Morticians hold one of the most spine-chilling professions imaginable. Their daily interactions with the deceased are on a level of intimacy that is almost inconceivable for most people. To some, there’s a unique beauty in their role; they preserve the final physical state of a person before they are laid to rest.
Curious Redditors reached out to undertakers, embalmers, and funeral directors, asking them to share their most challenging cases. The responses they received are, at the very least, bewildering.
A Nursing Home Ought To Be Shut Down
Those nurses need to reassess why they’re doing what they do.
Redditor /u/PastelPastries:
“[There was] this guy on the autopsy table with his [behind] rotted off to the bone. Turns out he was a paraplegic in a nursing home. The nurses just neglected cleaning his [behind] for so long that it rotted off and he couldn’t feel it… It wasn’t discovered until he was on the table…”
Cause Of Death Was Hardly Magical Even Though A Gargoyle Was Involved
The timiug of this is unimaginable.
Redditor /u/Back2Bach:
“The undertaker… had to prepare a woman for viewing at a wake who had been killed by a gargoyle falling from the tower of an old church and making a direct hit.
“Apparently, it did extensive damage – the kind that took him several days of reconstructive preparatory work.”
Vises Should Only Be Used By Professionals That Are Properly Attired
A lot of questions here, but the answers may be too weird to find.
Redditor /u/Ed98208:
“The weirdest and most puzzling [case] was a man in his late 60s who died of a pulmonary embolism as a result of crushing his own penis in a vise. I’ve tried to think of ways it could have happened accidentally (naked woodworking?) or what his thought process could possibly have been…”
Smoking May Have Worse Results Than You Think
The surgeon general did not see this one coming.
Redditor /u/TooMuchPretzels:
“We once had a lady that came in looking like she had died in a war. Burn marks, lacerations, what I imagine it looks like if you get hit by a grenade or a mine…
“Apparently she had been discharged from the hospital earlier that day for a hip replacement. They had given her a bottle of oxygen and strict orders to not smoke.
“Well ole Mrs Joe Camel sits right down on her sofa on her porch at home, plops the oxygen tank down next to her, and [with] oxygen tubes still in her nose, lights up her very last cigarette…”
Cake Frosting Can Be Dangerous
Gluttony really is one of the seven deadly sins.
Redditor /u/TheModernMortician:
“A lady ate herself to death on five containers of Duncan Hines frosting…
“Neighbors saw her for two days sitting in her fave chair… Then finally someone checked on her. [She was] dead with a container of frosting in her lap and four empties on the floor around her chair. Her chin had frosting on it, too…
“Her mother revealed she had gastric bypass five months prior.”
Not A Relaxing Soak
Imagine the horror when they eventually pulled her out.
Redditor /u/Ephialtis:
“One such instance, a large apartment complex started smelling something terrible coming from a particular room. [The] landlord found the old lady that lived there dead in the bathtub…
“Apparently she was getting in the tub to take a bath and had a heart attack. The water was running, already hot, and she accidentally knocked loose the drain with her foot. So what happened for the next two weeks… is she lay there marinating in hot water. Now, you’d think the water would eventually cool, right? Nope. They had those industrial hot water heaters since it was shared by the apartment complex and it easily kept up with the hot water demand.
“So she had been sitting in this hot water for a couple of weeks basically cooking… When they went to try and move the body it was similar to picking up a marinated chicken… The meat fell right off the bone.”
Horrible Repercussions
Lust too, is one of the seven deadly sins.
Redditor /u/princessolympia:
“[Once there was a] dead man [who] was a frequent <>. He yanked it with such force for so long that he permanently cut off the blood supply to his <>. It became horribly infected and gangrene set it. The infection went to his bloodstream and it killed him.”
That Holiday Season Was Very Bleak
May angels bring her to a deeper peace.
Redditor /u/BenicioDelPollo:
“My dad did autopsies for a while. [He] said the worst was a little girl who was charred in the fetal position. Supposedly when her house caught fire, she crawled under the Christmas tree, which then turned into a furnace.”
A Mind-Warping Turn Of Events
As fun as riding a bike is, do handle it responsibly and remember loved ones are waiting back home.
Redditor /u/UlicBelouve:
“[There was a] motorcycle accident [with the] rider having no helmet. [He lost his head in the crash]. [Authorities wandered] the ditches to find the head at the butt-crack of dawn. [They couldn’t find it but were] still walking and looking, and seeing things in that odd dusk, thinking [they] might trip over a detached head in the ditch.
“Other responders eventually figure it out: [the] head was pushed down into the body.”
Electrocution Was The Cause But No Electricity Was Nearby
Maybe the guy just upset Zeus or something, who knows.
Redditor /u/Azryhael:
“[I] am both paramedic and mortician, so I’ve seen some real doozies. One of the most bizarre was the fellow who, upon autopsy, had his cause of death declared as electrocution, despite the fact that the abandoned farmhouse he was in hadn’t had electricity in decades. Lividity and decomposition both supported the conclusion that he died where he was found, so it wasn’t a body dump, but there was no possible way for him to have been electrocuted there…
“He was inside the wooden building with no damage to the roof. He was in the middle of the room, too, so it’s unlikely that he was touching anything potentially conductive that could have passed the current of a lightning strike through his body. Just plain weird.”
The Pillow Was More Dangerous Than The Heroin
See, your parents were right in saying that drugs will kill one way or the other.
Redditor /u/EilrahcNotneb:
“It isn’t particularly strange, but one that stuck with me was a man who was a heroin addict. Coroner ruled that it wasn’t actually the heroin that killed him, but his pillow.
“The man injected so much he lost control of his body and fell face down onto his bed. He was completely paralyzed and eventually suffocated.
“If I hadn’t already decided, hearing the details and seeing the faces of his family made me swear to never go anywhere near that sh*t.”
A Sapling Tree Was Responsible
But how could the responders have known, right?
Redditor /u/TheCrispiestofBacon:
“My brother… told me about [his] case where a guy got into a car wreck and ended up being [ejected] out the windshield. When the police and first responders showed up, he was sitting outside the car in shock, but seemed absolutely fine other than some scratches and a broken arm, a miracle really. But as soon as the EMT lifted him up to give him a more thorough examination, the guy immediately collapsed and stopped breathing. They rushed him to the hospital where he died, but they couldn’t pinpoint what caused his sudden death.
“My brother performed the autopsy and discovered that the guy, when he was launched from the car, had been penetrated via rectum by a small sapling. When the guy was sitting down, he was still in shock and probably didn’t notice, but when the EMT stood him up, the sapling most likely perforated his bowel and destroyed his internal organs…”
A Brainteaser
He was pretty hardheaded and stubborn so it took another surge of willpower.
Redditor /u/-_Ryan_-:
“This guy commit suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head two times and then hanging himself. I have no idea how he managed it. Not even sure how it’s possible but who am I to argue with police?”
Not All Hangings Are Vertical
Man, that guy really and problems and felt all alone.
Redditor /u/hermarine:
“Not a Mortician or EMT/Cop/Fire etc. Just a Dad who chaperoned his 15yo kid for their class tour of the local county Sheriffs Dept Forensics department. Kids were morbidly curious at why this car with front end damage and no back windshield was in the warehouse. Tech offhandedly said a guy committed suicide by kicking out the back window, tied a long rope to a tree, ran the rope through the empty window, tied it around his neck, then floored it across this field, decapitating himself when the rope snapped taunt.”
A Macabre Way To Turn A Profit
Just another scene you’d think only happened in films, but no.
Redditor /u/constantterror:
“Not a mortician. Had a very bizzare case of death in my appartment building. On the second floor, there lived a completely crazy old hag. She would stand on the balcony naked from the waist down, throw sh*t at people below, loudly swear at anybody she met. Almost killed me with a glass jar to the head, missed me by the inches when I was walking out of the building. And she somehow had gotten herself a seventy year old lover who lived with her (God knows why).
“Anyhow, there was a sudden lull in her appereances, and after a while her neighbours noticed an unbearable stench coming out of her flat. Police got involved, they broke down the door, and inside was a very horrifying scene. There, on the bed, was she and her lover. She was dead for two weeks, her lover was dead for AT LEAST three months.
“Apparently, she kept his death secret to receive his retirement benefits using his documents and slept with his corpse in the same bed. And the flat itself … It was just a garbage dump, with metre-high piles of rags, refuse and rubbish laying around. And in the center of the room there stood a big (50 kg at least) open tub of dairy butter.”
Covered With The Babies
Not exactly biblical but hey, it’s what they wanted.
“My best man is a funeral director.
A ‘grieving’ nephew walks up to my friend and says ‘Hey, um, I’m gonna be bringing a cooler tomorrow. Is it cool if I put something in with Uncle Mark?’ Now this is fairly common. Assuming they want to send Uncle Mark to the afterlife with his favorite frosty beverage, my friend says sure.
Next day nephew shows up and pulls a couple of unlabeled jars from the cooler and goes to put them in the casket. My friend walks over and asks what the hell is in the jars. Apparently, nephew’s girlfriend has had a couple miscarriages and since they are ‘devout Christians,’ they believe these babies deserve a proper burial. They just weren’t willing to pay for it. So to hear my friend tell it, the nephew says ‘Well it’s real expensive and so we’ve just kinda been hanging on to them in the fridge until my mom goes. But it’s kinda freaking my (living) kids out so we figured we’d just inter them now. It’s cool, right?'”
When Plenty Of Fish Aren’t Enough
In a bizarre turn of events, someone hooked her fish and didn’t let it go.
“One of the more bizarre things to have happened as a director. This is a favorite amongst close friends of mine.
I had to cancel a date because I had to be on call for several evenings/nights in a row. I would just keep my schedule clear as opposed to cancel at the last second, unless it was a friend who understood what a pain in the ass my job was. I had several poor experiences with new dates and this.
We were talking on Plenty of Fish and that site is bizarro town to say the least. So I just messaged him we’d do something ‘super rad’ as soon as schedules allowed. Whatever.
I almost felt guilty, especially since I didn’t hear from him. Guys would get pissed or just not believe my job and think it was a joke. I almost relented and risked coffee but then I got a call to go in and embalm; my boss had been awesome and had his other assistant do the removal.
Went in, did my thing, didn’t pay much attention until I was done and went upstairs at the funeral home; this was a time before super fancy smart phones and 4G at our fingertips…
Guy I embalmed was the guy from Plenty of Fish I was supposed to go on the date with.”
When Grief Goes Too Far
She’s really gone off her rocker. Hope she got some help.
From a deleted user:
“Separated parents are mourning the loss of their toddler at the visitation before the funeral. Mom is grieving unlike any mother I’ve seen grieve over the loss of a child, almost fake. She proceeds to pick up the child and ‘hide’ him in her coat and walks out the door while no one is looking. Other funeral director is like… ‘holy sh*t, why is there an empty lil casket?’ The other funeral director finds the mom running to her car where he stops her and grabs kid.
Separated parents have huge blow out at the visitation.
We find out two months later that the mother and her new boyfriend had physically abused the kid, causing its death. Biological father had no idea.”
When Mausoleums Are Sealed, They Are Sealed For Life
Grief has been known to do strange things to people.
“Mortician here. Had a service in a mausoleum a few years ago. The wife of the decedent had been adamant that her husband not get buried. She was insistent that he be above ground in a tomb. She was really mourning his death and chose a double-depth space where both the husband’s casket, and then ultimately the wife’s, can be entombed end-to-end like train cars.
So there we were, final words were said, the minister blessed the space and the cemetery workers hefted the casket from the roller device it was on, sliding it into the concrete space over all the bb’s they spread in there to make it slide easier. They pushed the casket way back in there, and the cemetery workers started getting their tools together to seal up the opening and put the marble faceplate in place. As they were preparing, the wife took this moment to tell all the people there how glad she was to have chosen this space because, unlike below-ground burial, she will be able to come back and visit her husband any time she wants… that the cemetery will open up the tomb and pull out the casket and open it up for her so that she can visit with him.
We stared at her blankly for a moment and then one of the guys from our funeral home said, ‘But, Ma’am, once this is sealed up… it’s sealed up… they don’t open it again until you pass away…’ Well, she suddenly went ape and started screaming and thrashing about. Before we could stop her, she crawled into the tomb and started clawing at the casket, still screaming and crying. Two feet were all you could see flapping about. 50 people gasped and stood there horrified. We had to reach in and grab her feet and pull her back out while she clawed at the sides of the enclosure. When we got her out her dress had come way up exposing her undergarments and she was covered with dust/filth and absolutely crazy screaming and rolling about the floor. Her family dragged her away to one side while they gave the order to seal the tomb.”
You Don’t Need To Be Early
And now they know what it takes to last in that industry.
“My dad and stepmother were sextons for a cemetery in Baltimore for about six years when I was a teenager. We usually only got about one burial year and a couple of cremations, it wasn’t often that we had to deal with anything; we mostly just lived on the property, answered the phone, and fed the dogs.
Anyway, we had an actual burial late one January that went stupidly wrong. The groundskeeper had dug the grave a few days before, but since then it had rained and the temperature had dropped the ground had frozen solid. The vault arrives first, we set up the pulleys and go to lower it down, and it won’t go in. A minute later, we realize that the ground had swollen during the rain and then frozen in place. Nothing was going into the ground until we made the grave bigger.
“We get shovels and quickly bend the blades on the rock-hard sides. We scrounge up a couple of axes and those work, so we crawl in and start chipping away. The funeral director shows up with the hearse to set up, but there’s not much he can do while we’re in the way, so unloads the casket into the driveway, sets up some chairs and asks if we mind watching the body while he runs down to the bodega for a soda. We say why not – the service isn’t for another hour and we’re nowhere near done.
Well, about ten minutes later we hear a car pull up and look up to see a pair of horrified people staring at us from behind the wheel. Uh-oh. Looks like some people arrived early! Casket laying in the driveway! A pile of muddy people crawling around in a grave with a thousand-pound cement vault dangling over their heads! Aaaaand the newly returned funeral director drinking a beer!”
Family Feud Ruined A Funeral
Well she’s definitely in a much better place now.
“Funeral service person here, have to say that the saddest funeral I worked was the death of a 30-year-old woman who was very attractive and successful and had recently gotten married. Children and those in their prime are more bothersome, sure. But her family. Jesus.
Her husband had very little to do with the arrangements. I do not know why. So her father and stepmother were in control of the ceremony. The father seemed more unemotional than people I usually work with. Even people who don’t seem stereotypically sad, have a level of anxiety or just a numbness of someone who hasn’t full accepted it. I can’t read minds or know someone’s heart so I can’t say for sure, but he did not seem to care what we did.
The stepmom was strange. I caught her snooping through areas of the funeral home not open to the public, like opening doors to storage closets, and she even made it into our casks loading area almost to the morgue proper before I caught her roaming. 30 minutes before the funeral she was worried about having time to go get something to eat. She got in to an altercation with I’m assuming the ex-wife in our foyer; that side of the family stormed out. She did not seem remotely concerned or interested in her deceased stepdaughter.
The deceased sister was handicapped and made noises she couldn’t control when upset. (They also hadn’t bothered to tell her that her sister was dead until the day of.) The family kicked her out of the service because she was interrupting. More visitors left because of this. This only left a few meager funeral attendees.
This made me particularly sad, because I think everyone deserves a decent funeral. The girl seemed sweet, caring, and full of life but instead of trying to celebrate her memory they just seemed apathetic. You see all kinds of emotions running through people working funerals, but I have never seen anyone act that disinterested and self-absorbed.”
Fist Pump
There’s a backstory to this and we deserve to know.
From a deleted user:
“I used to altar serve, and once witnessed a lady walk up to her mother’s coffin as the perfect picture of anguished, raw grief, and as she kneeled down to kiss it, she got a huge, relieved, joyous smile and actually did the ‘Yes!’ fist, hiding it as part of the sign of the cross. She tipped us $50 each for serving, too. Weird.”
Saving Face
That lady did not sleep well that night. Hope she had a good bottle around.
“A family friend of ours owns a funeral home and he is a funeral director while his wife does the paperwork and consultations. One night we were all drinking and they started telling us about this story of a family that were looking to put on a funeral for their deceased son. The son was only 20 when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head (think messy, brains everywhere).
The mother and father of the deceased were at a standstill in the process of deciding on their options for the funeral. The father wanted a closed casket, given the horrific way in which his son had died. The mother wasn’t having any of it, she needed to see her son one last time. Now this was a rather important issue that needed to be ironed out ASAP (they need to be able to prep the body properly).
Well, they couldn’t come to an agreement, so my friend offered to sew up what was left of this guy’s head to the best of his abilities. This pleased both parents and off he went to reassembling the cadaver”s head. Now my friend is rather talented at what he does, he’s got a great community presence and gets a lot of business. Basically, he’s not just your run-of-the-mill funeral director. He takes great care of the deceased. But this particular cadaver was a bit different.
The victim had used a revolver against his right temple, which was cocked at an angle so that the resulting explosion of brains popped open right above the right eyebrow. Pretty much the whole upper right quadrant of his head was blown apart. To make an already long story short; my friend rebuilt this guy’s face, and glued the skin back together to make it seem normal. He insists to this day (this happened 20+ years ago) that it was one of the best reconstructions he had ever done. When the mother saw him, she was in tears at how beautiful he had made him look. The father was impressed. Everyone was happy, right?
Wrong. The visitation was scheduled for the morning and the funeral was in the afternoon. The visitation was going well, when suddenly one of the ladies viewing the body lets out a startling scream.
Apparently, the fake skull fragment that they used to reconstruct the kid’s face had unstuck and sunk back into the head, leaving a sort of crater. It left the face lopsided and disfigured. I distinctly remember going from shocked to laughing hysterically when my friend jumped out of his seat and started making the facial expressions of what this guy looked like. He said it looked a bit like Sloth from The Goonies.
They had to calm down the lady who witnessed the sink, and then the father closed the casket. They fixed it for the actual funeral, and things went according to plan.”
Problem With The Procession
As horrific as that was, at least they could continue with their business.
“My great aunt and uncle owned a funeral home and my mother worked there for a bit as mortician/funeral director. One weekend, she couldn’t find a babysitter so I rode along with her to help with the funeral stuff. En route to the cemetery, one of our police escorts for the funeral procession was hit by a car running a red light. He died.”
Pallbearers Bear Witness
Job must be worth the pay to be staying there for so long.
“As my account says, I’m a pallbearer. In the three years I’ve worked there, I’ve had some pretty weird funerals.
Once, a 16-year-old died because a self-made nail bomb exploded in his face. His friends, the white trash that they were, all arrived on scooters. A friend of the deceased stopped and put his helmet off. His father then said: ‘Nice helmet, if our son had one of those we wouldn’t be here.’
On another occasion, I saw the family smoking at the grave and throwing their cigarettes in the grave after they were done.
But the most awkward was the time I suddenly had something in my throat. It was right before the ceremony, so I rushed outside the church to cough. It was one of the longest coughs I’ve ever had, so my eyes were all watery when I went back. I only realized it when it was too late, and a woman noticed it. She thought I was super emotional, so she tried to comfort me the whole day. It was so uncomfortable, because I couldn’t say ‘Oh no I actually don’t really care.'”
Two Small Body Bags
Nothing ever prepares a person to witness the cold truth of death.
“Former funeral assistant in high school. Heard we had a call overnight for a set of twins that were stillborn. I had another call that morning, and when taking this call into the prep room, I asked the director about the twins from the evening before. He pointed to two small black trash bags laying on the counter, each about a foot in length. I finished my task, left the room, sat down, and felt like I’d been kicked in the nuts.
At 18, you’re never really prepared to see that ‘reality’ as you have a totally different expectation before you ever have to deal with it. As an aside, this was a premature birth where there would be no good way for a viewing. They were to be taken to the crematorium later that morning.”
One Sad Organist
Parents should not be burying their child. It’s the other way around.
“Church organist. The saddest funeral I ever witnessed was for a two-month-old baby girl. They brought her body into church in what looked like a picnic cooler – a Styrofoam container.
Three people got up to speak, and they just stood at the lectern, sobbing. At the end, the parents had to be helped out of church because the grief was so intense.”
Burying A Child
He was too young, with a full life ahead of him. Fly high, little guy.
“Just last year I had the unfortunate experience of handing a mother and father their 18-month-old son wrapped in a blanket at the funeral. Trying to make arrangements with a young family who’s just lost their first and only child has got to be the most sobering moment of my career. Picking out the hauntingly small casket with the parents was difficult as well. In a room surrounded by adult-sized, metallic caskets, they are forced to choose something that’s slightly bigger than a shoe box for their son.”
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