Most of us don't like to think about death too often, because it's a grim inevitability. But people who work as morticians or funeral directors traffic in dead bodies, and are often forced to face the many awful ways people's lives come to an end. On the flip side, they also gain a perspective on life few of us have.
Like any job, there are situations that are par for the course and stories that stand out. When you've worked with dead bodies for years it takes a lot to freak you out. The concept of the job itself is enough to make most people shudder.
In a popular Reddit thread, morticians and funeral workers shared the most bizarre, interesting, and haunting stories from the job, and I believe they all deserve massive raises.
1. DeathFrisbee2000's professor learned of the frozen girl.
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.
2. darkerthanmysoul tried to piece a man's face back together.
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 fucking 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 fuck with you.
Bizarre one was piecing a guy back together after he committed suicide 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.
3. Grimcupcake has a string of stories.
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.
4. Wackydetective had to treat the body of a former friend.
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.
5. deruvoo had to embalm their former coworker.
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.
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 fuck.
There's partially digested birthday cake, that edible confetti stuff, fucking 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 fucking sponge-dino that comes in those capsules you drop in water. He finds more, about a small biomes worth. He thought he was getting fucking 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.
7. Lonestarmami's town mortician got traumatized out of the job.
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.
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 fucking with him, he has been shaken all evening and this asshole is pranking him.
He marches over, very funny you dick, 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 ever loving hell out of the assistant. He quit the next day, said he would never set foot there ever again.
9. aylandgirl's in-laws had to remove gold from a woman's body.
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.
10. mrsluzzi13's dad has a lot of dark stories.
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!
11. batheinsriracha's job is not for the faint of stomach.
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.
12. sweetoklahome's friend got farted on by a corpse.
Sorry for crap 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 ass 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 ass
13. CudaRavage can no longer eat turkey.
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.
14. Bugloaf's dad has a wild story about bodies and fire.
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!
15. woody1594 had to go to a wedding four days after embalming the sister of the bride.
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. I've 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.
16. idosay worked in a mortuary and saw a body scrunch up.
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 fuck 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...fuck that.
He ended up putting the bodies away and I spent the rest of the night freaked out.
17. The_Goondocks's dad had to improvise with one body.
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.
18. doomlite saw a gun fall out of a dead woman's vagina.
Oh man, I might be late but this is good. We picked up a suicide 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 fucking 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 vagina. The question is why. It's been 10 plus years and I'm still wtf
19. CitizenTed had to play Tetris with a man's bones.
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.
20. OlDirtyTriple's dad watched a man take crabs off a dead man's body for dinner.
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.
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 shit, man.
But hey: it was 1982 and I was making $10 an hour, which was big money. With great wealth comes great responsibilities.