20 creepy incidents that happened to morgue workers (21 photos)

A Reddit user asked people whose work involves the dead to share the weird, creepy, and downright unusual experiences they've had in their careers. The post has collected more than six thousand comments, and, I must say, each one is worse than the other...





1. “You know how in the movies the pathologist or funeral home worker takes a snack while working and puts his sandwich on the dead man? No one would ever do that in real life, right? Of course not. In my case it was a bowl of cereal."



2. “I once helped with the autopsy of a woman whose body was discovered only a few weeks later, and she had been chewed by cats.”





3. “You haven’t smelled a real stench unless you’ve caught a dead person passing farts.”



4. “I am a refrigeration mechanic, our company entered into a contract with a funeral home that did everything at once (storage, 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 to be the only living person in an ice chest containing 25 corpses."



5. “As a child, my best friend lived above the funeral home that belonged to his family. We played hide and seek in the coffins until one day one of the 'empty' coffins turned out to be not empty at all because they had just received a 'delivery' from another funeral home."



6. “My wife works in a morgue. A lot of strange things happened to her, and this incident was more funny than creepy, but one day she tried to turn the stiff thigh of the deceased, completely extending his leg up. The grip slipped, the leg fell and the heel hit her right in the face, leaving her with a black eye.”



7. “The maggots crawling out of the holes scare me every time.”



8. “As a child, I had a friend whose father was hired to work in the morgue - he had to wash the hair of the dead. The first time he was left to work unattended, he rolled the body under the tap and turned on the water. This was immediately followed by a squeal and a cry of “COLD!” He ran out of this basement like crazy. His boss stood at the door laughing his head off while his partner crawled out from under the gurney.”



9. “I am the director of a funeral home. About 15 years ago a lady came to us whose husband had died in a terrible motorcycle accident. When she came to make funeral arrangements, she mentioned that she wanted to pick up his leather jacket. People often want to take the personal belongings of the deceased, but in this case the jacket was all torn, soaked in blood, and bone fragments were sticking out of it. The pathologist will usually return personal items in a sealed bag. As soon as this lady was given the package, she immediately opened it and put on her jacket. The stench was terrible. I sincerely hope she is okay now."



10. “The funeral home I worked for preferred to embalm the dead as soon as possible. I embalmed a man who had only been dead for half an hour or an hour. He was still warm and rigor had not yet set in. Before I started, I just held his hand for about a minute.”



11. “One of the deceased’s grandchildren staged a hysterical attack at her coffin. In the process, he stole all of her jewelry. This was quickly noticed and a major brawl ensued. The jewelry was returned to its place. Two weeks later, we receive a grandson who needs to be prepared and buried. Fucking creepy."



12. “Sometimes fresh corpses have limbs that shake.”



13. “Sometimes when people die and we turn them over to wash and dress them, they still have air in their lungs and make a 'sigh' sound when they move. I was scared shitless the first time I encountered it.”



14. “I had to go to the funeral home late one night to get something ready for my manager so she could pick up the body because it was a friend of hers and she wanted to get things done quickly. My wife came with me in the car and I headed down to the basement while my wife waited upstairs.

The basement consists of two parts. One is newer, and the old section (which we nicknamed the catacombs) is where we stored coffins, supplies, etc. I was preparing a spare stretcher, checking for gloves and other supplies, when I heard my name called, but the sound was coming from catacombs It was a deep voice that made my hair stand on end. Moreover, I had just been in the catacombs, which made what was happening seem even more creepy.

It wasn't my wife, and we left before my manager arrived, so no one was there. I don’t know what it was, but it definitely scared me.”



15. “I worked in a morgue for several years. We have special techniques to keep the deceased's mouth closed while loved ones say goodbye to him - otherwise, due to the angle of the head and neck, it would be wide open. And one day, during such a farewell, the device malfunctioned, and the mouth of this late gentleman literally fell open.

The lead embalmer was not available, so I did the best I could. He took the family out of the room and sealed their mouths with superglue, but the deceased had no teeth, and superglue definitely didn’t work on the lips alone. It looked like he was trying to scream. I had to call another morgue in town, and the embalmer used a giant needle and thread to sew the deceased's mouth shut from chin to roof of mouth."



16. “I once delivered pizza to a crematorium. The dude put the pizza on the cardboard coffin to get the money, and I couldn't take my eyes off the box on the conveyor belt leading into the crematorium chamber. I said: “Somehow disrespectful, no?” The dude turned around and simply said, “Oh, don’t worry about him, he doesn’t mind.”



17. “I worked at a funeral home for a while. At the very beginning, after about a month, I had to work on a holiday weekend. Only the carriers and I worked. They came, delivered the body and immediately left. I thought they were still there and wanted to ask something. I walked into the embalming room and when I opened the door this dude was SITTING ON A GURNEL looking right at me and I literally wet my pants from fright. It turns out that the body was brought from the district hospital. This guy died while in a semi-sitting position, and rigor mortis set in.”



18. “The most terrible incident happened when I was alone in the morgue at 4 in the morning. I used the elevator to lift the body onto the shelf. The corpse was approximately at my eye level when the light suddenly turned off. It was pitch black. I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face, all the fans had turned off, so all I could hear was the rustling of body bags. And then I began to hear disembodied voices. I couldn't make out what they were saying or where they were coming from. The light turned on after a few moments, and I continued working. (Turns out those voices were just an automated message saying “Power out, switching to generator power.” Haha).



19. “Before Covid, I worked in a funeral home, where the management was frankly so-so. I was a funeral assistant and one of the embalmers was very difficult to work with. Her name was AJ. About 4 days before this story, AJ received the body of a man who died of septicemia. He had to be cremated as the body was already in poor condition at the time of death. So AJ had the brilliant idea of ​​leaving this gentleman on a gurney for four days without refrigeration since he was going to be cremated anyway.

Of course, I was tasked with transporting him to the crematorium along with AJ. We entered the embalming room to find the deceased bloated and his urinary catheter leaking gray fluid onto the floor. If the plague had a smell, it would be this liquid. She smelled like a warning to the primitive lizard part of my brain. To describe this liquid as foul-smelling is an understatement. This liquid could be felt and felt in the air.

AJ and I put on our gear and luckily, since she had already placed it on the gurney, we didn't have to do much strain to move the body. Unfortunately, the gurney was relatively old and one of the wheels had to be manually unlocked with your hands as the foot pedal was too rusty.

AJ told me to unlock the wheel and I carefully leaned over and did so. And then she had the brilliant idea to jokingly shake the gurney violently, causing gray sludge to flow over the edge and onto the top of my head, getting under my eye protection and mask. I closed my mouth and eyes so that the liquid flowing down them would not get inside, and calmly walked into the employee toilet in a kind of numb state of shock. When the funeral home owners noticed my video, they sent me home with pay for the rest of the day.”



20. “My brother worked in a morgue. He once told me a story about how one day he was in one part of the building (a funeral home) and suddenly heard a muffled scream. He went to the front doors to see if there was anyone there calling for help, but he saw no one. He shrugged and went back to work... and then he heard it again.

He said it sounded like two men and a woman screaming. He looked around, but could not find the source of the sound... he then checked the body preparation room, where he heard the same screams just outside the door... inside, two men and one woman were lying on tables. This is definitely the creepiest incident in his life (or at least that he told me).”