f**k it I don’t care.
This is where s**t gets weird. He walks back inside main building to put away supplies when he swears he catches what looks like someone sitting in one of the pews get up and walk away. This was only from the corner of his eye, but it was enough to stun him in fear.
He takes a moment to gather himself, then walks out, and locks everything up for the night. Just at that last moment, he hears a loud bang, like a door slamming. He bolts to his car and speeds home. The following days didn’t have anything drastic like that, but that single event was enough for him to know the job just wasn’t for him.
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#62
Not a mortician, this comes from my mother back when she was a teenager. Guy she knows takes a job with the local funeral home. He works the graveyard shift, all was well for the first few months. Dude is often weirded out at work, claims that the building is haunted. Earlier in the evening, they get a call from the hospital saying that they have a lady there ready for pickup. They pick her up, guy is freaking out, says he has a bad feeling. Later in the evening, mortician has to step out for a bit, leaving guy there alone with the dead lady. He goes about his work, still a little freaked out. Suddenly he hears this low, soft moan… He swears it is just his mind playing tricks on him, goes about his business. He hears it again, little louder than last time, it is late, he is alone, he is just hearing things, probably just the pipes settling, the plumbing is old after all. Short time passes and it is louder, at this point he is sure he isn’t just imaging things, he knows he heard the dead lady moan. His first though was the mortician was f*****g with him, he has been shaken all evening and this a*****e is pranking him. He marches over, very funny you d**k, yanks back the sheet covering the dead lady expecting to find the mortician somewhere around her… Dead lady grabs the guy’s wrist… He lets out this scream and bolts for the door. Forgets his car, runs all the way home.
Turns out, old lady wasn’t dead, hospital got it wrong (hooray 1950s medicine). She had been in a coma or something and they had been sure she had passed on earlier that morning. She woke up at the funeral home and scared the everloving hell out of the assistant. He quit the next day, said he would never set foot there ever again.
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#63
I used to live with my girlfriend that was a mortician also being an EMT I can tell you that nothing prepares you for dealing with a child.
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#64
Not a mortician, nor is this a Mortician specific story. I figure u just want creepy dead body s**t.
Was an EMT that got access to bunch of places and experiences cause I am me. Hanging out in the morgue picking the brain of the guy on shift during graveyard @ martin luther. Had a corpse sit up on one of the gurney while mid conversation. I go pale. He just looks at me and says “they do that sometimes”.
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#65
My father was a funeral director in NY. They had to remove the wall of a house to get the body of an 800 lb man out. For the funeral, the giant casket was towed on a trailer.
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#66
Nothing in school or prior experience prepares you for caring for a young child, especially one that is the same age as yours. Tiny suits are not meant to be burial garments. It is something you don’t forget.
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#67
Not a mortician but retired deputy and my most bizarre dealings with a mortician was taking a report on a missing person(?). Turns out a corpse was stolen by family members to be interred in accordance to their traditional g***y beliefs. They openly admitted taking the body but we never found it nor could we definitively connect them to the theft. They hung around for a month or so and disappeared one night. Very interesting peeps…
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#68
Not a morticians story, but my dad was in the Coast Guard in the early 70s, stationed in San Francisco. Between the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge, they would get a lot of jumpers, and the coasties had to retrieve the bodies. At night or in bad weather, they would sometimes take hours or even a day or more to find.
One day they retrieved a body and the body was being eaten by crabs. Dad said there were more than a dozen crabs all over the body, the body was basically a big piece of crab bait. Some other coastie on the boat is pulling the crabs off the body, putting them in a cooler. Guy says to my dad “My wife loves dungeness crab” and apparently was notorious for being the guy who claimed the crabs.
Image source: OlDirtyTriple
#69
Not a mortician here but, a related story. My father passed away when I was quite young in a head on collision with a logging truck. Safe to say the body was not in a good state. Here’s the messed up part, my Grandma who’s only child has died, busts into the funeral home and demands to see the body. The funeral director suggests against it due to his state, she wants to anyway. As he’s bringing her in there says, “you’ll want a chair for this”. In she goes and PULLS OUT A F*****G DISPOSABLE CAMERA and starts snapping photos, doesn’t even bat an eyelash at what she’s seeing.
The story goes on to get even more weird but, thats for another time.
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#70
I worked as an autopsy lab assistant at a local medical examiners office, on the night shift. This usually meant I was working alone at night between two freezers stocked with the various bits and remains of individuals, unless a Doctor needed to do a late night autopsy for religious purposes, or an investigator or police officer needed to finger print a body. We only got those whose cause of death needed to be verified, and usually meant we got the… interesting… cases. Interesting job, so ask away.
The ones that really annoyed or bothered me after awhile, (annoyance is a part of the detachment and making it just a part of the job, on my end. Im seeing up to 100 fresh corpses a week) were the individuals that were extremely obese (talking 500 pounds or so).
The one that sticks out is a woman that was 510 pounds, and was hit by a car and ejected at high speeds and then hit by an 18 wheeler. Now imagine 500 pounds of hamburger helper with large bits of organ and bone mixed in with a few chunks of leg and that was a fun bag to try to prep and xray for autopsy.
Having to pull parts of a dude out of a bucket and piece him together like some macabre jigsaw puzzle was a very interesting second day as well.
A s*****e via crossbow was pretty cool, as you really don’t see that every day.
The most interesting (that I can share) was a murder via katana. We were all super interested to see what that looked like, and it turns out it was one perfect stroke between the ribs into the heart. No bones were hit, just the heart. We joked about a master ninja hunting the city for weeks after. There are much more crazy ones, but it would be way too easy to identify my area from them, and families don’t need that head and heartache from reddits long reach.
The worst is always decomposing bodies and water finds. It is the worst smell of the bunch by far, and the spongy, soupy, texture bodies get from long times in an aquatic environment is the absolute worst. They tend to burst everywhere when you cut them open too.
It was a sad job most of the time, as we only got those that suffered a violent death that needed investigated. Lots of children and people that were clearly failed by society.
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#71
Not exactly what you asked, but I feel I can weigh in here.
I worked in IT at a very large midwestern hospital. If there was a computer in the room, my badge would open the door to the room, which was neat. I’ve been in colonoscopies fixing their camera computer with a patient on the table, been witness to a c-section… you name it.
The hospital has an attached training school that had a GIANT dummy room. Any procedure had a dummy they could use for training. I went to their stage OR room to fix a wireless mouse that was acting up. On the table was a OR draped dummy that was just from clavicle to c****h- no appendages, just torso.
A side note- this training school is really into suspension of disbelief; even when you’re working on a dummy, this is a real patient and is referred to as such.
I fix the mouse, and being the social person I am and helped by the fact I had just run my last ticket, I start talking to the stage OR nurse.
Me: “wow that dummy is really cool, I didn’t know we had any that had cyberskin”
Her: “no, it’s real”
Me: roll eyes “yeah I know, all our patients in the training school are real. Can I touch it? It looks really neat”
Her: looks at me very confused and concerned “I mean, I guess, but it’s real so I’d wear gloves”
Me to me: I’ll just humor her. I didn’t know they had such neat stuff here!
I walk up to the draped dummy, and since it was OR draped, I could only see the area between the nipples and to the end of the rib cage.
Me to me: wow, I didn’t realize they made dummies with nipples! And n****e hair! (I reach out to touch it) And…. freckles… (my finger makes contact) and blood splatter… the dummy is very cold, and the thawed skin moves only slightly over what seemed to be frozen muscle underneath.
Me to her: “this is real!”
Her: “I tried to warn you”
Me: “I’m sorry I’m a d*****s”
I then silently apologized to this young mans torso as well.
Image source: Whatamensch
#72
Transported a 60 year old woman to the morgue after a severe car accident. She had ran into a large tree headon 75 MPH. Face was mashed in completely. After they xrayed the body, they found a tube of lipstick in her brain. Cause of death was putting on makeup while driving. ie.. Lipstick!
Image source: anon
#73
Worked in a Mortuary for a few months because I needed a job and it was at night. My job pretty much was check in the bodies as they were brought in and put them in errr cold storage? One night they brought in 2 bodies, back to back from a convalescing home. I didn’t have time to put the first away yet, so I put it off to the side while I signed in the new delivery. The people leave and I go back to the first body and noticed that it wasn’t exactly as I left it. When I left it the body was flat on it’s back and when I got back it was sorta scrunched up. I backed the f**k out of the room and just sat down. The Mortician came out and saw me pale as a ghost. I told him what happened and he laughed. He then proceeded to explain to me sometimes the body will curl up after death because of rigor mortis and after that’s done it’ll go back to being limp. He proceeded to tell me that some cases are so bad that the bodies sit straight up…f**k that.
He ended up putting the bodies away and I spent the rest of the night freaked out.
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#74
I am the superintendent of a cemetery & crematory (used to work as an apprentice as a funeral home as well) and have been reading this thread as I sit here winding down my afternoon in the chapel. Read a few comments about people seeing things and of course think to myself, “Thank God this hasn’t happened to me”. Right on queue the old piano in the corner plays a single note. Afternoon feelings have changed slightly.
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#75
I may be too late here. I’m a forensic anthropologist and I go to crime scenes sometimes. We recovered a the body of a murder victim after excavating her shallow grave. When I went to roll her over to put her in the body bag, she released gas from her… back end right into my face. At least it was just gas.
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#76
During highschool I got a job for the local funeral home as an assistant of sorts with responsibilities including, picking up deceased from their homes, driving the hearse, digging graves by hand, cleaning up s*****e scenes and passing out bulletins at funerals etc. Paid $25 an hour in the early 2000s so can’t complain.
This one funeral I worked had a man who was cremated who was a bit of a drunk with a large extended family. Per his wishes, his ashes were put in a beer stein and his memorial service involved large amounts of ethanol in various forms. It was a happy service as these things go, until the deceased’s best friend pulled out a karaoke machine and wanted to play a recording of a song that he and the deceased wrote while drunk. The name was “I’m a fat a*s”. The sound was unintelligible except for the chorus which liberally used the song’s title. Everyone breaks down crying and starts singing along. I excused myself to find somewhere to laugh quietly to myself.
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#77
I had a friend who was dating a guy who worked in a morgue. One day she finds pictures that he had hidden which showed him having s*x with different dead bodies.
It’s horrifying to think that someone can do this, but it’s personally horrifying to think of someone raping my dead body. It’s become a personal phobea.
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#78
Not a mortician but I’ll tell my story of encountering my first dead person. I think I was about twelve years old and I was on a vacation to Austria, a beautiful city with lots of these trams going up and downhill. We’d already heard the ambulances and after crossing a street with my father I noticed an ambulance and people climbing out of it frantically, looking closer there was this mangled body that had gotten under one of the downhill trams, his face was mashed and there was so much blood pooled around him. My father quickly grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away.
I still remember that clearly.
Image source: mdavinci
#79
I was working as a bouncer in a strip club when this happened. Guy comes in and proceeds to get super drunk until the bartender cuts him off. He decides it is time to go. So, to keep him from driving while still drunk, we try to convince him to stay and have a few more table dances, stay and enjoy some free sodas, something, anything. We just don’t want him to leave until he’s had time to sober up and he just keeps repeating “Na man, you don’t understand, I really gotta go” over and over. We follow him out to the parking lot, still trying to convince him to stay and sober up. We follow him to his vehicle, and suddenly realize, dude is driving a f*****g HEARSE!
All I remember is somebody saying “Please tell me you do not have a f****n’ body in there man!” Then the guy gets this funny look on his face and says “Yeah, I do. I’ll show you”. My coworkers and I, too stunned to react, just stand there while he opens the rear door of the hearse and opens the coffin. Inside we see a nice looking older gent, dead as a f*****g door nail and already prepped for his funeral. The drunk guy then says “You see, this is why I gotta go. I’ll get in trouble if my boss realizes I stopped on the way again”. Let me stress he said AGAIN, this wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this.
TLDR: Alcoholic stops for a drink while on the clock, poor dead stiff gets one last trip to the titty bar.
Image source: SpawnicusRex
#80
I had a summer job one year when I was at University (nearly forty years ago) as an orderly at the local hospital. I was assigned to the morgue and when a patient died on the ward we wold go up and bring the body back down after the nurses had cleaned the person up and family had said their goodbyes etc. One day we had to get this woman who died during the night. She must have been 30 stone. Docs decided on an autopsy so we had to move her from the gurney type thing to the slab. As I was the young guy the experienced orderly said that I had to take the head. This woman was gargantuanly fat. She was also slippery like her skin was greased. I lost my grip and dropped her and her head smacked into the floor. We got her up on the slab and the doc came in and there was blood pooling under her head – the drop had c*****d her skull open. He had a look and said that it was a good thing she was dead because that would have killed her.
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#81
I work in forensics, specifically as an entomologist; I extract insects from decomposing bodies to estimate the time of death or supplement existing evidence. It’s as a grotesque an occupation as you can imagine, the most odious cadaver was the partial skeletal remains of an eight month pregnant mother who gave life to a plethora of maggots, bot flies, and moth larvae were consuming her hair like some monsterous funeral shroud. The tiny bones of the baby were disintegrating under the unrelenting feasting of ham beetles as it’s flesh was too dry for maggots to find purchase; they preferred the malleable flesh of the mother’s face and breasts.
Observing the corpse, her exposed womb appeared to be giving birth. Many adult beetles were scuttling over her pubic bone and into the cradle of her pelvis. She was supine, her limbs were not splayed in distress but unfortunately her expression was indiscernible due to the divots of bot flies imbued in the flesh of her cheeks.
Then I began my extraction. It was a d**g induced s*****e which encapsulated the tranquillity of her and her child’s death.
Image source: VelvetDreamers
#82
I’m an OB/GYN but when I was a med student I saw a weird case come into the ED. Woman in her late 60s, no known history on her, found by a friend after a week of not picking up the phone laying on the floor of her apartment naked.
When she came in she was straight yellow, like, street sign yellow on every inch of her body, I thought she had body paint on but it must have been some catastrophic liver failure because she had crazy fluid retention in her abdomen as well. She was unresponsive, cardiac arrest, we started CPR, putting in a central line to her leg for fluid resuscitation, got an ekg hooked up but realized the ekg leads weren’t sticking and that there was this red c**p getting on our hands and scrubs with a funny smell.
In addition to and separate from the yellow skin, she was covered in ketchup, neck to shins. The EMTs had no idea how our why and we never found out ourselves.
Image source: Dr_D-R-E
#83
D**n I’m real late to this but this is my most peculiar call I ever went on.
It was by birthday last year and I was on call. i get a call at 3:30 am that we have a residential death, our medical examiner deputy called the funeral home and told is to bring reinforcements. I meet up with a coworker and we get to the house about 30 minutes later.
The M.E. pulls us aside and tells us the guy is in the basement, he’s 6’8 and probably 300 lbs. So there is just 3 employees of the funeral home and our M.E. at the house. By the grace of God we get this guy onto our cot but then we have to get this guy up the flight of stairs. The two older guys go up front and I take the back with my coworker.
When you take a cot up a flight of stairs you don’t really know how hard it is unroll you get both sets of wheels on the stairs. the first 4 stairs go pretty well but we know the back wheels are about to go up.
I’ve dealt with large people and stairs before but this was a diffrent demon, there was really only enough room for 1 person on the stair so I volunteered to try. we made it maybe 2 stairs before his body shifted on the cot and he started sliding back. we brought him back down and ended up calling the fire department.
The fire department brought 10 guys, we tied off the cot and tried making it up the stairs again but it just wasn’t going to happen. The fire chief and my funeral home owner told us to wait and went to talk to the family upstairs. After a while the chief came down with a sawsall and told us that we’re making a door.
we cut a hole in the side of the wall, wheeled him out and pit an end to the longest removal of my career. One of the firefighters was a woodworker and he came back that day and fixed up the wall in the basement. I showed up to the fire station that day with 5 pizzas and a case of beer.
TLDR; We had to cut a hole in a basement wall to get a large body out. Fire fighters are amazing.
Image source: stevenashattack
#84
One of my relatives used to pick up bodies for the morgue. While there were plenty of unsettling scenarios involving the bodies themselves, the creepiest thing was him discovering that some acquaintances of his were necrophiliacs.
Once they found out about his job, a couple of people actually asked if he’d let them “have some time alone” with the bodies and made their intentions clear with some innuendo. Needless to say, he refused and those ties were cut immediately.
Image source: Kipbikski
#85
Insert (“I’m not a coroner, but…”) my uncle (RIP) was. I’ve got two stories for you guys.
The first story has my uncle working this morgue in I think California. He was Deputy Chief Coroner of San Francisco, just not at this time yet. So he’s in some po-dunk town when the bodies are getting stacked up. Apparently, something happened and it caused a surge of deaths in the little town. Kinda f****d up, but so is life… Now, this town’s morgue was tiny, definitely not built for mass casualties (this was probably in the 70s or 80s, too). The place only had two or three cold storage slabs. So, as per my uncle, they (those up the pecking order from my uncle) stored the bodies upstairs on gurneys. When my uncle was done with the bodies on the slabs, he would go upstairs to retrieve the next poor f**k. Now, here’s the kicker, it was dark as s**t up there. No light. But, there were windows and it’s Cali-f*****g-fornia. Why, with windows, was there no light? Flies. F*****g. Flies. They were so thick on the windows, they literally blocked out the sunlight. My uncle didn’t work there long after that (but by god, he was a man of solid work ethic…).
Second story.
My dad would help my uncle out on certain jobs. This was at a different mortuary, mind you, and in the 70s or so—
…so, the local retirement home gives the place a call and says, “We’ve got another one,” or some s**t like that. So my uncle asks my dad to come help him get a body from the home. My dad says ok, and they hop in the coroner vehicle and arrive at the home. They walk into the room and on one bed, lies a motionless individual, and on the other (of two beds in the room) another motionless individual. The grab one of them, as per what they’ve been told, I imagine, and begin rolling her out the door, when suddenly the caretaker comes barreling out of the joint screaming “It’s not her! She’s still alive!” They grabbed the wrong person. The one they grabbed was still alive and the one on the other bed was the dead one.
—to be fair, though, my uncle did mention that back in the day (and I imagine it occurs today as well) doping the living s**t out of the elderly to make them sleep all day until they’re dead was a thing that happened. So, differentiating a living, albeit comatose, person from a dead one was really hard until they could do the official time of death test at the mortuary (I guess there was really no need back in the day. Man, people must’ve lived by the seat of their f*****g pants back then).
To be clear, though, as I’ve basically shown my uncle in a terrible light, he was a great person. The dude was stoic, wise, and definitely a lover of many women (dude liked his gals, man). He’d call out b******t. Definitely: he would fit in a “man’s man” category, albeit if he were still alive.
And for the record, Yes, he chose his own personalized mortician work for himself after death. He was ill and knew it was coming, so he made pretty personalized plans. Extra large casket, no shoes on him, and not to be embalmed. I guess his reasoning was that: What dead guy needs shoes? The extra large casket wasn’t because he wanted to be comfortable, he was a VERY broad-shouldered individual. As for the lack of embalming, he wanted to return to the earth as fast as possible.
So there’s the only stories I have about morticians.
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#86
Not a mortician, but my father is, and occasionally I hear some pretty F-d up things. The worst one was about 10 or 15 years ago. Some good ole boy was backing his 18 wheeler up and getting ready to hook onto a trailer. Some how in the process of trying to get locked in the hydrolics failed and the trailer rolled back crushing this guy to death. Upon arrival to pick up the body, my dad approaches the scene and there are a bunch of cops standing around, and he goes up to them and to get info on where the body was, and they all just kind of casually mumble and proceed to explain finally that there was a problem, that the majority of the body was able to be retrieved just fine, after they had the wrecker truck prop the trailer back up, but not the head, as it had gotten stuck on the front pin of the trailer and none of them knew how to get it off.
My dad, having seen it all stares all these guys down, goes up to the trailer and literally kicks the head off the end of this pin, and then scoops it up into his bag and heads for the car. As he passes by the cops he just just mumbles barely enough for anyone to hear them…”pussies”.
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#87
Ive been in the body business for 5 years i have a lot of f****d up storys…but ill share this one:
I got a call for a pick up at a hospital. The dispatcher said to bring 2 or 3 people because he was around 600 pounds. I get there and look at his paperwork and it turns out this guy was only about 20 years old. And the nurse told me somthing that ill never forget. “He had no congenital illnesses” Which means this kid ate so much that got too fat to move bu the time he was 18 and somehow someone was providing enough food for him to get over 600 pounds barley out of puberty…When i got back to the crematorium with him i weighed him on the floor scale and he was EXACTLY 666 pounds…
I couldn’t make this s**t up.
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#88
One of my dad’s good friends was the son of the local mortician, who later followed in his father’s footsteps to run the business. In their 20’s they lost one of their buddies. Pub was across the street from the funeral home. After a few drinks they decided to retrieve their buddy from the funeral home, propped him up on a barstool and had one last drink with him. I always thought it a bizarre story but fully expected to see at least one other person post something similar. Kind of a weekend at Bernie’s but back in the 1950’s.
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#89
My aunt works in a nursing home and she said one night they had a young girl in, her first night ever working, and someone died so they had to prepare him but when they had him sat up he released his gases and the newbie nearly died because it sounded like a groan from the dead guy.
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#90
My grandfather was a mortician for a bit during his lifetime, and he told me this story of a body he was working on sitting up while his back was turned. Scared the c**p out of him, and I think he quit soon afterwards. Turns out it was just some sort of after-death muscle spasm or something like that.
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#91
I spent some time picking up bodies for the medical examiner. There are many stories, some of my own and some those who I worked with.
One which is usually popular is that of a woman who died on her own in the reservation town. We arrived and the cop on the scene was quite disgusted with the place. He was looking forward to be deployed back to Afghanistan to get away from this town. The house when we arrived was an older house with several stories. The fence outside had been driven through by a car at some point. It was a night of course.
We entered the house and it was a complete mess. She was obviously a bit of a hoarder. I’ve seen much worse hoarders in this job, but she was on her way there. There was stuff piled everywhere, you couldn’t tell what the floor was actually covered in because of all the garbage and paper and stuff ground into the floor. Probably hardwood underneath as it felt so fairly solid, but tough to say for sure.
The second floor was up a spiral staircase, and she was upstairs. Before we went up there the cop told us that the dogs had ‘got her a little bit’. We worked our way up the spiral staircase to the door that he had indicated she was behind. When we opened the door there was a body sitting in an office chair facing the door. However it was a skull on top of a body. The dogs had eaten all of the skin off of her head. They also ate her breasts and the implants from her breasts were on the floor. She had several small dogs, they had started eating each other before her. So there was bones from at least one probably two dogs scattered around. She had died and was not able to feed the dogs obviously, so they turned on each other and then her.
The guy I was with started freaking out a little bit. It was a fairly disgusting site, well beyond the average call that we went to. We were trying to figure out how to get her out of the chair. She was decomposed of course, so she was covered in blisters that bodies get covered in as they decompose. We have to gather as much of the body as we can, so he grabbed her implants and what was left of her scalp with the hair attached off the floor. You don’t want to pop those blisters if you can avoid it, they are very putrid when they leak out. In my partners state of not knowing what the hell to do with her, he decided that the easiest way to get her out of the chair what’s the kick the chair out from under her. So he did. She came crashing to the floor and the blisters burst. It was now a horrible mess of oozing puss.
We had our portable stretcher as obviously we aren’t going to bring the one with wheels up the spiral staircase. We don’t generally bring that up staircases at all really. We set up the body bag and loaded her in. Of course some of the fluids and whatnot got on the outside of the body bag. We loaded her onto the stretcher and carried her out of the house. She stank up the minivan all the way back to the city. It was Winter and quite cold out, but we had to drive with all the windows down to try and survive the putrid odor.
Edit:
I got I home around 3am and immediately put all my clothes in the washer. Took a long hot shower probably draining both hot water tanks my house had.
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#92
Not me, but my Dad & his friend (the mortician, Mr. Mort).
My Dad was doing some business on the other side of the state, pretty close to where his friend Mr. Mort lived. Mr. Mort invited him for a coffee, but said, “Hey, while you’re here, can you help me with a particularly heavy one?”, meaning a large body needed to be cremated. My Dad was in prime shape, and said sure.
There was a 350-400 pound (25-28 stone) lady that needed to be moved from a gurney to the conveyor belt contraption, to be rolled into the crematorium furnace. Normally, she’d be placed into some kind of cardboard coffin, but she was simply too large, so had to go in wearing a hospital gown. After some planning and effort, they successfully moved her over to the belt without dropping her, pushed her into the furnace, and turned it on.
The crematorium was nearly automated. Basically, push a button, and it went through everything it needed to do to properly turn whatever was inside to ash. So, my Dad and Mr. Mort set it, and walked down the street for a coffee.
About 20 minutes later, they see a firetruck go by, and think nothing of it. Then another one goes by. This was a small town in western South Dakota, so there weren’t many firetrucks. They walked outside, and there were flames coming from the crematorium…and some oil was coming from the building. And the smell of burnt ham.
What happened: the lady was so large that there wasn’t enough space around her body in the furnace to generate the heat necessary to properly turn her to ash. But there was enough heat to melt her skin, and turn her fat reserves into hot oil, and leak out of the crematorium. The oil set the building on fire (thankfully it was in a separated garage, so the entire mortuary didn’t go up in flames), and flaming oil started to flow down the driveway and down the street. The first fire engine was parked too close to the fire, and the hot oil flowed past the tires on one corner, then melted and popped them. So you had a bit of pandemonium of firefighters spraying the flames, and others jumping into the two firetrucks to move them away ASAP.
Sorry for the abrupt ending, but I don’t remember anything about the aftermath. I’ll have to ask my Dad when I see him. Since this question was posted 18 hours ago, I’m guessing only a few people will see my post, but you’re welcome!
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