21 Morgue Workers Share Their “Worst Of” Stories
Murders
“We ended up attending a man who had committed suicide after killing his girlfriend. He had caved the back of her head in with a blunt object and hanged her in a spare room, before hanging himself.
The weirdest part of it is that he didn’t kill himself straight away. Her body had decomposed more than his has, and the police on scene estimated she had been dead for around 4 or 5 days before he killed himself.” — Demaikeru
Eerie scenes
“Hangings are always very eerie scenes.They somehow seem staged, cinematic, unreal.
And it’s odd what sticks in your memory. Like how neatly they placed their slippers beside the ladder, or how rough the knot is.” — IrrelevantPuppy
Trapped inside the morgue
“Someone calling “Help!” and banging on the door of the morgue from the inside. The door had been rigged to stay shut from the outside.
No zombies, it was a very alive and very terrified woman. The housekeeping staff were hazing a newbie who was terrified of bodies.” — Abaiyachi
This is absolutely a “worst of” story
“I work in a hospital in infection control, and occasionally I am needed down in the morgue when there is a containment issue.
On this night, a body was brought in under special circumstances. A body was found in a body of water, so the patient was already swollen from that. It has been at least a few days since time of death (this is a guess, I do not have or get access to actually patient files besides the related infectious or biohazard information). This patient did not have an positive results from the lab, so I didn’t understand why I was called in.
What happened was, all suspicious death autopsies are performed at a single location in my state. Since there body was found on a Friday, we were to keep the body in storage until it could be transported on Monday. This is not abnormal, but here’s what happened…
Our body storage is actually just an old walk in freezer from the cafeteria renovation years ago. After the body was brought in, the freezer broker down some time over the weekend, and as they body warmed up, so did the gases in the intestines, resulting in the lower torso exploding on to the cart and floor. It was the most putrid thing I’ve ever had to be a part of.” — Weiner_Queefer_9000
A “meat puzzle”
“Mortuary- We had an older lady, maybe mid 60’s, who looked like a beautiful, youthful 40 year old from the chest up, and like Frankenstein’s monster below that. I’m talking numerous heavy scars all over, misshapen areas of her torso, lots of discoloration and fluid build up. She looked like she had been attacked by a lawnmower and crudely stapled back together. Come to find out she was really into plastic surgery, and even though she had an expensive, well recommended surgeon things started to go wrong. She got infections, her body wasn’t responding well to the surgeries, and every procedure done to fix the previous one just went worse. They pretty much turned her into a living meat puzzle.” — Haceldama
Body fluids
“80+ year old lady passes away on the ward and has haematuria (blood in urine) and a catheter. She was palliative an expected to pass away so the catheter is to be removed on performing last offices. When I did so a crazy amount of urine that pretty much looked like blood gushed out. I was not prepared. I brushed it off and carried on but my word it was like something out of a horror movie. I assumed he catheter had blocked with a clot and the urine just stayed in her bladder, pretty wild and weird anyway.” — Hadgfeet
Twofer
“A seemingly healthy middle aged guy had a heart attack and passed away early one morning. His wife and adult kids came in that afternoon to make arrangements. A few hours later at home, while her family was eating dinner, she went to lay down, had a heart attack of her own and passed away. So we ended up picking up both the husband and the wife at the same time, and no those greedy sonsofbitches didn’t offer the family a discount on the removals.” — Haceldama
Construction paper
“Medical student here, been in the hospitals all this year: we had a patient I’d been following since her admission who had alcoholic liver cirrhosis, and it was horrible to watch. She went from cheerful and talkative to a shaky, catatonic mess within a week. When she died her skin was a neon-yellow; I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies in my time, but I’ve never seen anything like that. Her skin looked like that yellow construction paper from elementary school.” — flowercurtains
Worms
“I had a pt die in ICU that was in his 60’s or so. He was a missionary that came back early from some South American country due to abdominal pain. His bowel had perforated due to parasitic worms. When he dies, the abdomen was still wiggling. I cleaned him up and bagged him and prayed that the worms didn’t come thru. Hope the morgue freezer killed those things. That was the most gross thing I have ever witnessed in many deaths I have seen.” — peprjak24
Rigor Mortis
“The first time I touched a dead body, I went with a fellow healthcare assistant to perform last offices (washing the body, putting them in a shroud and moving them into a body bag). The family had stayed for quite a long time after death and nobody had thought to lower the head of the bed. So when we went to put the bed flat, the body stayed in a propped up position despite the lack of support. Having to roll someone around who was stuck in a V shape wasn’t the best introduction to handling dead bodies and the porters gave us a funny look when they came to pick the body up.” — DaughterOfTheStorm
Amazing Grace
“A couple of years ago I ran a suicide by shotgun to the head. He’s at the far end of a large sized bedroom, there’s brain matter on the door we entered in. At least 20-25 feet of travel. Freakiest part was that near the body was a framed picture with the words to Amazing Grace hanging on the wall, blood and brain matter streaked down the front.” — Captain-Red-Beard
It could be someone you know
“I (26M) work for a funeral home part time. They are contracted with the county medical examiner’s office to transport bodies to the hospital morgue. We go where they have passed and bag them for transport. I live in a town where drug overdoses happen frequently. I have transported most of my classmates from highschool. Finding out your highschool friend has died by asking the officer on scene for the information to fill out the paperwork is hard. Putting your friend in a body bag is even harder.” — hind_sights2020
Murders and cover-ups
“Obligatory ‘I’m not a morgue worker and this doesn’t quite fit’, but our lecturer told us about how, when he was a student, the police came to examine the body (an elderly person) he was dissecting. As it turns out, another elderly person had been murdered by their doctor, the same doctor who had treated my lecturer’s cadaver before their death. The police needed to examine the cadaver to see if it had also been murdered, which it had. I’m assuming the doctor was found guilty.” — Arashi_Kanashimi
The farts
“I used to recover eyes for cornea transplants from all the morgues and funeral homes in a large metro town. All hours of the day and night.
Was in a funeral home in the middle of the night any all the otehr staff were gone. They had a 6 drawer cooler and I was examining the donor when one of the other bodies farted the loudest fast I have heard from anyone, live or dead. I thought someone was playing a prank on me and that someone else was there in the morgue with me. I almost wet myself.
Oh, and you have smelt nothing until you have smelt the farts of the dead.” — TheGarp
Morgue pranks
“My uncle used to run a funeral home. He wanted my cousins to get into the business, but they wouldn’t. He convinced my dad that he should send me down for a summer when I was 17, to see if I’d be interested in it since none of his kids were.
My cousin thought it would be hilarious to hide in a bag and pop up and scream.” — Esmerelda-Weatherwax
Moving bodies
“My sister is a deputy coroner and one night she went to prepare a body and it had moved to the other side of the morgue. She was so scared she called my mom to come get her. The next morning it turns out it was just the other coroner.” — [deleted]
“Running the bowl”
“You cut the entire length of the intestine with a scissor to look for any diverticuli or ulcerations etc… usually a lot of horrible things come out.” — [deleted]
“Milking the bowel”
“Not a morgue attendant, but a medical student who has been through anatomy and had a cadaver to dissect. One lab was titled, “Milking the bowel”. This involved tying off the rectum from the large bowel and cutting it, then squeezing the poop out of the rectum so as to “prevent contamination of surrounding structures”. It accomplished exactly the opposite of that.” — LaikasSpaceMix
Necrophilia
“I once saw a man having sex with a decreased woman. That’s it.” — marked-one
People who won’t honor their loved ones last request
“I was a makeup artist for 5 years (hence the mua), and had a friend who worked at a funeral home. He did all sorts of odd jobs, from transporting bodies to doing makeup for funerals and viewings (which he was originally hired for, but ended up doing all sorts of things). He didn’t have any crazy stories, only a family that insisted the father NOT be wearing any lipstick.
So he was at the viewing, waiting patiently just outside the door to greet and thank visitors, when three mourners completely broke down upon viewing the body. Apparently the father had been a crazy drag queen, and his fellow drag queens were so heartbroken that the family hadn’t followed the father’s last requests.” — torontomua
It’s too much
“My twin bro was an EMT who responded on a gunshot wound to the head (patient was still alive! died shortly after arriving at the hospital). He took a couple weeks off after that one.
His first call after getting back on the ambulance was a hanging.
“Fuck this shit, I’m done!”
He did nothing but run transfers and teach classes for the remainder of his time at the ambulance company. Then he went to medical school and became an OB/GYN, so he could see people getting born rather than dying.
He has never described the hanging scene to me. I’m not gonna ask.” — insertcaffeine
