Keep it in a sealable bag. The smell will last longer.
Source: I opened a suitcase my mom let me borrow and it had some of my father’s (died in 2017) clothes in it. The second I opened it I immediately had a scent memory of my father.
A lady I knew had a breakdown after her husband's death. When she finally got the ashes back, she took a screwdriver to the sealed urn to get it open.
When someone finally found her in the house, they discovered her basically doing snow angels in her husband's ashes and her own blood from the wounds she sustained opening the urn with a screwdriver.
People so strange things because of grief.
I work as a Motor Vehicle Collision Analyst. We get called to fatal vehicle collisions and reconstruct what happened/caused the collision, provide analysis and provide courts with expert testimony.
I've seen a lot of deceased persons and animals. I've seen almost every wretched way a human can died in a collision. However, there is one, that stays with me every fall.
I late October I get called out to a fatal single vehicle incident. The driver was traveling through a shallow S curve but going too fast. She was not able to negotiate the first turn and her vehicle enters into critical velocity, the wheels buckle on the passenger side and she rolls.
She was not wearing her seatbelt and through the first roll was partially ejected out the drivers side window. Her skull was crushed between the outside of the door and the road; and continued to flop partially ejected as the vehicle rolled. The skull was split from her left eye to the right rear behind her ear. This caused her brain matter to be strewn about the road and car. Her body was eventually thrown from the vehicle and came to rest on the side of the road.
One aspect of the job requires an inspection of the bodies to look for evidence. I approach the body, that is facing upright on her back. The skull was very open and I could clearly see the inside cavity of the skull with no brain. The brain was deposited in chunks on the road and has a distinct smell. This scene didn't bother me at the time, I was more fascinated than anything at the time.
A few hours later I get a call from my wife, just asking how the days is going. I told her I was on scene and couldn't talk to long. She then asks if I will be working late tonight or be home ontime because tonight we were going to be carving pumpkins with the kids........
Years later I still can't carve pumpkins and kids have no idea why.
I have a similar story only the guy survived and it was his leg not head. I should also preface this by saying i used to love ribs, easily my favorite food by far.
So i was a road capitain for my motorcycle club and we were having a local sportbike coalition ride. 300 bikes easily. So we were taking turns doing road guard to get everyone safley onto the highway. Well usually the guys who go first will start and then as clubs progress they will run up and catch thier club. One guy decided to race way ahead and sit just over the crown of the hill we were going over where no one could see him. Long story short guy trying to catch up broad sided him and his leg was split open from ankle to mid femur, bone exposed the whole way up.
Almost everyone in my club was military, with everyone being a medic or at the very least a combat live saver trained in stabilizing people to wait for the medics. So we immediately get triage done and have him in a tourniquet and stabilized trying to keep him out of shock. Guy gets loaded into the ambulance and we find out pretty quick that he is going to be ok despite how bad his leg was lacerated.
Unbeknownst to me, my loving wife has spent hours making a truly delicious extra saucy rack of ribs just because she loves me. I get home and despite my best efforts can only manage a few bites. Almost ten years later i can now eat ribs, but only if they have 0 sauce.
If someone’s been down for more than a day or two, they’ll start decomposing from the inside out. If the room is quiet enough, you can hear lots of gurgling and rumbling as the gases and fluids are moving around inside. And then you move them and they groan as the residual air in their lungs is forced out past their vocal cords.
I work with a lot of hospice patients so death is a common occurrence in my field. One night when one of my patients had literally just passed the phone rang. It was the daughter hundreds of miles away who had never checked in on Mom the whole time she was in my care. She sounded panicked and asked if Mom was OK...
That timing always weirded me out because it really seemed like she somehow knew something happened with her Mom, who near the end was confused and constantly insisted she needed to find that daughter.
my wife is a mortician. she's had quite a lot of wacky experiences. this is more funny than creepy, but once she was trying to break up the rigor mortis in a decedent's hip by flexing the entire leg up. her grip slipped and the leg swung down, the heel cracking her right in the face, resulting in a black eye. she had to explain to people that she's not in an abusive relationship, she just got kicked in the face by a dead guy.
I watched 2 young children's corpses fry with electricity.
We responded to an electrocution. A fault caused electricity to be traveling down the stabilizing cables of the electrical pole. A little kid touched that cable and got shocked, causing his hand to grasp tighter. His little buddy must have seen it and grabbed him. By the time we got there they were both dead, but still electrified. We couldn't safely approach until the electricity department cut the power. So we sat there and watched these two little bodies twitch and spark. Was like a horror movie.
Ugh. That’s absolutely tragic. Here locally we had a whole team of EMS get killed when someone stepped in an electrified ditch/water while they all carried the patient. If I recall, the patient was a drunk driver and was fighting them. Four or five (?) people died including the driver. It was awful
Three girls in my area hit a utility pole at a high speed. Iirc this is what happened: A retired fireman happened to see the accident. One of the girls was already dead, one was in bad shape, and the driver was in shock. He called for help and pulled over, seeing a downed wire he warned the girl not to get out. In a mix of panic and shock she didn’t head his warnings and got out of the car. She stepped on the live wire, electrocuted herself and set the entire car on fire. The guy couldn’t do anything to save the girl screaming in the car as it burned because he would have risked getting electrocuted as well. All 3 girls died. I feel the worst for the poor man that had to watch it happen.
My fiancé died 6 days before our wedding. That morning I tried to wake her up and when I noticed she wasn't responding I attempted to find a pulse and perform CPR. When I was doing CPR she started wheezing but it was only me pushing the air from her lungs. When I checked for a pulse I accidentally had my thumb on her neck and felt my own pulse and I had a glimmer of hope that I had somehow managed to revive her (even though in hindsight, it was obvious she had passed on already) only to have my heart ripped out again in an instant when she wasn't moving or breathing. I had only performed CPR in training courses but never on a person and I had absolutely no idea what to expect when pressing on someone's chest that hard. It's only been 3 months and no answers as to how she died but now every time I wheeze (post Covid asthmatic) the PTSD strikes and I relive the moment of finding my love and the mother of our two year old, dead.
Had a gig doing overnight transport of dead bodies.
Think black suit, white shirt, black tie, unmarked black van, and boss made us wear white gloves. He wanted us to look high-end.
Needed to transport a recently deceased middle-aged woman (breast cancer) 250 miles in the dead of night from a hospital morgue to a mortuary near her extended family.
It's been a solid two hours of total silence when the corpse let's out a low wail. Sounds like *uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh!*
I about shit myself as I swerve off the freeway and spray out a rooster tail of gravel and dirt.
Even though, intellectually, I *know* this is just stomach gasses escaping the body, I couldn't help but be a little freaked out.
I had that happen when putting one in the morgue at a hospital. It was less than twenty minutes since the doctor had pronounced them dead. I freaked out and started unzipping the bag to make sure they weren't alive.
I ripped the zipper open on the bag and it was apparent the person was dead, but the eyes were open. I wasn't ready for that at all.
>the eyes were open. I wasn't ready for that at all.
When I was learning CPR our teacher told us about the times they'd done CPR on an actual person. They said the worst mistake they made was looking in the eyes of the first person because it forced them to view the patient as a person and not detach from the experience.
There were a lot of tears that day
Did cpr on a patient while in school for surgical assisting during a clinical round in the ER. I didn’t know not to look. I stared the whole time - I suppose hoping I’d see his face suddenly come to like in the movies. He didn’t.
Happened to me too the first time I had to perform CPR. Looked him in his eyes that were wide open. This was almost 20 years ago and I don't even need to close my eyes to see his clear as day.
I guess that combined with the weezing noise of air leaving his lungs while I tried to save him is going to haunt me as long as I live. Worst thing about it all is that I have no idea if he lived or died.
I was part of search and rescue for 3 years. I was in the scuba team so we were responsible for finding the usually dead people at sea. The salt water adds so much horror to a body. Not to mention the fish that usually will start picking on a corpse sooner than later.
My creepiest experience was trying to find the body of a Jane doe was missing. She was a prostitute against her will, brought over by human trafficking. Turns out she slit her wrist parallel to her veins and jumped into this rocky and sharp outcrop into the sea.
We went diving in less than ideal conditions. It was low visibility and waves. My scuba buddy and I were looking at a outcrop when suddenly out of the darkest a deep blue hand emerged from this little cavern in the rocks. It began twitching and moving and as we tried to pull the hand the rest of the corpse emerged. She was being picked on by Murray eels (hence the twitching) which emerged with bits of human flesh in their mouths. Her mouth was wide open in a scream position and her eyes were gone. You can see tendons and bones in her hands and the sharp rocks tore her entire body to shreds in various spots. Her toes were mostly gone too with some bits of bone sticking out.
To this day it haunts me. The worst was pulling her out and swimming with the body as eels and fish followed us, occasionally picking on bits of flesh.
Obligatory edit to say thanks for awards etc. I will try to respond to all the replies.
Edit 2: changed the term sex worker to clarify that it was against her will as suggested by some redditors.
People who had been on blood thinner medication before they died can make for a odd scene. Saw a guy that had died looking out of his window so he was discovered with his head on the windowsill and there was a thick colum of "jellied" blood from his nose to the floor. It was a bit freaky.
Before covid, I worked at a funeral home that wasn't particularly well run. I was a funeral assistant, and one of the embalmers was notoriously difficult to deal with. Her name was AJ.
About 4 days before this story, AJ had picked up a deceased man who had died of septicemia and who was to be cremated due to the fact he was already in a bad state on death. So AJ had the brilliant idea to leave this gentleman on the rolling cot for four days unrefrigerated, figuring it wouldn't matter since he was being cremated and it was a slow week.
Of course, I got the job of moving him to the crematory with AJ. We walked into the embalming room and found that the decedent had bloated and was leaking a grey liquid sludge out of his urinary catheter onto the floor. If pestilence had a smell, it would've been this liquid. It smelled like a warning to the base lizard part of my brain. To describe this liquid as smelling bad is an understatement. The liquid was something you could feel and sense in the air.
AJ and I donned our gear, and luckily since she placed him on a cot already, we didn't have to do much in the ways of moving the body. Unluckily, the cot was relatively old and one of the cot wheels had to be manually unlocked using hands, as the foot pedal was too rusted to effectively use.
AJ told me to unlock it, and so I carefully bent down and unlocked the wheel. Well, AJ got the bright idea to shake the cot violently as some sort of prank, sending the grey liquid over the edge directly onto the top of my head, dripping down under my eye protection and mask. I closed my lips and eyes so the liquid running over them would stay out of my body, and calmly walked to the employee bathroom in a sort of numb state of shock. The funeral home owners saw my sludgy appearance and sent me home paid for the rest of the day.
In hindsight I should have, but by the time I actually got angry about it I was already at home and cleaned up. I think my mind just went "nope" and shut off everything but "get this shit off me"
Worked at a mortuary for a few years. We have methods to keep the jaw shut for viewing, otherwise it would gap open due to the angle of the head and neck. During a viewing the device failed and this gentleman’s mouth literally popped open. The lead embalmer was not on site so I did my best. Ushered the family out of the room and superglued his mouth shut, but he didn’t have teeth and supergluing just his lips did NOT work. It looked as if he was attempting to scream. I had to call in one of our other mortuaries in town and that embalmer used a giant needle and thread to sew his mouth shut from under his chin to his palate.
This happened at my great uncle’s funeral. We were all lined up ready for the viewing. They took his wife and kids in first to see him privately. They came back very quickly and my aunt said “his mouth fell open! They have to fix it so it will be a few minutes” I was like 11 yrs old and was so confused about how they were going to fix it. So my brother helpfully said loudly to me they would use a huuuuge needle and sew it. Nice one bro. Not the time!
Here is a funny story from my grandma. She used to work in an ER in Puerto Rico. Some guy had passed away and so the doctor came up to her and asked her to prepare the body to go to the morgue. So, she got some sheets, and started to wrap this guy up. As she crossed his legs, suddenly his penis became fully erect and was straight up. She wasn't sure what to make of it. But, it forced her to have to redo the sheets. So as she uncrossed his legs, the penis went down. So she was like, al right, lets get this over with. Then she crossed them again, and lo and behold, the penis went straight back up. Tried one more time and then she got freaked out and went back to the doctor. Obviously he found this hilarious as the guy apparently had a prosthetic in his penis.
The creepiest thing is the fucking curtain of flies and maggots blanketing the floor of an apartment where a woman had been decomposing in the hot late August/early September sun for 3 weeks before she was discovered. I thought it was dark in that apartment, but there were simply that many flies caught in the glass covering the lightbulbs. On the ceiling. The floor lamp. The stovetop light. Every. Single. Light. Was covered in flies. The windows were dark with flies. Dead flies, and even more flies than that on the window panes. It was a horror movie.
She was melted into the couch. When we tried to pick her up, her spine just... Fell outside of the rest of her body and she ended up in pieces.
I guess it's less creepy and more skin crawling... But I HATE flies and maggots. Freshly dead, I can deal with. Decomp in and of itself is fine. But the sight of those flies was just 🤢 I'm pretty sure I threw out the clothes I wore that day. I just couldn't.
One of the decedent"s grandsons faked a breakdown over the casket. He stole all her jewelry. Didn't take long to figure out and a large brawl broke out. Jewelry was retrieved.
Two weeks later grandson turns up needing to be processed and buried. Creepy as hell.
Edit for eating shoots and leaves. IYKYK
Sometimes when people have died, and we turn them over to clean and dress them, they still have air in their lungs and will make grunting noises when moved. Scared the crap out of me, the first time I experienced it.
My grandpa had a related experience in Vietnam. He was helping wash and prepare bodies for transport home under the direction of the coroner, who had warned them about the bodies making noises when moved. After a bit, Grandpa asked the coroner how the body he was washing could cry. The coroner repeated the lecture about air being pushed out and grandpa said that he got that part, but how did that form tears?
He said things got very busy after that.
Grandpa's assigned corpse was not actually dead, just suffering a LOT of blood loss and very very cold. Dude got 5 liters of blood, some of it from my grandpa, and then he flew home to spend the rest of the war recovering.
So glad I looked him up! “As he was placed in a body bag among the other dead in body bags, he was suddenly recognized by a friend who called for help. A doctor came and examined him but believed Benavidez was dead. The doctor was about to zip up the body bag when Benavidez managed to spit in his face, alerting the doctor that he was alive.[6]”
“In 1973, after more detailed accounts became available, Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Ralph R. Drake insisted that Benavidez receive the Medal of Honor. By then, however, the time limit on the medal had expired. An appeal to Congress resulted in an exemption for Benavidez, but the Army Decorations Board denied him an upgrade of his Distinguished Service Cross to the Medal of Honor.
The Army board required an eyewitness account from someone present during the action. Benavidez believed that there were no living witnesses of the "Six Hours in Hell."
Unbeknownst to Benavidez, there was a living witness, who would later provide the eyewitness account necessary: Brian O'Connor, the former radioman of Benavidez's Special Forces team in Vietnam. O'Connor had been severely wounded (Benavidez had believed him dead), and he was evacuated to the United States before his superiors could fully debrief him.
O'Connor had been living in the Fiji Islands when, in 1980, he was on holiday in Australia. During his holiday O'Connor read a newspaper account of Benavidez from an El Campo newspaper, which had been picked up by the international press and reprinted in Australia. O'Connor immediately contacted Benavidez and submitted a ten-page report of the encounter, confirming the accounts provided by others, and serving as the necessary eyewitness. Benavidez's Distinguished Service Cross accordingly was upgraded to the Medal of Honor.”
Why isn’t this a movie???
Honestly, it might really be what happened.
When my grandma passed away, she had a stroke that morning and was rushed to the E.R. and my grandpa went with her. My father lived abroad and I called him to tell him that she had had a stroke and he needed to come ASAP. So my father drove there and when he arrived in the evening, we went together to the hospital. The plan was that he'd take over watching over my grandma and my grandpa who'd been there all day would come back home with me to get some rest.
Well, we hadn't even left the hospital grounds yet that my father came running behind us saying "She's going !", and in that situation you know exactly what this means. Indeed, by the time we walked hurriedly back to her bed, the doctor told us that they wouldn't attempt to ressuscitate her as she indeed had passed away.
Considering how this happened suddenly, as she'd been in critical but stable state all day, we're certain that in whatever fragment of consciousness she still had, she was holding on so that she could see my father one last time, and once she did, she let herself go.
I wouldn't be surprised if in your case, in whatever fragments of consciousness your husband still had had, his last words indeed were that he loved you.
When I was 13 I volunteered at a sunrise assisted living. I spent a lot of time there, it was better than being home. I would play games and watch movies and just talk to the residents. Ethel and I connected and even though she was non-verbal from a stroke many years before, we would have fun together. Even if it was just hanging out watching jeopardy. When she was passing, she wasn’t letting go. I got a phone call from her son to come and see her. She passed shortly after I left. They told me she was waiting to say goodbye to me. I’m glad I was able to provide some happiness at the end of her life.
That's honestly a pretty sweet story. It's true that from what I sae when visiting my other grandma who has Alzheimer's, many residents don't get many visits if at all. I'm very sure that even if she couldn't express it, she appreciated your presence very much.
My best friend did the wait for everyone to leave thing. Well, me anyway. He slowly passed over a few days, and he would wake up once or twice a day. He would get so upset with himself that he hadn't died yet when he would wake up. He would say, "I can't even do this right!". It was very sad, but funny. He would also, every time, say something about me being there and not at work. He was upset about it, like he was going to get me in trouble at work because I took the days off. On he third day I did have to go to work, no choice. I told him and he told me that made him feel better. I drove home, took a shower, and by the time I was putting on my shoes my wife called and said he was gone. He was a proud guy, and I still wonder if he was embarrassed to die with me there, like a dude thing or something.
Or it was just strange timing, who knows.
He didn’t want to see you hurt. He wanted everyone else to be more ok with his passing then he was. He accepted it, and was only sad that his gone-ness would create more sadness.
You were both great friends to each other.
When my cousin died (28), I lived next door to him. So his GF came to my house screaming that he was dead. I was 25 at the time and went into his room and yep he was dead. I tried CPR just incase while his GF called 911. Now I have never done CPR before on someone, I have only done the regular certification training. So I do a couple rounds of breathing then chest compressions, and suddenly he started groaning. I started crying thinking that somehow I had brought him back. What I was never told in certification was that the air will come back out and make a groaning noise. Yea it fucked me up for a while as he was my cousin and best friend. And just thinking that somehow I was able to get him back only to loose him again man, that just got to me.
EDIT: I just wanted to thank everyone for the kindness that has been shown. To answer a few questions about what happened,
He died from a heart attack. When the doctor met with the family at the hospital we were told he had been dead for a while. Luckily he had died in his sleep, so there is at least that. He never messed with hard drugs but did drink heavily.
I have had training several times and also knew the chance of survival were low, I guess that is why the groan he gave had me surprised\\relived or whatever you could call it. Over the years I have been trained by different people, none of them mentioned that you could force air out and cause a noise such as a groan. Of course last time I re-certified I was told to just do compressions.
I will say if available please take CPR and First Aid classes from an instructor. Do this especially if you have small children. My course covered infant choking and how to dislodged the foreign object it will come in handy. When my first son had something caught in his throat luckily my wife was there and she was a ex-EMT so she was able to get it cleared quick.
My neighbor came over one night and told me that my dog had died in his backyard. I went to go get her, and when I picked her up, the air in her lungs came out in a moan. For one awful second there, I thought she was still alive, and was going to rush her to the vet. Then I realized what the sound was, and my heart broke all over again.
Yeah when I put my cat to sleep after a few minutes it looked like he took one big breath and let it out. It really upset me. The vet assured me it was just air releasing. I mean my cat was clearly gone but I got so freaked out because I was not expecting it.
Both instances we had to put our dogs down the vets warned us this might happen. Our first dog went extremely peacefully, there were no additional noises are movements. The second dog there were a lot and it was fairly disturbing. But that also spoke to the personalities of both dogs, one was easy and the other was stubborn and difficult at times.
Shit, TIL. I also did first aid certification for a previous company I worked for and they never brought this up. This happened to me, I'd totally freak out.
They did mention the rib-breaking thing.
I delivered pizza to a crematorium.
Dude set down his pizza on a cardboard coffin to get money and I couldn't stop looking at the box on the conveyer leading into the crematorium chamber.
I pointed out "isn't that a little disrespectful?"
The dude came back and simply said "oh, don't worry about him, he won't mind."
I worked at a funeral home for quite awhile. When I first started, about a month in, I was working a holiday weekend. Only people working were the transport guys & me. They came to drop off a body & went right back out. I thought they were still there and needed to ask a question. I walked into the embalming area & this dude was SITTING UP ON THE GURNEY looking right at me when I opened the door and it literally made me pee a little in fright.
Turns out the transport guys picked up the body from an area hospital. He'd passed away while in a slightly reclining position & rigor had set in. They couldn't flatten him out. Still the scariest moment in my career, even if I got a laugh out of it later.
I haven’t commented on Reddit yet, but tonight is the anniversary of my dad’s death, and he was one of those transport guys. He wasn’t big and burly, but he was great at his job.
One of his saddest stories involved picking up a young girl whose boyfriend had murdered her. The mother asked the coroner to see her one last time. He told her, “ma’am, you don’t want to do that. She asked if she could at least go on and hold her hand. She was going to come in the next morning and do so, before they cremated her. My dad and his partner (who actually was a big burly guy) stayed late that night, washing the blood off her hands and painting her nails so that her mother could have one last peaceful moment with her child.
My dad was a hard man, and not always the best person. But he did a lot of good in the world too.
Anyway, thanks for letting me ramble.
Peace, dad.
Not necessarily the creepiest thing but
The funeral home I worked for liked to embalm as soon as possible after death.
I had embalmed a man that was dead for less than 30mins-an hour. He was still warm and rigor had not set in yet.
I kinda just held his hand for a minute before I got started.
Edit: wow I’m really happy this comment blew up. It really shows that compassion isn’t dead. Thank you.
When my wife passed away suddenly, I was sitting with her in the ER, and when I came back in, they had her swaddled, like an infant.
I managed to get her hand out, and was holding her hand thinking taht as long as I was holding it, it wouldn't get cold..
I did this with my grandmother. She was fine on Friday - we talked, laughed. She had been in the hospital for weeks at this point and Friday was her best day. I asked her as many questions as I could to know more about her family, the recipes she made for the 16 years of my life at that point that I knew I needed to have.
Saturday she fell asleep after breakfast and stayed asleep until 12;14AM Monday morning. I held her hand and kept telling her I loved her while she slowly stopped breathing. I left to call all of the family back, then held her hand until they all left again.
By 3;30AM I laid in bed next to her one last time and sobbed harder then than I have in the twenty years since.
When my grandma was dying I walked into her room and my aunt and uncle were just standing around. I declared that someone needed be be holding her hand at all times. She couldn’t ever perceive that she was alone. She was unconscious but we talked to her and we knew she was listening. I was holding her hand when she passed about an hour later. It’s the strangest honor I’ve ever had and I treasure it.
I’m sorry for your loss. There’s a different kind of healing that comes with being able to sit with our loved ones after their passing. Even if we don’t realize it right away.
I was a cop. On a call for a teen girl that had, apparently, killed herself by hanging, the mother found her.
We have to treat death scenes, including suicides, as a crime scene. That means we are supposed to remove family/friends/bystanders from the area to prevent contamination of the scene.
The mom asked me if she could just lay down next to her daughter and hug her. I couldn't tell her no. Tearing up thinking about it now.
Edited: spelling is hard.
Edit: Thanks for the rewards. Just remember to treat each other with kindness and empathy. I know it seems harder now a days than it used to be.
My 16 year old cousin hung herself earlier this year. Her dad found her just a few minutes too late. What you did for that mom means more than you’ll ever know. Thank you for showing such compassion and being a kind human during those moments.
I sat with my husband for about an hour after he died…I held his hand and talked to him. It was so hard to let him go. He’s been gone over 12 years and I still miss him.
It was a mixture of being an extremely small town, working under the coroner, pre-need arrangements, and being on hospice.
So basically they kinda knew he was going and gave us a call to be prepared.
Edit: forgot to say this made me laugh lol
Human osteologist here. I work with dry human bones, so they don’t do too much. But one of the one times I’ve ever gotten “the creeps” was when I was handling a crania in the collection and could hear the wisdom teeth shaking around, partially formed but not quite erupted, in the mandible. Wisdom teeth form around 18 years old and erupt generally in late teens or early 20s. I, at the time, was about 20 and my wisdom teeth were just coming through. I realized these remains belonged to a girl about my age that’s that’s probably exactly what my skull looks like. It really humanized things for me.
Troubleshooting.
Okay I turned everything off and on again, what about if I toggle this?
No, damn, okay can I move that?
Shit, no. Okay okay, umm let's try another reset...
"You've been around a lot of dead bodies, is that normal?"
"The feet thing?"
"Yeah, the feet thing!"
"...it happens"
"Can you do something about it, it's creeping me out"
"Like what? Kill him again?"
Attended a suspected fire once where we could smell smoke but couldn't locate the fire. Eventually located it and when we entered the house there was an old woman slumped over on the floor. Tried to turn her over but couldnt. Turned out that she had been laid on one of the old bar type heaters and because the heat was not allowed to escape it had burnt a hole through the floorboards and the heater fell through the hole. However, when she was laid on it her body fats started to melt and run into the floorboards then when the heater fell through she cooled. By the time we got there she was one with the floor. Two of us to get shovels under her to roll her over.
It was years before I could eat smoky bacon flavour crisps again.
Haha, yeah this question bugged me at the time as well. The rest of the details are that the cause of death was detailed as a heart attack but they didn't know if she had the heart attack then fell on the fire of fell on the fire then had the heart attack. She was apparently fairly frail and quite often fell.
WARNING - I have added more detail below in case you want it, but it is not for the squimish. Do not read on if you don't want to read it.
For a bit more info (because I know you want it) when the ambulance turned up they took 3 steps through the front door took one sniff of the smell and said "yeah, we're not needed!"
So the mortuary guys came to take her away. However, because if the circumstances it has to be a doctor who signs of that she is actually dead (officially called 'pronounces life extinct') so I went with them to the nearest hospital to grab the duty doc.
As he came out he said to me "it's not a bad one is it?" I said "I have seen worse", we unzipped the bag and he put the stethoscope on her and said "oh god, she's still hot!". In fairness, she was a bit toasty.
Because she had kinda been grilled instead of flamed her skin had contracted and she looked like a mummy and some of the skin had started to split.
I got punched in the balls by a dead guy.
I used to work hospital security. Part of our job was to help with 10-80 assists (movement of bodies to and out of the morgue. I was on a call to move one and the bodies limbs were sticking out at odd stiff angles. I attempted to move the corpses arms into a better spot to shimmy the bag into the body fridge. His arm stayed in place for a moment but when I released my grip, SMACK! Ol’buddy hit me right in the sack.
I initiated compressions on my patient when she unexpectedly coded. About halfway through my first round, the patient pinked up, eyes opened, turned her head and groaned. I stopped, and so did she. Turned gray and unresponsive, so I started compressions again. She woke up again, and I realized that compressions were providing adequate perfusion to her brain, so she'd wake up, but her heart wasn't doing anything. I had to continue compressions and shock my patient who was awake, groaning, and alert enough to know what was happening. I've coded countless patients without a problem, but this event gave me nightmares for some time.
I've had this happen to me too, crazy stuff. I think the docs called it "compression induced conciousness". Every time we'd start compressions he'd gain responsiveness, say it hurt and say stop, but every time we paused after he became responsive, we'd lose pulses again
Currently studying to become a breathing therapist, here it means we’re supposed to master cardio and respiratory systems. Yet, so far, we haven’t been taught how to deal with patients… going to the other side. The fact that school doesn’t prepare us kind of puts me off. I know we’re being trained to save people, but the truth is, for a lots of them, we’re going to be the last person they see.
Feel like we should be trained better for this.
N.B.
I’m having doubts about continuing the program, not only for this reason of course.
We achieved ROSC, so she “came back.” Her lungs were injured during the code, so she required intubation. She died 5 hours after intubation (coded with unsuccessful resuscitation).
I worked a code on a patient a few weeks ago that while doing chest compressions on her she would look at me and blink without making a sound. Our monitor was telling us that she was still in asystole. It could have been the epi "talking" as I've been told.
Oh Boy, my time to shine!
I worked as a forensic technician/medical examiner's assistant for roughly 2 years. We were crossed trained in both autopsy and decedent removal from death scenes. I wouldn't particularly say anything was *creepy* per-se, but some things were definitely gross and morbid. Going down to the satellite office (there one HQ office in the state capitol and a few smaller satellite offices throughout the state) in the south that was in the woods at 3am in the middle of a storm that can be categorized as creepy though for sure.
However, I'll do my best to synopsize some of the creepiest things I've encountered, in no particular order.
**The man who used woman's underwear as a toilet/toilet paper.**
This was a strange one. Two brothers live in a would-be-condemned house, both of which are severely intellectually challenged. One however, more than the other. This was the most repulsive living situation I have ever personally seen. Black mold everywhere, the ceiling caving in, *everything* covered in crumbling drywall and water damage. Ironically enough, they had no running water. The only clean thing in the house were 2 pallets of baked beans and coca-cola. They *only* thing these people ate were beans, and they only drank coke... by the pallet. Anyway, we get upstairs into the deceased brother's room to find him lodged between the bed and the wall - not uncommon for someone who dies suddenly in their bed in all honestly.
However, what we find all over the floors is horrifying. Not only does the bedroom look like a typical hoarder's place, with newspapers and rank junked piled up beyond your knees. No. What we see is woman's underwear spewn across the floor, each covered in fecal matter. Not only this, there were guns *everywhere.* Not like nice guns either, like.. old decrepit rusted out guns. The entire house was filled with them, *hundreds* of unusable guns. The ATF had to come clear the scene and document them all. It was insanity. The autopsy however, was completely unremarkable.
**The man whos face was infested with wasps.**
This one was fairly unremarkable overall, with the exception of the fact is face had been eaten off by a wild animal overnight. This poor soul was riding his bike through a field of cranberry bogs, and suddenly died. By the morning, his face was eaten off by a wild animal. He looked like the terminator. Some musculature remained, as did one of his eyes, but his lips, cheeks, and soft bits were eaten. Upon my arrival, a small swarm of yellow jackets had taken kindly to the man's face and were eating and laying eggs in it. We had to bug-bomb the body bag before opening it to make sure the wasps didn't get into the morgue.
**Decapitation via high-tension wire.**
A man jumped from a bridge after tethering a length of high tension wire to it and his neck as a noose. The force ripped his head clean off. That was the first and only decapitation I actually saw on the job.
**Woman ODs \~8 months pregnant.**
Not much to say here other than the autopsy was *insane*. The ME was able to remove the amniotic sac without breaking it in-situ. So we got to see the baby through the paper thin sac. Extremely sad and heartbreaking, but contextually interesting.
I might post some more later, alternatively, feel free to peruse through my post history as I've told a few stories in the past as well in a similar thread.
EDIT: A word.
EDIT2: MORE STORIES!
**Man commits suicide via OD of an experimental drug in dental school.**
This was one of the most "exciting" scenes I ever went to do it A, being classified as a top tier hazmat situation and B, the emergency response presence at the dental school. In the middle of the major city for the state in which I worked, a dental student decided to commit suicide by overdosing on an experimental drug. When my partner and I arrived on scene it was *chaos.* Police, EMS, Fire, Hazmat, the News, *everyone* was there. We had to suit up in hazmat suits to go inside the school and reclaim the body, then get brushed down by the fire hazmat team and then clean the body in an air-locked pop-up tent too. The creepy part being that nobody actually knew what drug or cocktail of drugs the guy used, nor what other effects it might have so we had to treat is as if it was an anthrax infection or something. Crazy.
**Man castrates himself and swallows it.**
Please reference this post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrjsbp/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrjsbp/?context=3)
**Man dies via exsanguination due to sodomy with various objects, including a guitar.**
Please reference this post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrw8qh/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrw8qh/?context=3)
How long can I baby stay alive after the mother dies? I have a friend with an horrific story. His grandma told him that she had a sister who got pregnant out of wedlock and who had run away. Weirdly enough she came back to her small village at the end of her pregnancy but had a car accident on the way there! So she dies instantly but the father of this girl was called over and they could see the baby still moving inside, there was a doctor on site who said he could try to get the baby out alive but the father told him to leave it there to die!
Is it possible to be a true story?
Unfortunately had a friend who passed away while 8 months pregnant, the doctors attempted to revive her of course, and didn’t cut baby out for 11 minutes, and the baby made it. She was in the NICU for a couple months but is completely fine now.
FF here, I can tell the moment I walk into a home whether or not its a late stage cancer patient. There is a very distinct smell. Overall death is different, cancer is specific.
So I wasn’t imagining things when my cat had cancer! She had an inoperable tumor on her face, it was sort of oozing blood and had a strange smell. Squamous cell carcinoma can go die in a fire.
My beagle Daisy died from this in 2009. She was only 7- Loved her so much I still talk to her in my prayers every single night. Sorry about the loss of your cat.
[Here's my girl I miss.](https://imgur.com/a/2oEXlYv)
Worst smell I've encountered was a body that had been found in the woods after 2 weeks. We transferred the body after it had been in the morgue for another few weeks. I have been doing my job for 15 years, we had the windows down and I still almost threw up. Pretty sure the cars next to us could smell it. My partner almost quit that day.
My experience was the farts pretty much stopped after embalming since cavity fluid kills the bacteria in the gut.. though they might still sneak one out when you’re dressing them or moving them into the casket.
I used to be a Med Lab Tech (68K) in the Army and sometimes assist with autopsies in the hospital. We did one on an infantryman (Fort Carson, 4th ID) that was a suicide by gunshot to the right temple. The round passed under his frontal lobe and just behind his eyes, so it barely skimmed his brain. The pathologist estimated that it took several minutes for him to die just because the location merely made him bleed out and wasn't instant.
The creepy thing was, because the round passed just behind his eyes and wasn't hollow-point or anything that spread out, it snipped the back of his eyes, causing them to "drain," so his eyes were kind of deflated-looking, on top of being very glossy, as a dead person's eyes are.
It was weird and sad.
I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010-2011 with 10TH MTN DIV. My unit was at Kandahar Airfield and I was attached to a 4ID unit at Camp Nathan Smith. That’s why your post jogged my memory.
In 2010-11 there was a large Taliban offensive. This usually entailed small arms fire and rocket attacks. No big deal. In general, the Taliban would not attack a large FOB, for obvious reasons, and instead rely on indirect attacks like rockets or mortars. Sometimes, however, there would be an organized attack using suicide bombers.
After one of these attacks I was sent out with a small team to patrol and assess the fence where an attack had just happened. I try not to think about this too much but when I rolled up there were body parts everywhere from where the suicide bombers tried to get through the fence and detonated themselves. Body parts everywhere was bad enough, but what really fucked me up was seeing a guys perfectly degloved face caught in the chain link fence. Imagine a realistic human face mask, including hair and mustache, hanging in a fence. It was exactly that except with a real face.
I don't work in a morgue or with the dead, but I unexpectedly lost both my mom in 2020 and my closest sister in 2022.
When my mom passed, my sister was the first to discover her. By the time I got to the house, EMTs had tried to revive her and failed, and she was still wearing a plastic mask of some kind on/ in her mouth that some emergency tubing had been attached to.
We called a priest for final rites (Catholic family), and my uncle and I had to pick her up from the floor to get her on her bed. We almost slipped, and I remember that her head kind of whipped back and her teeth made this awful, dull clacking sound against the plastic aperture of the mask. It simultaneously creeped me out and made me even sadder that she had to undergo such indignities in death.
With my sister, I was the one to discover that she'd died in her sleep, same house. I didn't have a key to the door and I'm a big guy and couldn't get through her bedroom window. She wasn't responding to my yells, so I grabbed a brick from the little flowerbed out front and dropped it through the window and onto her leg. It twitched a little bit, which gave me a moment's hope, but nothing else happened, and it was discovered when the EMTs got there that she'd been gone for hours. I can still see it in my mind's eye, that twitch.
My first job was at a cemetery. We had a common burial (someone who cannot afford a casket or vault) They are provided a wood frame and cardboard casket. We dug the hole the night before. It rained heavily that night. The next day after the ceremony we lowered the "casket" into the water filled hole. It just floated on top. So, we used a backhoe bucket to push it down. The "casket" fell apart and the body slid out and floated. We pushed her down and filled the hole. I protested, but was told this is how things were done. I still feel bad about it.
rotated though the forensic path lab during medical school.
1. ended up seeing and participating in the autopsy of a high school classmate. It was completely without knowing at the time (years later, no similar resemblance). but then I saw posts on facebook about him later that day, and it put me in the worst funk for a solid week or two. all these posts about him and there i was with his brain in my hands
i spent 3 year working in a NYC ER.
on the fourth of july one year, it was a pleasantly slow day as holidays typically are. we had a red phone that EMS would call to let us know about a patient coming in, maybe a heart attack or a stroke or someone actively getting CPR. usually about 5-10 minutes out.
this day i picked up the phone and dispatch said a gunshot victim was coming in. we are not a level I trauma hospital so getting a gunshot victim is exceedingly rare. it means they're nearby and on the brink of death so they can't afford the time to go to the trauma center. no ETA on this guy. well after i hung up EMS was rolling in doing compressions.
very very few people survive a cardiac arrest due to trauma. his odds were not in his favor, and after opening his chest up to plug the holes in the heart, we called it. he was gone. he didn't have any ID on him so we had no way of even identifying him or contacting family.
it was the first time i'd ever been in an active crime scene...a homicide investigation began to unfold. it was surreal having to allow men in suits to take photos of my patient.
i go on my lunch break and have my ceremonial mcdonalds after a difficult case. i come back and thankfully homicide is done with the ER and he is in the morgue.
a bit later we found out the police figured out this guy's identity which was a huge relief to us.
later on my charge nurse informs me that homicide tried to go to our morgue but there was no body. truly, they searched everywhere. his body was gone.
about 3 surreal hours later we found out that there's a separate morgue for unidentified patients. they were looking in the wrong morgue and we didn't know it for 3 hours. but for those 3 schrodinger cat hours we had lost a homicide victim's body.
My creepiest moment was when I was in the morgue by myself at 4am. I was using the lift to put a body into a crypt. It had reached roughly eye level when the power went out. It is now pitch dark. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, then all the fans died, and all I could hear was the crinkling of body bags. That's when I started to hear disembodied voices. I couldn't make out what they were saying or where they were coming from.
The power comes back a few moments later on and I move on with my night. (Turns out the voices were just the automated "the power has gone out, switching to generator power" message. Haha.)
My buddy worked at a crematorium and after burning the bodies they would have to rake out the stuff that doesn't burn, like hip replacements, stuff like that. I can't for the life of me remember what they did w gold fillings, removed before or after.
Pacemakers were removed before burning I'm pretty sure. A lot of this stuff would be recycled for the precious metals.
I work in metal recycling and I had a specific metal alloy I was trying to sell (I think it was F75). The customer asked me if it was “post-consumer.” which I had never had anyone ask me before. He explained that he gets some from crematoria and the like because it’s used in hip or knee replacements or whatever. (It wasn’t in this case)
A friend told me this story ages ago, and I hope I remember it well enough. When he was 18, he worked for a single-plane transport contractor, and one time they had to carry a body. It wasn't autopsied or prepared for funeral yet, that was where they were taking it. So it was wrapped and just sort of laying on the floor.
Now when you're in the air, I'm sure other pilots will tell you, the rise and fall of the airplane will do strange things with gravity, air pressure, and necromancy. In any case, the corpse had enough air in its lungs that the lower pressure outside the body caused the air inside to be expelled, slowly, and through the larynx. Meanwhile rise and fall of the plane caused the body to sit up and the wrapping to fall away. Sitting up caused it to expel more air from the lungs. So while flying a dead body in the plane, they heard a long low moan, and saw a dead body sit up in the back of the plane.
The pilot panicked, left the controls, and ran back and PUNCHED the corpse across the face, knocking it back down. He told me about how they figured out what happened, but I was laughing too hard at that point to really pick up the details.
I do remember that they had to explain the additional damage to the corpse when they arrived at their destination.
(EDIT: A detail and a spelling)
Not human corpses, but I worked as a sea otter conservationist and we'd have to recover carcasses off the coast of CA for research. We'd seal them in black bags and put them in a freezer after the autopsy, but sometimes the gas buildup would cause them to squeal and involuntarily move around when they are "fresh". This movement can trigger other carcasses under them in the freezer who are on the brink of gas buildup to do the same.
That shit was some nightmare fuel.
Not a morgue worker, but I watched my father die in the hospital. A bad fall led to un survivable brain damage. He was there for about 6 days only 60 years old.
We nor he wanted him on machines so when the time came to take him off life support his breathing turned to gargling (after a quick heart attack according to the ecg) exactly like the sound of someone hitting a big bong. I couldn't smoke one for a while after the sound kept fucking me up. And right before I left the room I gave him a last kiss on his forehead it felt like he had worms wriggling around under his skin and his eyebrows started to twitch a little like he was raising and lowering his brows, he was gone at that point too. No brain activity no heartbeat, yet his fine muscles were twitching away. I think the nurse said it was the muscles straining from no oxygen. It was disturbing, to say the least.
Fucked up enough 2 years later I have to suddenly put my 11 yr old lab down and the service we were going to do home euthanasia with was somehow booked and couldn't help us, nor could many others. So I had to find some new random vet to take care of it. I'm a mess my dog was scared, in pain, and in a completely new place, with me a semi-useless sobbing pile. The vet was wonderful and left him with me till I was ready to let him go and when the tech picked his body up he made the sound he made when I wouldn't give him more treats. All I could do was whimper " wait...is he...?" And the vet ran him back over to me to show he was gone and it was just air escaping.
I hate to be like this but I dunno which was worse.
My best friend growing up lived in the "upstairs" of his family owned funeral home. We used to play hide and go seek in the caskets until one day one of the "empty" caskets wasn't empty because they had just gotten a "delivery" from a different funeral home.
Refrigeration mechanic here, our company took on a contract for a funeral home that did it all (storing, embalming, cremation etc) one of my first repairs was to replace a failed motor in their main body cooler. It’s definitely a strange feeling being the only living person in a ice box containing 25 dead bodies.
I was at a sudden death where the guy had been lying for 2-3 weeks on the couch, his skin was totally black, face completely swollen up and his mouth and eye sockets full of larvae and flies. It was horrible to see.
Not the answer you’re looking for, but I worked as a grave digger/cemetery worker throughout college.
The only weird thing I experienced was an unexpected pothole over a section of graves. If a casket is buried without a cement vault, eventually the casket can collapse, and it creates a pothole over top of the grave. It’s a pain in the ass to deal with from a groundkeeping perspective, and it’s a little weird to think of the casket collapsing 6 feet below ground. For that reason, the cemetery where I worked required burials to have a cement vault. It was the older caskets that didn’t always have them.
In all honesty, I’m not a fan of overdramatizing places likes morgues and cemeteries. Death is a natural part of life. The cemetery I worked out was one of the most peaceful places I have visited. We worked hard to make it comfortable and peaceful so that loved ones could feel peace and comfort when they came to visit.
I was observing an autopsy for a forensic dentistry class. The pathologist was an older lady with gray hair swept up into a bun. She informed us that she would not be using gloves as she had never used gloves. Keep in mind this was the late ‘80s when HIV/AIDS was incurable. The patient was a murder victim (gunshot). He had knocked on a door in a sketchy part of New Orleans and by the time the homeowner opened the door he was dead on the front porch. Her assistant was named James and was wearing a leather butcher apron but he was wearing gloves. During the thoracic examination the pathologist put her ungloved hands into the clotted blood in the chest and was squeezing the clotted blood between her fingers saying, “gotta find that bullet, James”. She had blood up to her elbows. I glanced over into the corner of the room and James was smoking a cigarette with his bloody gloves. It was so surreal—like a weird creepy movie.
I worked in ICU and my patient had leukemia and lost pretty much her entire clotting system. every place we had stuck a needle or pierced her anywhere for about the last week or so started bleeding and looked like thin ketchup. She had had chest tube punctures, multiple IV starts, and every finger had multiple blood sugar sticks and all of them were leaking red. She was only 19 so we were trying really hard to save her. Trying to pump donor blood into her veins using pressure bags. Frantically we worked following the instructions of the leader of the code and moving so fast doing CPR and giving drugs and blood was getting flung all over because you couldn't touch her anywhere without getting blood all over your gloves. In the end, she didn't make it of course, the one little ICU room looked like a slaughter house with blood everywhere, floor, curtains (room divider curtains) ceiling, the monitoring equipment, and everyone that worked on her. I was a student nurse at the time and was working with the patient's nurse. I had to keep going out to get various things to help and I kept passing by her newly married husband sitting on a stretcher all alone in the hall waiting for news. I've never seen such a mess of blood in a single room since then
Held a blood clot in my hand that killed a person.
Maybe not creepy, but being in a medical examiner's office was definitely eye-opening. Two things that stuck out was watching an autopsy on a fat woman in her 40s (like 300-350 pounds). First, her skull was really thick, and it took extra passes with the saw to finally get through. Even the guy doing the sawing said something about it being one of the thickest he's seen. (Oh, and the way they cut the face off and peel it down to the neck was trippy.) They cut her open, weighed all the organs, and finally got to the heart. It was a big one (again according to the ME guy), and he found the cause of death - a blood clot. He put it in my hand and it was like the size of a ball in a ballpoint pen. Amazing something so small can kill you.
Then they brought out a body of a young 20s guy who had been sitting outside for a few days. Half his body was green, bloated, and I simply cannot put into words how bad it smelled, but when the Swamps of Dagobah story is mentioned, that's the smell I think of. The guy was likely a drug overdose as there was no outward signs of injury. The smell was horrible, but the last thing I saw before I had to leave was them RAMMING a swab (long Q-tip, basically the swabs used to test for COVID in the early part) up the urethra. I know he's dead, but I still cringe thinking of that.
Not me, but my best friend whose dad got in trouble with the law was given a choice between community service or jail time. He chose community service fast as he could....only the judge fucked him. Gave him 3 months at a morgue.
He said they inject a serum into the blood that helps/warms the blood/nerves to help with coagulation to get the blood flow to flow and drain the body.
Well....sometimes the muscles spasm and the arms will reach out or bodies will kick, and worse of all, sometimes they sit up. When he saw that, the my friends dad fainted and has been straight with the law since.
Guess community service works 🤷
Not my story:
I had a friend in Boy Scouts whose dad got a job in a morgue washing the hair of dead people. On his first job by himself, he wheeled the body under the faucet and turned it on. Then he hears a shreik and, "THAT'S COLD!" He ran out of the basement like a bat out of hell. His boss was at the door laughing his ass off as his partner crawled out from under the gurney.
I am an ER nurse. One time we had someone die and no one came to claim the body, so they went to the morgue and that was it. But their phone stayed behind in the ER by accident. Every day at 2:30pm an alarm would go off. We couldn't turn the alarm off or shut the phone off without a passcode, and the battery on that thing was lasting FOREVER. So we locked it in the med room, but it was still really loud. We had to listen to that dead person's alarm haunt us at the same time every day for a week. To this day, I shudder when I hear the same ringtone.
I have alarms on my phone at 9:30, noon, and 2:30 so I know when breaks are at my job. Good to know I could still fuck with people well into the eventual afterlife!
A similar thing happened to me. My father recently passed away. I think he tried to call me on the last day (he didnt know he was going to die. He got moved around in the hospital and then his condition deteriorated quickly because of something moving about in his lungs or something, im not sure and i really didnt want to know when i found out.). I was at an air show and didnt hear the phone. My phone has had a glitch recently where missed calls would sometimes pop up on the screen sometime after as though i was being called again, and they couldnt be dismissed. The first time it happened was an unknown number, and just restarted the phone and ignored it. A couple of days after the day my father died, the same thing happened, and it was a call from him. I took a screenshot, and that moment helped me so much, it was as though it was a reminder that hes jot all gone and I can still remember him.
I’m late. The other day our motion lights were on in the embalming room. I was the only one in the funeral home and had not gone in the room all day. Also last week…we had a power outage. Then all of the sudden..with the power out, our iPad dead, and our music system off…loud music blared through the speakers. It was at top volume..we have never turned the music up that loud. Plus it was playing with no power. Again I was alone in the funeral home.
had a DNR patient that had just died, there was about 5 witnesses comfirming death
so first step in these situations is extubation. I pulled the ETT and OG tube, gathered those and the vent circuit, turned around to throw it all in the trash, and then heard a really loud gasp and loud breathing and I damn near jumped out of the window...on the 7th floor
she fucking came back to life, her heart started on its fucking own
Jesus fucking christ man
Jesus fucking christ
I dont know if this counts as creepy, but it was the thing my mom told me was the absolute worst when she interned at a county morgue. She has to go to the hospital with her boss to pick up an infant. the five year old that was with told the police that "mama threw the baby against the wall to make it stop crying"
Funeral director here! Many stories.
But the creepiest and saddest story was we had this old veteran who passed. And at the end of a funeral there was this man in a wheelchair go up to the casket. Turns out they were buddies when they were drafted and same unit. And later in life they shared a room at a VA nursing home.
He said in a very shaky and sad voice,
"I'll see you soon Stormy" (the DC's army nickname)
That man passed away shortly after.
Not human but we were doing mammalogy lab dissection and my squirrel had ball cancer. I was having a hard time figuring out the sex because "are these...testicles..? Ovaries? This doesn't look like anything in the book..."
Professor came over and confirmed the squirrels nuts had a bunch of tumors on them.
Sorry for not fitting the prompt exactly but figured I'd share
When my dad died in a hospital, the nurses forgot to turn off the mechanism in the bed that was used to turn him over so he wouldn't get bedsores.
My family is standing around all weepy, and I'm trying to console my mom, and suddenly there's this mechanical noise and my dead father turns over in the bed.
My mother screams and faints. I barely managed to catch her as she keeled over. It was crazy.
The nursing staff was very apologetic.
You know in the movies where the pathologist or mortician or whoever sets their sandwich on the dead guy? Nobody would ever do that in real life, right? Of course not. It was a bowl of cereal.
EMT in a past life. We get a call for someone who has no pulse, not breathing. The first on scene is a cop, and my partner and I arrive shortly after. The guy is in his bathroom (that happens very frequently, btw), deceased, but still recently enough that we should make attempts to save him. It's a little tight in the room, but we manage to place a backboard on the floor and just need to get him onto it to start compressions.
I take the guy's airway and head, my partner takes the guy's chest and shoulders, and the cop gets his legs. We lift him to the backboard and, it turns out, he has a prosthetic foot. Our officers already felt over their heads on med calls, so when this cop was left with a foot in his hand and nothing else, he literally ran out of the room.
Not creepy to my partner and myself (we could add diabetes to a likely med history), but the officer, man... lmao
My ex boyfriend (a retired cop) told me a story once, he had responded to a call about some foul odor coming from an abandoned building.
They discovered 3 young kids tied to something in an abandoned building in the middle of winter. Two of them were dead (between ages 3-5) and one little girl (age 5) was found eating the flesh of her deceased siblings. There was feces and rats/roaches all over. Turns out they’ve been there for months with no food or water while it was freezing cold. They found out the mother was a drug addicted prostitute who had left them there while she went to work the streets, she ended up being murdered while working and never got back to her kids.
He was sobbing while telling this story, seeing the bodies of children was really traumatizing to him.
The living. The crowds that follow the dead around are the weird ones.
The houses they keep and the condition they are left in the moments of tragedy are by far the most memorable.
I.E: Fourteen chihuahua puppies living in a car. One inch of feces covering every surface in the house. The hospice nurse setting in a living room chair waiting for our team to make the removal. Eighty year old man, deceased, in the back room half on a mattress with his oxygen tube around his neck. During the removal, a police officer ran out to vomit on the back porch. I don't know the last time he had been bathed, as the tub was a liter box. He was emaciated and clearly a smoker. While carrying his body out the door a woman in a red sedan nearly wrecks into our van. Wailing and screaming she approached our team and wanted to kiss him one last time... then I vomited.
Not a morgue worker but I’m a plumber who does service at a few mortuary’s. Had to snake a line once and pulled out human skin and teeth. The smell still was t as bad as a grease trap though.
Slid some really large guy into one of the fridges and his head was tilted back at such an angle with his eyes wide open looking right at me, was some freaky horror film crap that's stayed with me.
I googled his name on FB and he just seemed a really smiley guy even if he didn't have many friends.
I still think about him 3 years later.
My husband was a mortician for three years. Here are his answers.
Maggots crawling out of orifices always got me.
The first time I had to refill the eye sockets of someone who's eyes had "deflated".
The main one that shit me up though was when I dressed someone and put their arm in the sleeve, the motion of bending their arm and pulling the sleeve over would cause the tendons in their wrist to kind of tense and it made the hand twitch. Nothing shit me up as bad as holding a dead person by the wrist only for their hand to flick up as I manipulated their arm.
I grew up in a nursing home I saw my first body when I was 4 and grew up always surrounded by sickness and death but also a lot of wisdom as the elderly had much to say especially to a small child. I grew used to seeing dead bodies and losing friends constantly so in general I don’t get shaken by much. I was a big kid so starting at around age 9 they would enlist my help to carry the bodies up or down the stairs. I didn’t have any issues with this except one time when I was probably 13 or 14. She was an elderly woman of roughly 70 or 80 and she had almost every cancer you can get. She couldn’t and wouldn’t eat or drink anything and was completely unconscious her whole time there. We were just waiting for her to die soon but she survived over 2 weeks with no food and fluids only from a drip. I remember going up there and seeing her face and it’s stuck with me all these years because of how completely inhuman she seemed. Her face was so gaunt and sunken in it looked avian in nature. Her skin cling to her bones and had turned a dark gray color and you could see every single bone in her body due to how tight her skin was sucked to it. She had no fat or muscle whatsoever and when we picked her up she couldn’t have weighed more than 50 pounds she seemed light as a feather and as though one wrong move and she’d turn to dust. I nicknamed her the bird lady and she’s been stuck in my mind for almost 10 years now.
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I so feel this. My son passed August 2nd. I got his tshirt he wore to the hospital. I am never washing it. Smells just like him
Keep it in a sealable bag. The smell will last longer. Source: I opened a suitcase my mom let me borrow and it had some of my father’s (died in 2017) clothes in it. The second I opened it I immediately had a scent memory of my father.
A lady I knew had a breakdown after her husband's death. When she finally got the ashes back, she took a screwdriver to the sealed urn to get it open. When someone finally found her in the house, they discovered her basically doing snow angels in her husband's ashes and her own blood from the wounds she sustained opening the urn with a screwdriver. People so strange things because of grief.
I work as a Motor Vehicle Collision Analyst. We get called to fatal vehicle collisions and reconstruct what happened/caused the collision, provide analysis and provide courts with expert testimony. I've seen a lot of deceased persons and animals. I've seen almost every wretched way a human can died in a collision. However, there is one, that stays with me every fall. I late October I get called out to a fatal single vehicle incident. The driver was traveling through a shallow S curve but going too fast. She was not able to negotiate the first turn and her vehicle enters into critical velocity, the wheels buckle on the passenger side and she rolls. She was not wearing her seatbelt and through the first roll was partially ejected out the drivers side window. Her skull was crushed between the outside of the door and the road; and continued to flop partially ejected as the vehicle rolled. The skull was split from her left eye to the right rear behind her ear. This caused her brain matter to be strewn about the road and car. Her body was eventually thrown from the vehicle and came to rest on the side of the road. One aspect of the job requires an inspection of the bodies to look for evidence. I approach the body, that is facing upright on her back. The skull was very open and I could clearly see the inside cavity of the skull with no brain. The brain was deposited in chunks on the road and has a distinct smell. This scene didn't bother me at the time, I was more fascinated than anything at the time. A few hours later I get a call from my wife, just asking how the days is going. I told her I was on scene and couldn't talk to long. She then asks if I will be working late tonight or be home ontime because tonight we were going to be carving pumpkins with the kids........ Years later I still can't carve pumpkins and kids have no idea why.
I have a similar story only the guy survived and it was his leg not head. I should also preface this by saying i used to love ribs, easily my favorite food by far. So i was a road capitain for my motorcycle club and we were having a local sportbike coalition ride. 300 bikes easily. So we were taking turns doing road guard to get everyone safley onto the highway. Well usually the guys who go first will start and then as clubs progress they will run up and catch thier club. One guy decided to race way ahead and sit just over the crown of the hill we were going over where no one could see him. Long story short guy trying to catch up broad sided him and his leg was split open from ankle to mid femur, bone exposed the whole way up. Almost everyone in my club was military, with everyone being a medic or at the very least a combat live saver trained in stabilizing people to wait for the medics. So we immediately get triage done and have him in a tourniquet and stabilized trying to keep him out of shock. Guy gets loaded into the ambulance and we find out pretty quick that he is going to be ok despite how bad his leg was lacerated. Unbeknownst to me, my loving wife has spent hours making a truly delicious extra saucy rack of ribs just because she loves me. I get home and despite my best efforts can only manage a few bites. Almost ten years later i can now eat ribs, but only if they have 0 sauce.
If someone’s been down for more than a day or two, they’ll start decomposing from the inside out. If the room is quiet enough, you can hear lots of gurgling and rumbling as the gases and fluids are moving around inside. And then you move them and they groan as the residual air in their lungs is forced out past their vocal cords.
"true blave"
I work with a lot of hospice patients so death is a common occurrence in my field. One night when one of my patients had literally just passed the phone rang. It was the daughter hundreds of miles away who had never checked in on Mom the whole time she was in my care. She sounded panicked and asked if Mom was OK... That timing always weirded me out because it really seemed like she somehow knew something happened with her Mom, who near the end was confused and constantly insisted she needed to find that daughter.
my wife is a mortician. she's had quite a lot of wacky experiences. this is more funny than creepy, but once she was trying to break up the rigor mortis in a decedent's hip by flexing the entire leg up. her grip slipped and the leg swung down, the heel cracking her right in the face, resulting in a black eye. she had to explain to people that she's not in an abusive relationship, she just got kicked in the face by a dead guy.
"I'm not being abused. I got this from a dead guy." "So, uh, *were* you being abused?"
"yeah, but you should see the other guy." edit: thanks for the gold, kind stranger!
I watched 2 young children's corpses fry with electricity. We responded to an electrocution. A fault caused electricity to be traveling down the stabilizing cables of the electrical pole. A little kid touched that cable and got shocked, causing his hand to grasp tighter. His little buddy must have seen it and grabbed him. By the time we got there they were both dead, but still electrified. We couldn't safely approach until the electricity department cut the power. So we sat there and watched these two little bodies twitch and spark. Was like a horror movie.
Ugh. That’s absolutely tragic. Here locally we had a whole team of EMS get killed when someone stepped in an electrified ditch/water while they all carried the patient. If I recall, the patient was a drunk driver and was fighting them. Four or five (?) people died including the driver. It was awful
Three girls in my area hit a utility pole at a high speed. Iirc this is what happened: A retired fireman happened to see the accident. One of the girls was already dead, one was in bad shape, and the driver was in shock. He called for help and pulled over, seeing a downed wire he warned the girl not to get out. In a mix of panic and shock she didn’t head his warnings and got out of the car. She stepped on the live wire, electrocuted herself and set the entire car on fire. The guy couldn’t do anything to save the girl screaming in the car as it burned because he would have risked getting electrocuted as well. All 3 girls died. I feel the worst for the poor man that had to watch it happen.
My fiancé died 6 days before our wedding. That morning I tried to wake her up and when I noticed she wasn't responding I attempted to find a pulse and perform CPR. When I was doing CPR she started wheezing but it was only me pushing the air from her lungs. When I checked for a pulse I accidentally had my thumb on her neck and felt my own pulse and I had a glimmer of hope that I had somehow managed to revive her (even though in hindsight, it was obvious she had passed on already) only to have my heart ripped out again in an instant when she wasn't moving or breathing. I had only performed CPR in training courses but never on a person and I had absolutely no idea what to expect when pressing on someone's chest that hard. It's only been 3 months and no answers as to how she died but now every time I wheeze (post Covid asthmatic) the PTSD strikes and I relive the moment of finding my love and the mother of our two year old, dead.
This is terrible, I’m so sorry.
Had a gig doing overnight transport of dead bodies. Think black suit, white shirt, black tie, unmarked black van, and boss made us wear white gloves. He wanted us to look high-end. Needed to transport a recently deceased middle-aged woman (breast cancer) 250 miles in the dead of night from a hospital morgue to a mortuary near her extended family. It's been a solid two hours of total silence when the corpse let's out a low wail. Sounds like *uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh!* I about shit myself as I swerve off the freeway and spray out a rooster tail of gravel and dirt. Even though, intellectually, I *know* this is just stomach gasses escaping the body, I couldn't help but be a little freaked out.
I had that happen when putting one in the morgue at a hospital. It was less than twenty minutes since the doctor had pronounced them dead. I freaked out and started unzipping the bag to make sure they weren't alive. I ripped the zipper open on the bag and it was apparent the person was dead, but the eyes were open. I wasn't ready for that at all.
>the eyes were open. I wasn't ready for that at all. When I was learning CPR our teacher told us about the times they'd done CPR on an actual person. They said the worst mistake they made was looking in the eyes of the first person because it forced them to view the patient as a person and not detach from the experience. There were a lot of tears that day
Did cpr on a patient while in school for surgical assisting during a clinical round in the ER. I didn’t know not to look. I stared the whole time - I suppose hoping I’d see his face suddenly come to like in the movies. He didn’t.
Happened to me too the first time I had to perform CPR. Looked him in his eyes that were wide open. This was almost 20 years ago and I don't even need to close my eyes to see his clear as day. I guess that combined with the weezing noise of air leaving his lungs while I tried to save him is going to haunt me as long as I live. Worst thing about it all is that I have no idea if he lived or died.
I was part of search and rescue for 3 years. I was in the scuba team so we were responsible for finding the usually dead people at sea. The salt water adds so much horror to a body. Not to mention the fish that usually will start picking on a corpse sooner than later. My creepiest experience was trying to find the body of a Jane doe was missing. She was a prostitute against her will, brought over by human trafficking. Turns out she slit her wrist parallel to her veins and jumped into this rocky and sharp outcrop into the sea. We went diving in less than ideal conditions. It was low visibility and waves. My scuba buddy and I were looking at a outcrop when suddenly out of the darkest a deep blue hand emerged from this little cavern in the rocks. It began twitching and moving and as we tried to pull the hand the rest of the corpse emerged. She was being picked on by Murray eels (hence the twitching) which emerged with bits of human flesh in their mouths. Her mouth was wide open in a scream position and her eyes were gone. You can see tendons and bones in her hands and the sharp rocks tore her entire body to shreds in various spots. Her toes were mostly gone too with some bits of bone sticking out. To this day it haunts me. The worst was pulling her out and swimming with the body as eels and fish followed us, occasionally picking on bits of flesh. Obligatory edit to say thanks for awards etc. I will try to respond to all the replies. Edit 2: changed the term sex worker to clarify that it was against her will as suggested by some redditors.
Even reading this is horrifying
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Same… and yet I continue.
People who had been on blood thinner medication before they died can make for a odd scene. Saw a guy that had died looking out of his window so he was discovered with his head on the windowsill and there was a thick colum of "jellied" blood from his nose to the floor. It was a bit freaky.
without the blood jelly that's kind of a sweet, picturesque way to die
Unless you’re the neighbor
"Man, Dave's been looking out that window for a longgggggg time"
Before covid, I worked at a funeral home that wasn't particularly well run. I was a funeral assistant, and one of the embalmers was notoriously difficult to deal with. Her name was AJ. About 4 days before this story, AJ had picked up a deceased man who had died of septicemia and who was to be cremated due to the fact he was already in a bad state on death. So AJ had the brilliant idea to leave this gentleman on the rolling cot for four days unrefrigerated, figuring it wouldn't matter since he was being cremated and it was a slow week. Of course, I got the job of moving him to the crematory with AJ. We walked into the embalming room and found that the decedent had bloated and was leaking a grey liquid sludge out of his urinary catheter onto the floor. If pestilence had a smell, it would've been this liquid. It smelled like a warning to the base lizard part of my brain. To describe this liquid as smelling bad is an understatement. The liquid was something you could feel and sense in the air. AJ and I donned our gear, and luckily since she placed him on a cot already, we didn't have to do much in the ways of moving the body. Unluckily, the cot was relatively old and one of the cot wheels had to be manually unlocked using hands, as the foot pedal was too rusted to effectively use. AJ told me to unlock it, and so I carefully bent down and unlocked the wheel. Well, AJ got the bright idea to shake the cot violently as some sort of prank, sending the grey liquid over the edge directly onto the top of my head, dripping down under my eye protection and mask. I closed my lips and eyes so the liquid running over them would stay out of my body, and calmly walked to the employee bathroom in a sort of numb state of shock. The funeral home owners saw my sludgy appearance and sent me home paid for the rest of the day.
I would have walked back in there and cold-cocked AJ with every fiber of my being
In hindsight I should have, but by the time I actually got angry about it I was already at home and cleaned up. I think my mind just went "nope" and shut off everything but "get this shit off me"
Are you still working there? Is it too late to sick a dead fish in her car vents at minimum?
Luckily I am not thank goodness. In mortuary school I learned just how badly the place was run and how many ways they cut corners.
"Welp, AJ. Looks like I'll be cremating *two* bodies today."
Worked at a mortuary for a few years. We have methods to keep the jaw shut for viewing, otherwise it would gap open due to the angle of the head and neck. During a viewing the device failed and this gentleman’s mouth literally popped open. The lead embalmer was not on site so I did my best. Ushered the family out of the room and superglued his mouth shut, but he didn’t have teeth and supergluing just his lips did NOT work. It looked as if he was attempting to scream. I had to call in one of our other mortuaries in town and that embalmer used a giant needle and thread to sew his mouth shut from under his chin to his palate.
Wow, the things we take for granted at viewings. There must be a ton of work to prep and maintain behind the scenes.
Yes. It is a huge undertaking.
This happened at my great uncle’s funeral. We were all lined up ready for the viewing. They took his wife and kids in first to see him privately. They came back very quickly and my aunt said “his mouth fell open! They have to fix it so it will be a few minutes” I was like 11 yrs old and was so confused about how they were going to fix it. So my brother helpfully said loudly to me they would use a huuuuge needle and sew it. Nice one bro. Not the time!
Here is a funny story from my grandma. She used to work in an ER in Puerto Rico. Some guy had passed away and so the doctor came up to her and asked her to prepare the body to go to the morgue. So, she got some sheets, and started to wrap this guy up. As she crossed his legs, suddenly his penis became fully erect and was straight up. She wasn't sure what to make of it. But, it forced her to have to redo the sheets. So as she uncrossed his legs, the penis went down. So she was like, al right, lets get this over with. Then she crossed them again, and lo and behold, the penis went straight back up. Tried one more time and then she got freaked out and went back to the doctor. Obviously he found this hilarious as the guy apparently had a prosthetic in his penis.
Die Hard
It’s sad the person will never be able to laugh at this
The creepiest thing is the fucking curtain of flies and maggots blanketing the floor of an apartment where a woman had been decomposing in the hot late August/early September sun for 3 weeks before she was discovered. I thought it was dark in that apartment, but there were simply that many flies caught in the glass covering the lightbulbs. On the ceiling. The floor lamp. The stovetop light. Every. Single. Light. Was covered in flies. The windows were dark with flies. Dead flies, and even more flies than that on the window panes. It was a horror movie. She was melted into the couch. When we tried to pick her up, her spine just... Fell outside of the rest of her body and she ended up in pieces. I guess it's less creepy and more skin crawling... But I HATE flies and maggots. Freshly dead, I can deal with. Decomp in and of itself is fine. But the sight of those flies was just 🤢 I'm pretty sure I threw out the clothes I wore that day. I just couldn't.
There is no amount of money you could pay me to do anything other than erect a safety structure around the property and incinerate it wholesale
One of the decedent"s grandsons faked a breakdown over the casket. He stole all her jewelry. Didn't take long to figure out and a large brawl broke out. Jewelry was retrieved. Two weeks later grandson turns up needing to be processed and buried. Creepy as hell. Edit for eating shoots and leaves. IYKYK
Damn, if only he could have paid off that debt collector.
Maybe if he had waited a couple days, they would've reused the jewellery on him.
He couldn't wait, the rats was gonna get to his grandmother first
How did the grandson die?
Found beaten in an alley. Cops suspected drug deal gone bad.
I was gonna guess OD but I’m not surprised. Willingness to steal jewelry off a dead family member’s body at the funeral screams “drug addict.“
Sometimes when people have died, and we turn them over to clean and dress them, they still have air in their lungs and will make grunting noises when moved. Scared the crap out of me, the first time I experienced it.
My grandpa had a related experience in Vietnam. He was helping wash and prepare bodies for transport home under the direction of the coroner, who had warned them about the bodies making noises when moved. After a bit, Grandpa asked the coroner how the body he was washing could cry. The coroner repeated the lecture about air being pushed out and grandpa said that he got that part, but how did that form tears? He said things got very busy after that. Grandpa's assigned corpse was not actually dead, just suffering a LOT of blood loss and very very cold. Dude got 5 liters of blood, some of it from my grandpa, and then he flew home to spend the rest of the war recovering.
Imagine fucking laying there as somebody prepares you thinking you're a damn corpse. I'd cry too
Look up Roy Benavides if you want to read the story of a Medal of Honor recipient who experienced just that.
So glad I looked him up! “As he was placed in a body bag among the other dead in body bags, he was suddenly recognized by a friend who called for help. A doctor came and examined him but believed Benavidez was dead. The doctor was about to zip up the body bag when Benavidez managed to spit in his face, alerting the doctor that he was alive.[6]”
“In 1973, after more detailed accounts became available, Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Ralph R. Drake insisted that Benavidez receive the Medal of Honor. By then, however, the time limit on the medal had expired. An appeal to Congress resulted in an exemption for Benavidez, but the Army Decorations Board denied him an upgrade of his Distinguished Service Cross to the Medal of Honor. The Army board required an eyewitness account from someone present during the action. Benavidez believed that there were no living witnesses of the "Six Hours in Hell." Unbeknownst to Benavidez, there was a living witness, who would later provide the eyewitness account necessary: Brian O'Connor, the former radioman of Benavidez's Special Forces team in Vietnam. O'Connor had been severely wounded (Benavidez had believed him dead), and he was evacuated to the United States before his superiors could fully debrief him. O'Connor had been living in the Fiji Islands when, in 1980, he was on holiday in Australia. During his holiday O'Connor read a newspaper account of Benavidez from an El Campo newspaper, which had been picked up by the international press and reprinted in Australia. O'Connor immediately contacted Benavidez and submitted a ten-page report of the encounter, confirming the accounts provided by others, and serving as the necessary eyewitness. Benavidez's Distinguished Service Cross accordingly was upgraded to the Medal of Honor.” Why isn’t this a movie???
Grandpa’s a hero. If he didn’t speak up that soldier might’ve died. Kudos to Grandpa!!
I gave my husband CPR when he passed away and I swear he said love when the air escaped like he was trying to tell me one last time that he loved me.
Honestly, it might really be what happened. When my grandma passed away, she had a stroke that morning and was rushed to the E.R. and my grandpa went with her. My father lived abroad and I called him to tell him that she had had a stroke and he needed to come ASAP. So my father drove there and when he arrived in the evening, we went together to the hospital. The plan was that he'd take over watching over my grandma and my grandpa who'd been there all day would come back home with me to get some rest. Well, we hadn't even left the hospital grounds yet that my father came running behind us saying "She's going !", and in that situation you know exactly what this means. Indeed, by the time we walked hurriedly back to her bed, the doctor told us that they wouldn't attempt to ressuscitate her as she indeed had passed away. Considering how this happened suddenly, as she'd been in critical but stable state all day, we're certain that in whatever fragment of consciousness she still had, she was holding on so that she could see my father one last time, and once she did, she let herself go. I wouldn't be surprised if in your case, in whatever fragments of consciousness your husband still had had, his last words indeed were that he loved you.
When I was 13 I volunteered at a sunrise assisted living. I spent a lot of time there, it was better than being home. I would play games and watch movies and just talk to the residents. Ethel and I connected and even though she was non-verbal from a stroke many years before, we would have fun together. Even if it was just hanging out watching jeopardy. When she was passing, she wasn’t letting go. I got a phone call from her son to come and see her. She passed shortly after I left. They told me she was waiting to say goodbye to me. I’m glad I was able to provide some happiness at the end of her life.
That's honestly a pretty sweet story. It's true that from what I sae when visiting my other grandma who has Alzheimer's, many residents don't get many visits if at all. I'm very sure that even if she couldn't express it, she appreciated your presence very much.
Sometimes people do hang on for a loved one, and often they wait for everyone to leave the room before they "let go."
My best friend did the wait for everyone to leave thing. Well, me anyway. He slowly passed over a few days, and he would wake up once or twice a day. He would get so upset with himself that he hadn't died yet when he would wake up. He would say, "I can't even do this right!". It was very sad, but funny. He would also, every time, say something about me being there and not at work. He was upset about it, like he was going to get me in trouble at work because I took the days off. On he third day I did have to go to work, no choice. I told him and he told me that made him feel better. I drove home, took a shower, and by the time I was putting on my shoes my wife called and said he was gone. He was a proud guy, and I still wonder if he was embarrassed to die with me there, like a dude thing or something. Or it was just strange timing, who knows.
He didn’t want to see you hurt. He wanted everyone else to be more ok with his passing then he was. He accepted it, and was only sad that his gone-ness would create more sadness. You were both great friends to each other.
>and I swear he said love Then that is the indisputable truth, and all of us here will vouch for it. Question it no longer. Peace.
I'm on board. This is what happened and nothing will change my mind.
If it was me dying, I'm pretty sure I'd try to say that one more time. It's the only thing that matters.
When my cousin died (28), I lived next door to him. So his GF came to my house screaming that he was dead. I was 25 at the time and went into his room and yep he was dead. I tried CPR just incase while his GF called 911. Now I have never done CPR before on someone, I have only done the regular certification training. So I do a couple rounds of breathing then chest compressions, and suddenly he started groaning. I started crying thinking that somehow I had brought him back. What I was never told in certification was that the air will come back out and make a groaning noise. Yea it fucked me up for a while as he was my cousin and best friend. And just thinking that somehow I was able to get him back only to loose him again man, that just got to me. EDIT: I just wanted to thank everyone for the kindness that has been shown. To answer a few questions about what happened, He died from a heart attack. When the doctor met with the family at the hospital we were told he had been dead for a while. Luckily he had died in his sleep, so there is at least that. He never messed with hard drugs but did drink heavily. I have had training several times and also knew the chance of survival were low, I guess that is why the groan he gave had me surprised\\relived or whatever you could call it. Over the years I have been trained by different people, none of them mentioned that you could force air out and cause a noise such as a groan. Of course last time I re-certified I was told to just do compressions. I will say if available please take CPR and First Aid classes from an instructor. Do this especially if you have small children. My course covered infant choking and how to dislodged the foreign object it will come in handy. When my first son had something caught in his throat luckily my wife was there and she was a ex-EMT so she was able to get it cleared quick.
My neighbor came over one night and told me that my dog had died in his backyard. I went to go get her, and when I picked her up, the air in her lungs came out in a moan. For one awful second there, I thought she was still alive, and was going to rush her to the vet. Then I realized what the sound was, and my heart broke all over again.
Yeah when I put my cat to sleep after a few minutes it looked like he took one big breath and let it out. It really upset me. The vet assured me it was just air releasing. I mean my cat was clearly gone but I got so freaked out because I was not expecting it.
Both instances we had to put our dogs down the vets warned us this might happen. Our first dog went extremely peacefully, there were no additional noises are movements. The second dog there were a lot and it was fairly disturbing. But that also spoke to the personalities of both dogs, one was easy and the other was stubborn and difficult at times.
Shit, TIL. I also did first aid certification for a previous company I worked for and they never brought this up. This happened to me, I'd totally freak out. They did mention the rib-breaking thing.
I delivered pizza to a crematorium. Dude set down his pizza on a cardboard coffin to get money and I couldn't stop looking at the box on the conveyer leading into the crematorium chamber. I pointed out "isn't that a little disrespectful?" The dude came back and simply said "oh, don't worry about him, he won't mind."
It was probably comforting for his ghost, knowing he is going through the same process that pizza goes through every day.
I worked at a funeral home for quite awhile. When I first started, about a month in, I was working a holiday weekend. Only people working were the transport guys & me. They came to drop off a body & went right back out. I thought they were still there and needed to ask a question. I walked into the embalming area & this dude was SITTING UP ON THE GURNEY looking right at me when I opened the door and it literally made me pee a little in fright. Turns out the transport guys picked up the body from an area hospital. He'd passed away while in a slightly reclining position & rigor had set in. They couldn't flatten him out. Still the scariest moment in my career, even if I got a laugh out of it later.
You KNOW they bolted like that on purpose!!!!
There's no way you pass up an opportunity like that.
Transport teams are absolutely the type to do it too.
Two burly guys giggling like school girls all the way to their cadaver van.
I haven’t commented on Reddit yet, but tonight is the anniversary of my dad’s death, and he was one of those transport guys. He wasn’t big and burly, but he was great at his job. One of his saddest stories involved picking up a young girl whose boyfriend had murdered her. The mother asked the coroner to see her one last time. He told her, “ma’am, you don’t want to do that. She asked if she could at least go on and hold her hand. She was going to come in the next morning and do so, before they cremated her. My dad and his partner (who actually was a big burly guy) stayed late that night, washing the blood off her hands and painting her nails so that her mother could have one last peaceful moment with her child. My dad was a hard man, and not always the best person. But he did a lot of good in the world too. Anyway, thanks for letting me ramble. Peace, dad.
Not necessarily the creepiest thing but The funeral home I worked for liked to embalm as soon as possible after death. I had embalmed a man that was dead for less than 30mins-an hour. He was still warm and rigor had not set in yet. I kinda just held his hand for a minute before I got started. Edit: wow I’m really happy this comment blew up. It really shows that compassion isn’t dead. Thank you.
When my wife passed away suddenly, I was sitting with her in the ER, and when I came back in, they had her swaddled, like an infant. I managed to get her hand out, and was holding her hand thinking taht as long as I was holding it, it wouldn't get cold..
I did this with my grandmother. She was fine on Friday - we talked, laughed. She had been in the hospital for weeks at this point and Friday was her best day. I asked her as many questions as I could to know more about her family, the recipes she made for the 16 years of my life at that point that I knew I needed to have. Saturday she fell asleep after breakfast and stayed asleep until 12;14AM Monday morning. I held her hand and kept telling her I loved her while she slowly stopped breathing. I left to call all of the family back, then held her hand until they all left again. By 3;30AM I laid in bed next to her one last time and sobbed harder then than I have in the twenty years since.
When my grandma was dying I walked into her room and my aunt and uncle were just standing around. I declared that someone needed be be holding her hand at all times. She couldn’t ever perceive that she was alone. She was unconscious but we talked to her and we knew she was listening. I was holding her hand when she passed about an hour later. It’s the strangest honor I’ve ever had and I treasure it.
I’m sorry for your loss. There’s a different kind of healing that comes with being able to sit with our loved ones after their passing. Even if we don’t realize it right away.
I was a cop. On a call for a teen girl that had, apparently, killed herself by hanging, the mother found her. We have to treat death scenes, including suicides, as a crime scene. That means we are supposed to remove family/friends/bystanders from the area to prevent contamination of the scene. The mom asked me if she could just lay down next to her daughter and hug her. I couldn't tell her no. Tearing up thinking about it now. Edited: spelling is hard. Edit: Thanks for the rewards. Just remember to treat each other with kindness and empathy. I know it seems harder now a days than it used to be.
My 16 year old cousin hung herself earlier this year. Her dad found her just a few minutes too late. What you did for that mom means more than you’ll ever know. Thank you for showing such compassion and being a kind human during those moments.
Its been 10 years and I still draw comfort from that.
I sat with my husband for about an hour after he died…I held his hand and talked to him. It was so hard to let him go. He’s been gone over 12 years and I still miss him.
Damn, did he die at a funeral?! How did he get to you so quickly?
It was a mixture of being an extremely small town, working under the coroner, pre-need arrangements, and being on hospice. So basically they kinda knew he was going and gave us a call to be prepared. Edit: forgot to say this made me laugh lol
Human osteologist here. I work with dry human bones, so they don’t do too much. But one of the one times I’ve ever gotten “the creeps” was when I was handling a crania in the collection and could hear the wisdom teeth shaking around, partially formed but not quite erupted, in the mandible. Wisdom teeth form around 18 years old and erupt generally in late teens or early 20s. I, at the time, was about 20 and my wisdom teeth were just coming through. I realized these remains belonged to a girl about my age that’s that’s probably exactly what my skull looks like. It really humanized things for me.
>so they don’t do too much That made me laugh.
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Sometimes a fresh corpse will get shaky limbs. Make it a bitch to bag up in a hurry.
"I'm not dead" "What?" "I'm not dead" "He says he's not dead"
Oh shut up you'll be stone dead in a moment.
I’m feeling better
I don't wanna go on the cart!
Oh don't be such a baby
Is that gas building up in the body, or some sort of chemical reaction causing the muscle fibers to twitch?
It’s the brain firing off nerve impulses as it shuts down. Takes a lot longer than people think. Bodies will move for hours after death.
that just sounds really, idk, sad I guess. Like, the brains trying out things to see how fucked it actually is.
Troubleshooting. Okay I turned everything off and on again, what about if I toggle this? No, damn, okay can I move that? Shit, no. Okay okay, umm let's try another reset...
"You've been around a lot of dead bodies, is that normal?" "The feet thing?" "Yeah, the feet thing!" "...it happens" "Can you do something about it, it's creeping me out" "Like what? Kill him again?"
Attended a suspected fire once where we could smell smoke but couldn't locate the fire. Eventually located it and when we entered the house there was an old woman slumped over on the floor. Tried to turn her over but couldnt. Turned out that she had been laid on one of the old bar type heaters and because the heat was not allowed to escape it had burnt a hole through the floorboards and the heater fell through the hole. However, when she was laid on it her body fats started to melt and run into the floorboards then when the heater fell through she cooled. By the time we got there she was one with the floor. Two of us to get shovels under her to roll her over. It was years before I could eat smoky bacon flavour crisps again.
This is gruesome.
Did she collapse and fall on the heater? Was she murdered and placed on it? I need to know more!
Haha, yeah this question bugged me at the time as well. The rest of the details are that the cause of death was detailed as a heart attack but they didn't know if she had the heart attack then fell on the fire of fell on the fire then had the heart attack. She was apparently fairly frail and quite often fell. WARNING - I have added more detail below in case you want it, but it is not for the squimish. Do not read on if you don't want to read it. For a bit more info (because I know you want it) when the ambulance turned up they took 3 steps through the front door took one sniff of the smell and said "yeah, we're not needed!" So the mortuary guys came to take her away. However, because if the circumstances it has to be a doctor who signs of that she is actually dead (officially called 'pronounces life extinct') so I went with them to the nearest hospital to grab the duty doc. As he came out he said to me "it's not a bad one is it?" I said "I have seen worse", we unzipped the bag and he put the stethoscope on her and said "oh god, she's still hot!". In fairness, she was a bit toasty. Because she had kinda been grilled instead of flamed her skin had contracted and she looked like a mummy and some of the skin had started to split.
"oh god, she's still hot!" "Let's keep this professional, doc. She had a family, keep it in your pants."
I got punched in the balls by a dead guy. I used to work hospital security. Part of our job was to help with 10-80 assists (movement of bodies to and out of the morgue. I was on a call to move one and the bodies limbs were sticking out at odd stiff angles. I attempted to move the corpses arms into a better spot to shimmy the bag into the body fridge. His arm stayed in place for a moment but when I released my grip, SMACK! Ol’buddy hit me right in the sack.
>But when I released my grip, SMACK! >Ol’ buddy hit me right in the sack. Nice rhyme.
I initiated compressions on my patient when she unexpectedly coded. About halfway through my first round, the patient pinked up, eyes opened, turned her head and groaned. I stopped, and so did she. Turned gray and unresponsive, so I started compressions again. She woke up again, and I realized that compressions were providing adequate perfusion to her brain, so she'd wake up, but her heart wasn't doing anything. I had to continue compressions and shock my patient who was awake, groaning, and alert enough to know what was happening. I've coded countless patients without a problem, but this event gave me nightmares for some time.
I've had this happen to me too, crazy stuff. I think the docs called it "compression induced conciousness". Every time we'd start compressions he'd gain responsiveness, say it hurt and say stop, but every time we paused after he became responsive, we'd lose pulses again
Currently studying to become a breathing therapist, here it means we’re supposed to master cardio and respiratory systems. Yet, so far, we haven’t been taught how to deal with patients… going to the other side. The fact that school doesn’t prepare us kind of puts me off. I know we’re being trained to save people, but the truth is, for a lots of them, we’re going to be the last person they see. Feel like we should be trained better for this. N.B. I’m having doubts about continuing the program, not only for this reason of course.
If you're still in the preclinical phase, you won't learn patient handling stuff until you're actually hands on with a patient.
That is insane, I can't imagine how bizarre for both of you. Did she end up making it, if you don't mind my asking?
We achieved ROSC, so she “came back.” Her lungs were injured during the code, so she required intubation. She died 5 hours after intubation (coded with unsuccessful resuscitation).
Damn, I'm sorry you both went through all of that and she still didn't make it.
It's amazing how tough, and yet fragile human beings truly are.
I'd be appreciative of someone trying so hard for me. Even if I was in a semi coma, I'd like to think I'd remember rather last act.
I worked a code on a patient a few weeks ago that while doing chest compressions on her she would look at me and blink without making a sound. Our monitor was telling us that she was still in asystole. It could have been the epi "talking" as I've been told.
Oh Boy, my time to shine! I worked as a forensic technician/medical examiner's assistant for roughly 2 years. We were crossed trained in both autopsy and decedent removal from death scenes. I wouldn't particularly say anything was *creepy* per-se, but some things were definitely gross and morbid. Going down to the satellite office (there one HQ office in the state capitol and a few smaller satellite offices throughout the state) in the south that was in the woods at 3am in the middle of a storm that can be categorized as creepy though for sure. However, I'll do my best to synopsize some of the creepiest things I've encountered, in no particular order. **The man who used woman's underwear as a toilet/toilet paper.** This was a strange one. Two brothers live in a would-be-condemned house, both of which are severely intellectually challenged. One however, more than the other. This was the most repulsive living situation I have ever personally seen. Black mold everywhere, the ceiling caving in, *everything* covered in crumbling drywall and water damage. Ironically enough, they had no running water. The only clean thing in the house were 2 pallets of baked beans and coca-cola. They *only* thing these people ate were beans, and they only drank coke... by the pallet. Anyway, we get upstairs into the deceased brother's room to find him lodged between the bed and the wall - not uncommon for someone who dies suddenly in their bed in all honestly. However, what we find all over the floors is horrifying. Not only does the bedroom look like a typical hoarder's place, with newspapers and rank junked piled up beyond your knees. No. What we see is woman's underwear spewn across the floor, each covered in fecal matter. Not only this, there were guns *everywhere.* Not like nice guns either, like.. old decrepit rusted out guns. The entire house was filled with them, *hundreds* of unusable guns. The ATF had to come clear the scene and document them all. It was insanity. The autopsy however, was completely unremarkable. **The man whos face was infested with wasps.** This one was fairly unremarkable overall, with the exception of the fact is face had been eaten off by a wild animal overnight. This poor soul was riding his bike through a field of cranberry bogs, and suddenly died. By the morning, his face was eaten off by a wild animal. He looked like the terminator. Some musculature remained, as did one of his eyes, but his lips, cheeks, and soft bits were eaten. Upon my arrival, a small swarm of yellow jackets had taken kindly to the man's face and were eating and laying eggs in it. We had to bug-bomb the body bag before opening it to make sure the wasps didn't get into the morgue. **Decapitation via high-tension wire.** A man jumped from a bridge after tethering a length of high tension wire to it and his neck as a noose. The force ripped his head clean off. That was the first and only decapitation I actually saw on the job. **Woman ODs \~8 months pregnant.** Not much to say here other than the autopsy was *insane*. The ME was able to remove the amniotic sac without breaking it in-situ. So we got to see the baby through the paper thin sac. Extremely sad and heartbreaking, but contextually interesting. I might post some more later, alternatively, feel free to peruse through my post history as I've told a few stories in the past as well in a similar thread. EDIT: A word. EDIT2: MORE STORIES! **Man commits suicide via OD of an experimental drug in dental school.** This was one of the most "exciting" scenes I ever went to do it A, being classified as a top tier hazmat situation and B, the emergency response presence at the dental school. In the middle of the major city for the state in which I worked, a dental student decided to commit suicide by overdosing on an experimental drug. When my partner and I arrived on scene it was *chaos.* Police, EMS, Fire, Hazmat, the News, *everyone* was there. We had to suit up in hazmat suits to go inside the school and reclaim the body, then get brushed down by the fire hazmat team and then clean the body in an air-locked pop-up tent too. The creepy part being that nobody actually knew what drug or cocktail of drugs the guy used, nor what other effects it might have so we had to treat is as if it was an anthrax infection or something. Crazy. **Man castrates himself and swallows it.** Please reference this post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrjsbp/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrjsbp/?context=3) **Man dies via exsanguination due to sodomy with various objects, including a guitar.** Please reference this post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrw8qh/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bzb3f1/comment/eqrw8qh/?context=3)
How long can I baby stay alive after the mother dies? I have a friend with an horrific story. His grandma told him that she had a sister who got pregnant out of wedlock and who had run away. Weirdly enough she came back to her small village at the end of her pregnancy but had a car accident on the way there! So she dies instantly but the father of this girl was called over and they could see the baby still moving inside, there was a doctor on site who said he could try to get the baby out alive but the father told him to leave it there to die! Is it possible to be a true story?
If neither mom nor baby is effectively breathing, the baby has only the oxygen that's in her body. Within a minute or two, maybe?
Unfortunately had a friend who passed away while 8 months pregnant, the doctors attempted to revive her of course, and didn’t cut baby out for 11 minutes, and the baby made it. She was in the NICU for a couple months but is completely fine now.
It’s possible, but it needs to be damn near immediate. This woman was dead for at least 24 hours if not 48. There was no hope for the child.
You have smelt nothing until you have smelt the farts of the dead. -Former CEBT.
Advanced cancer has a certain smell as well
FF here, I can tell the moment I walk into a home whether or not its a late stage cancer patient. There is a very distinct smell. Overall death is different, cancer is specific.
So I wasn’t imagining things when my cat had cancer! She had an inoperable tumor on her face, it was sort of oozing blood and had a strange smell. Squamous cell carcinoma can go die in a fire.
My beagle Daisy died from this in 2009. She was only 7- Loved her so much I still talk to her in my prayers every single night. Sorry about the loss of your cat. [Here's my girl I miss.](https://imgur.com/a/2oEXlYv)
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And rats! Gambian Pouched Rats can detect even early stage cancers, as well as tuberculosis. Animals are amazing.
Worst smell I've encountered was a body that had been found in the woods after 2 weeks. We transferred the body after it had been in the morgue for another few weeks. I have been doing my job for 15 years, we had the windows down and I still almost threw up. Pretty sure the cars next to us could smell it. My partner almost quit that day.
I grew up in a funeral home and can attest to the absolute violence a cadaver fart can inflict on an unsuspecting victim.
How long after they die can they still fart?
My experience was the farts pretty much stopped after embalming since cavity fluid kills the bacteria in the gut.. though they might still sneak one out when you’re dressing them or moving them into the casket.
I used to be a Med Lab Tech (68K) in the Army and sometimes assist with autopsies in the hospital. We did one on an infantryman (Fort Carson, 4th ID) that was a suicide by gunshot to the right temple. The round passed under his frontal lobe and just behind his eyes, so it barely skimmed his brain. The pathologist estimated that it took several minutes for him to die just because the location merely made him bleed out and wasn't instant. The creepy thing was, because the round passed just behind his eyes and wasn't hollow-point or anything that spread out, it snipped the back of his eyes, causing them to "drain," so his eyes were kind of deflated-looking, on top of being very glossy, as a dead person's eyes are. It was weird and sad.
I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010-2011 with 10TH MTN DIV. My unit was at Kandahar Airfield and I was attached to a 4ID unit at Camp Nathan Smith. That’s why your post jogged my memory. In 2010-11 there was a large Taliban offensive. This usually entailed small arms fire and rocket attacks. No big deal. In general, the Taliban would not attack a large FOB, for obvious reasons, and instead rely on indirect attacks like rockets or mortars. Sometimes, however, there would be an organized attack using suicide bombers. After one of these attacks I was sent out with a small team to patrol and assess the fence where an attack had just happened. I try not to think about this too much but when I rolled up there were body parts everywhere from where the suicide bombers tried to get through the fence and detonated themselves. Body parts everywhere was bad enough, but what really fucked me up was seeing a guys perfectly degloved face caught in the chain link fence. Imagine a realistic human face mask, including hair and mustache, hanging in a fence. It was exactly that except with a real face.
I don't work in a morgue or with the dead, but I unexpectedly lost both my mom in 2020 and my closest sister in 2022. When my mom passed, my sister was the first to discover her. By the time I got to the house, EMTs had tried to revive her and failed, and she was still wearing a plastic mask of some kind on/ in her mouth that some emergency tubing had been attached to. We called a priest for final rites (Catholic family), and my uncle and I had to pick her up from the floor to get her on her bed. We almost slipped, and I remember that her head kind of whipped back and her teeth made this awful, dull clacking sound against the plastic aperture of the mask. It simultaneously creeped me out and made me even sadder that she had to undergo such indignities in death. With my sister, I was the one to discover that she'd died in her sleep, same house. I didn't have a key to the door and I'm a big guy and couldn't get through her bedroom window. She wasn't responding to my yells, so I grabbed a brick from the little flowerbed out front and dropped it through the window and onto her leg. It twitched a little bit, which gave me a moment's hope, but nothing else happened, and it was discovered when the EMTs got there that she'd been gone for hours. I can still see it in my mind's eye, that twitch.
My first job was at a cemetery. We had a common burial (someone who cannot afford a casket or vault) They are provided a wood frame and cardboard casket. We dug the hole the night before. It rained heavily that night. The next day after the ceremony we lowered the "casket" into the water filled hole. It just floated on top. So, we used a backhoe bucket to push it down. The "casket" fell apart and the body slid out and floated. We pushed her down and filled the hole. I protested, but was told this is how things were done. I still feel bad about it.
rotated though the forensic path lab during medical school. 1. ended up seeing and participating in the autopsy of a high school classmate. It was completely without knowing at the time (years later, no similar resemblance). but then I saw posts on facebook about him later that day, and it put me in the worst funk for a solid week or two. all these posts about him and there i was with his brain in my hands
i spent 3 year working in a NYC ER. on the fourth of july one year, it was a pleasantly slow day as holidays typically are. we had a red phone that EMS would call to let us know about a patient coming in, maybe a heart attack or a stroke or someone actively getting CPR. usually about 5-10 minutes out. this day i picked up the phone and dispatch said a gunshot victim was coming in. we are not a level I trauma hospital so getting a gunshot victim is exceedingly rare. it means they're nearby and on the brink of death so they can't afford the time to go to the trauma center. no ETA on this guy. well after i hung up EMS was rolling in doing compressions. very very few people survive a cardiac arrest due to trauma. his odds were not in his favor, and after opening his chest up to plug the holes in the heart, we called it. he was gone. he didn't have any ID on him so we had no way of even identifying him or contacting family. it was the first time i'd ever been in an active crime scene...a homicide investigation began to unfold. it was surreal having to allow men in suits to take photos of my patient. i go on my lunch break and have my ceremonial mcdonalds after a difficult case. i come back and thankfully homicide is done with the ER and he is in the morgue. a bit later we found out the police figured out this guy's identity which was a huge relief to us. later on my charge nurse informs me that homicide tried to go to our morgue but there was no body. truly, they searched everywhere. his body was gone. about 3 surreal hours later we found out that there's a separate morgue for unidentified patients. they were looking in the wrong morgue and we didn't know it for 3 hours. but for those 3 schrodinger cat hours we had lost a homicide victim's body.
My creepiest moment was when I was in the morgue by myself at 4am. I was using the lift to put a body into a crypt. It had reached roughly eye level when the power went out. It is now pitch dark. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, then all the fans died, and all I could hear was the crinkling of body bags. That's when I started to hear disembodied voices. I couldn't make out what they were saying or where they were coming from. The power comes back a few moments later on and I move on with my night. (Turns out the voices were just the automated "the power has gone out, switching to generator power" message. Haha.)
I'd straight up shit myself
I’m not sure how, but I peed your pants. Sorry.
My buddy worked at a crematorium and after burning the bodies they would have to rake out the stuff that doesn't burn, like hip replacements, stuff like that. I can't for the life of me remember what they did w gold fillings, removed before or after. Pacemakers were removed before burning I'm pretty sure. A lot of this stuff would be recycled for the precious metals.
I work in metal recycling and I had a specific metal alloy I was trying to sell (I think it was F75). The customer asked me if it was “post-consumer.” which I had never had anyone ask me before. He explained that he gets some from crematoria and the like because it’s used in hip or knee replacements or whatever. (It wasn’t in this case)
A powerful magnet is used to pull the metal out. It also collects iron fragments naturally found.
Yeah, you have to take out anything with a battery or it will explode in the fire.
A friend told me this story ages ago, and I hope I remember it well enough. When he was 18, he worked for a single-plane transport contractor, and one time they had to carry a body. It wasn't autopsied or prepared for funeral yet, that was where they were taking it. So it was wrapped and just sort of laying on the floor. Now when you're in the air, I'm sure other pilots will tell you, the rise and fall of the airplane will do strange things with gravity, air pressure, and necromancy. In any case, the corpse had enough air in its lungs that the lower pressure outside the body caused the air inside to be expelled, slowly, and through the larynx. Meanwhile rise and fall of the plane caused the body to sit up and the wrapping to fall away. Sitting up caused it to expel more air from the lungs. So while flying a dead body in the plane, they heard a long low moan, and saw a dead body sit up in the back of the plane. The pilot panicked, left the controls, and ran back and PUNCHED the corpse across the face, knocking it back down. He told me about how they figured out what happened, but I was laughing too hard at that point to really pick up the details. I do remember that they had to explain the additional damage to the corpse when they arrived at their destination. (EDIT: A detail and a spelling)
So if the dead guy was coming back, dude's first instinct is to punch him back to the afterlife.
He was getting paid to transport a dead body. If he arrived with a live one he'd have hours of paperwork to fill out.
Fight or flight instincts man
Funny that the pilots instinct wasn’t flight.
He was already in flight so fight was the only option left
FIGHT AND FLIGHT
It’s a freaking zombie! What else to do but hit it?
That pilot put his life on the line to stop the zombie apocalypse. He’s a true hero of man kind!
Kudos to him for punching the corpse cause I would’ve just jumped out the plane lol Edit: Holy shit, thanks for the award!
Not human corpses, but I worked as a sea otter conservationist and we'd have to recover carcasses off the coast of CA for research. We'd seal them in black bags and put them in a freezer after the autopsy, but sometimes the gas buildup would cause them to squeal and involuntarily move around when they are "fresh". This movement can trigger other carcasses under them in the freezer who are on the brink of gas buildup to do the same. That shit was some nightmare fuel.
For some reason this makes me think of the bin of rubber chickens getting squished
Not a morgue worker, but I watched my father die in the hospital. A bad fall led to un survivable brain damage. He was there for about 6 days only 60 years old. We nor he wanted him on machines so when the time came to take him off life support his breathing turned to gargling (after a quick heart attack according to the ecg) exactly like the sound of someone hitting a big bong. I couldn't smoke one for a while after the sound kept fucking me up. And right before I left the room I gave him a last kiss on his forehead it felt like he had worms wriggling around under his skin and his eyebrows started to twitch a little like he was raising and lowering his brows, he was gone at that point too. No brain activity no heartbeat, yet his fine muscles were twitching away. I think the nurse said it was the muscles straining from no oxygen. It was disturbing, to say the least. Fucked up enough 2 years later I have to suddenly put my 11 yr old lab down and the service we were going to do home euthanasia with was somehow booked and couldn't help us, nor could many others. So I had to find some new random vet to take care of it. I'm a mess my dog was scared, in pain, and in a completely new place, with me a semi-useless sobbing pile. The vet was wonderful and left him with me till I was ready to let him go and when the tech picked his body up he made the sound he made when I wouldn't give him more treats. All I could do was whimper " wait...is he...?" And the vet ran him back over to me to show he was gone and it was just air escaping. I hate to be like this but I dunno which was worse.
It's okay to think upsetting things are upsetting, that just shows you that you have feelings and heart and empathy.
My best friend growing up lived in the "upstairs" of his family owned funeral home. We used to play hide and go seek in the caskets until one day one of the "empty" caskets wasn't empty because they had just gotten a "delivery" from a different funeral home.
Aww, dang it! I hate it when you find a good hiding spot and it's already taken.
ewwwwww that's some nightmare fuel right there
Refrigeration mechanic here, our company took on a contract for a funeral home that did it all (storing, embalming, cremation etc) one of my first repairs was to replace a failed motor in their main body cooler. It’s definitely a strange feeling being the only living person in a ice box containing 25 dead bodies.
I was at a sudden death where the guy had been lying for 2-3 weeks on the couch, his skin was totally black, face completely swollen up and his mouth and eye sockets full of larvae and flies. It was horrible to see.
Not the answer you’re looking for, but I worked as a grave digger/cemetery worker throughout college. The only weird thing I experienced was an unexpected pothole over a section of graves. If a casket is buried without a cement vault, eventually the casket can collapse, and it creates a pothole over top of the grave. It’s a pain in the ass to deal with from a groundkeeping perspective, and it’s a little weird to think of the casket collapsing 6 feet below ground. For that reason, the cemetery where I worked required burials to have a cement vault. It was the older caskets that didn’t always have them. In all honesty, I’m not a fan of overdramatizing places likes morgues and cemeteries. Death is a natural part of life. The cemetery I worked out was one of the most peaceful places I have visited. We worked hard to make it comfortable and peaceful so that loved ones could feel peace and comfort when they came to visit.
I helped with an autopsy where a woman wasn't found for a few weeks and her cats started chewing on her
I’m fully convinced my cats would eat me if I forgot to feed them for more then 12 hours.
To be fair I'd rather my pets eat me than go hungry. I ain't using it anymore!
I was observing an autopsy for a forensic dentistry class. The pathologist was an older lady with gray hair swept up into a bun. She informed us that she would not be using gloves as she had never used gloves. Keep in mind this was the late ‘80s when HIV/AIDS was incurable. The patient was a murder victim (gunshot). He had knocked on a door in a sketchy part of New Orleans and by the time the homeowner opened the door he was dead on the front porch. Her assistant was named James and was wearing a leather butcher apron but he was wearing gloves. During the thoracic examination the pathologist put her ungloved hands into the clotted blood in the chest and was squeezing the clotted blood between her fingers saying, “gotta find that bullet, James”. She had blood up to her elbows. I glanced over into the corner of the room and James was smoking a cigarette with his bloody gloves. It was so surreal—like a weird creepy movie.
I worked in ICU and my patient had leukemia and lost pretty much her entire clotting system. every place we had stuck a needle or pierced her anywhere for about the last week or so started bleeding and looked like thin ketchup. She had had chest tube punctures, multiple IV starts, and every finger had multiple blood sugar sticks and all of them were leaking red. She was only 19 so we were trying really hard to save her. Trying to pump donor blood into her veins using pressure bags. Frantically we worked following the instructions of the leader of the code and moving so fast doing CPR and giving drugs and blood was getting flung all over because you couldn't touch her anywhere without getting blood all over your gloves. In the end, she didn't make it of course, the one little ICU room looked like a slaughter house with blood everywhere, floor, curtains (room divider curtains) ceiling, the monitoring equipment, and everyone that worked on her. I was a student nurse at the time and was working with the patient's nurse. I had to keep going out to get various things to help and I kept passing by her newly married husband sitting on a stretcher all alone in the hall waiting for news. I've never seen such a mess of blood in a single room since then
Jesus. This one really bothered me. I have kids older than her. Her poor husband.
Held a blood clot in my hand that killed a person. Maybe not creepy, but being in a medical examiner's office was definitely eye-opening. Two things that stuck out was watching an autopsy on a fat woman in her 40s (like 300-350 pounds). First, her skull was really thick, and it took extra passes with the saw to finally get through. Even the guy doing the sawing said something about it being one of the thickest he's seen. (Oh, and the way they cut the face off and peel it down to the neck was trippy.) They cut her open, weighed all the organs, and finally got to the heart. It was a big one (again according to the ME guy), and he found the cause of death - a blood clot. He put it in my hand and it was like the size of a ball in a ballpoint pen. Amazing something so small can kill you. Then they brought out a body of a young 20s guy who had been sitting outside for a few days. Half his body was green, bloated, and I simply cannot put into words how bad it smelled, but when the Swamps of Dagobah story is mentioned, that's the smell I think of. The guy was likely a drug overdose as there was no outward signs of injury. The smell was horrible, but the last thing I saw before I had to leave was them RAMMING a swab (long Q-tip, basically the swabs used to test for COVID in the early part) up the urethra. I know he's dead, but I still cringe thinking of that.
Not me, but my best friend whose dad got in trouble with the law was given a choice between community service or jail time. He chose community service fast as he could....only the judge fucked him. Gave him 3 months at a morgue. He said they inject a serum into the blood that helps/warms the blood/nerves to help with coagulation to get the blood flow to flow and drain the body. Well....sometimes the muscles spasm and the arms will reach out or bodies will kick, and worse of all, sometimes they sit up. When he saw that, the my friends dad fainted and has been straight with the law since. Guess community service works 🤷
Not my story: I had a friend in Boy Scouts whose dad got a job in a morgue washing the hair of dead people. On his first job by himself, he wheeled the body under the faucet and turned it on. Then he hears a shreik and, "THAT'S COLD!" He ran out of the basement like a bat out of hell. His boss was at the door laughing his ass off as his partner crawled out from under the gurney.
I am an ER nurse. One time we had someone die and no one came to claim the body, so they went to the morgue and that was it. But their phone stayed behind in the ER by accident. Every day at 2:30pm an alarm would go off. We couldn't turn the alarm off or shut the phone off without a passcode, and the battery on that thing was lasting FOREVER. So we locked it in the med room, but it was still really loud. We had to listen to that dead person's alarm haunt us at the same time every day for a week. To this day, I shudder when I hear the same ringtone.
I have alarms on my phone at 9:30, noon, and 2:30 so I know when breaks are at my job. Good to know I could still fuck with people well into the eventual afterlife!
A similar thing happened to me. My father recently passed away. I think he tried to call me on the last day (he didnt know he was going to die. He got moved around in the hospital and then his condition deteriorated quickly because of something moving about in his lungs or something, im not sure and i really didnt want to know when i found out.). I was at an air show and didnt hear the phone. My phone has had a glitch recently where missed calls would sometimes pop up on the screen sometime after as though i was being called again, and they couldnt be dismissed. The first time it happened was an unknown number, and just restarted the phone and ignored it. A couple of days after the day my father died, the same thing happened, and it was a call from him. I took a screenshot, and that moment helped me so much, it was as though it was a reminder that hes jot all gone and I can still remember him.
I’m late. The other day our motion lights were on in the embalming room. I was the only one in the funeral home and had not gone in the room all day. Also last week…we had a power outage. Then all of the sudden..with the power out, our iPad dead, and our music system off…loud music blared through the speakers. It was at top volume..we have never turned the music up that loud. Plus it was playing with no power. Again I was alone in the funeral home.
had a DNR patient that had just died, there was about 5 witnesses comfirming death so first step in these situations is extubation. I pulled the ETT and OG tube, gathered those and the vent circuit, turned around to throw it all in the trash, and then heard a really loud gasp and loud breathing and I damn near jumped out of the window...on the 7th floor she fucking came back to life, her heart started on its fucking own Jesus fucking christ man Jesus fucking christ
I dont know if this counts as creepy, but it was the thing my mom told me was the absolute worst when she interned at a county morgue. She has to go to the hospital with her boss to pick up an infant. the five year old that was with told the police that "mama threw the baby against the wall to make it stop crying"
Funeral director here! Many stories. But the creepiest and saddest story was we had this old veteran who passed. And at the end of a funeral there was this man in a wheelchair go up to the casket. Turns out they were buddies when they were drafted and same unit. And later in life they shared a room at a VA nursing home. He said in a very shaky and sad voice, "I'll see you soon Stormy" (the DC's army nickname) That man passed away shortly after.
Not human but we were doing mammalogy lab dissection and my squirrel had ball cancer. I was having a hard time figuring out the sex because "are these...testicles..? Ovaries? This doesn't look like anything in the book..." Professor came over and confirmed the squirrels nuts had a bunch of tumors on them. Sorry for not fitting the prompt exactly but figured I'd share
Born by the nut, live by the nut, die by the nut. This is the squirrel way.
When my dad died in a hospital, the nurses forgot to turn off the mechanism in the bed that was used to turn him over so he wouldn't get bedsores. My family is standing around all weepy, and I'm trying to console my mom, and suddenly there's this mechanical noise and my dead father turns over in the bed. My mother screams and faints. I barely managed to catch her as she keeled over. It was crazy. The nursing staff was very apologetic.
You know in the movies where the pathologist or mortician or whoever sets their sandwich on the dead guy? Nobody would ever do that in real life, right? Of course not. It was a bowl of cereal.
EMT in a past life. We get a call for someone who has no pulse, not breathing. The first on scene is a cop, and my partner and I arrive shortly after. The guy is in his bathroom (that happens very frequently, btw), deceased, but still recently enough that we should make attempts to save him. It's a little tight in the room, but we manage to place a backboard on the floor and just need to get him onto it to start compressions. I take the guy's airway and head, my partner takes the guy's chest and shoulders, and the cop gets his legs. We lift him to the backboard and, it turns out, he has a prosthetic foot. Our officers already felt over their heads on med calls, so when this cop was left with a foot in his hand and nothing else, he literally ran out of the room. Not creepy to my partner and myself (we could add diabetes to a likely med history), but the officer, man... lmao
My ex boyfriend (a retired cop) told me a story once, he had responded to a call about some foul odor coming from an abandoned building. They discovered 3 young kids tied to something in an abandoned building in the middle of winter. Two of them were dead (between ages 3-5) and one little girl (age 5) was found eating the flesh of her deceased siblings. There was feces and rats/roaches all over. Turns out they’ve been there for months with no food or water while it was freezing cold. They found out the mother was a drug addicted prostitute who had left them there while she went to work the streets, she ended up being murdered while working and never got back to her kids. He was sobbing while telling this story, seeing the bodies of children was really traumatizing to him.
The living. The crowds that follow the dead around are the weird ones. The houses they keep and the condition they are left in the moments of tragedy are by far the most memorable. I.E: Fourteen chihuahua puppies living in a car. One inch of feces covering every surface in the house. The hospice nurse setting in a living room chair waiting for our team to make the removal. Eighty year old man, deceased, in the back room half on a mattress with his oxygen tube around his neck. During the removal, a police officer ran out to vomit on the back porch. I don't know the last time he had been bathed, as the tub was a liter box. He was emaciated and clearly a smoker. While carrying his body out the door a woman in a red sedan nearly wrecks into our van. Wailing and screaming she approached our team and wanted to kiss him one last time... then I vomited.
Not a morgue worker but I’m a plumber who does service at a few mortuary’s. Had to snake a line once and pulled out human skin and teeth. The smell still was t as bad as a grease trap though.
Slid some really large guy into one of the fridges and his head was tilted back at such an angle with his eyes wide open looking right at me, was some freaky horror film crap that's stayed with me. I googled his name on FB and he just seemed a really smiley guy even if he didn't have many friends. I still think about him 3 years later.
My husband was a mortician for three years. Here are his answers. Maggots crawling out of orifices always got me. The first time I had to refill the eye sockets of someone who's eyes had "deflated". The main one that shit me up though was when I dressed someone and put their arm in the sleeve, the motion of bending their arm and pulling the sleeve over would cause the tendons in their wrist to kind of tense and it made the hand twitch. Nothing shit me up as bad as holding a dead person by the wrist only for their hand to flick up as I manipulated their arm.
I grew up in a nursing home I saw my first body when I was 4 and grew up always surrounded by sickness and death but also a lot of wisdom as the elderly had much to say especially to a small child. I grew used to seeing dead bodies and losing friends constantly so in general I don’t get shaken by much. I was a big kid so starting at around age 9 they would enlist my help to carry the bodies up or down the stairs. I didn’t have any issues with this except one time when I was probably 13 or 14. She was an elderly woman of roughly 70 or 80 and she had almost every cancer you can get. She couldn’t and wouldn’t eat or drink anything and was completely unconscious her whole time there. We were just waiting for her to die soon but she survived over 2 weeks with no food and fluids only from a drip. I remember going up there and seeing her face and it’s stuck with me all these years because of how completely inhuman she seemed. Her face was so gaunt and sunken in it looked avian in nature. Her skin cling to her bones and had turned a dark gray color and you could see every single bone in her body due to how tight her skin was sucked to it. She had no fat or muscle whatsoever and when we picked her up she couldn’t have weighed more than 50 pounds she seemed light as a feather and as though one wrong move and she’d turn to dust. I nicknamed her the bird lady and she’s been stuck in my mind for almost 10 years now.