A young man, straight out of school, with no cash or the will for college, takes a job
as a janitor at the local morgue.
His friends are like, “Bro, are you serious, you’re gonna work with dead bodies?!”
The guy’s like, the money’s good, the hours aint bad.
And so what, we all die.
At least it’ll be quiet.
Customer satisfaction, bro, guaranteed every time.
And the best thing, the clients are literally queuing outside the door.
Two weeks later, he takes strong sedatives before going to work.
He thinks he’s seen everything now.
What he’s beheld he can’t delete from the hard drive of his mind.
When you ask him what’s wrong he just looks at you with a blank expression and says quietly,
“I see dead people.”
After this you’ve watched this show, you’ll know exactly how he feels.
15.
No one gets out alive What could have possibly happened to that
guy you might now be thinking.
What could a janitor see that would disturb him so much?
Well, we guess that depends on how long you’ve worked at the morgue.
We found a story about a morgue in Sweden and it involved a janitor.
He wasn’t like the janitor in our intro in that he’d worked at the morgue a long
time and knew the pathologist and autopsy assistants well.
But one day he was asked to do something beyond the call of duty.
He was asked to help with the autopsy itself, something not really in a janitor’s purview.
The pathologist later said that having a janitor remove organs from a dead person “wasn't
an ideal solution”, but they were understaffed that day, what else could they do.
So, that’s one thing, don’t think if you’re just a janitor you won’t get up close to
the dead.
Ok, that’s not exactly a hellish story.
We thought we’d ease you into this show.
Now listen to how dead men come back to life.
14.
Return of the living dead In 2020, a man in Kenya was rushed to the
hospital after suffering from excruciating pains in his stomach.
At the hospital, a doctor looked at him and then asked his older brother to go and write
down all of his brother’s details.
When the brother returned, a nurse just said, sorry, your brother passed.
The dead man was sent to the morgue.
Now imagine this, a few hours later one of the assistants in the morgue had just made
a slit in the man’s leg so he could put something called formalin in there.
This is a kind of preservative used so don’t the dead don’t rot on the spot.
Suddenly, the man shot up from the table and started screaming.
There were a few employees around at the time, perhaps some of them a bit superstitious because
they ran around in a state of panic thinking the dead man had been resurrected or they
had a zombie on their hands.
Kenyan BBC, writing in dialect, put those fears to rest quoting the man as saying, “Dis
na di work of God.”
The man later said this to the media, translated from dialect, “I cannot believe what just
happened.
How did they establish that I was dead?”
Well, worse things have happened at the morgue as you’re about to see.
13.
Dog and cats love dead people Some morgues are just too busy.
In 2020, a man went to see his father at a morgue in Venezuela, a country plagued by
economic problems.
As soon as the man entered the place he said he was overwhelmed by the smell of putrefaction.
Maybe that happens, but what he saw next should never happen.
He said one room had so many bodies they were piled on top of each other.
Some of them were rotten and he could see down to their bones.
Below the table, parts of their flesh had dropped onto mats, where there were also dead
worms.
Disgusted, he talked to someone at the morgue, and she said sometimes cats and dogs come
in and feast on the bodies, hence the bits of flesh everywhere.
Another staff member said they did try and scare away the animals, but there were just
too many of them.
He investigated why the place was like this, and a staffer said they were the bodies of
the unclaimed, mostly homeless folks.
He said the freezers hadn’t worked for months and neither had the ACs, so basically scores
of rotting bodies decomposed at a very fast rate.
This is not healthy for the workers of course, but there’s no cash to fix up the place.
One staffer said, “We're like a zoo.
The environment is completely polluted.
We're all afraid for our health.”
12.
Just Chilling In most countries, bodies are refrigerated
at the morgue, but even so, things can go very wrong.
In 2014, a 91-year old Polish woman was declared dead by her doctor.
The family shed their tears, but hey, 91, what you gonna do.
The woman was placed inside one of the fridges at the morgue.
Thankfully, one of the staff noticed that the woman’s body bag was moving a bit, and
of course, it was highly unlikely something had gotten in there with her.
She was in fact, alive, but God knows how.
The doctor later told Polish TV news, “I was sure she was dead.
I'm stunned, I don't understand what happened.
Her heart had stopped beating, she was no longer breathing.”
Apparently, when the woman’s family came, she complained about feeling cold.
She was given some hot soup and some pancakes to warm her up.
It’s probably a blessing that she had dementia because she was unaware of what had happened
to her.
This kind of thing is actually more common than you think, as you will now see.
11.
Embalmed alive Having embalming chemicals injected into your
body you can imagine would be very painful if you woke up during the process.
In 2014, that almost happened to a Kenyan man.
He’d been lying in the chiller for 15 hours and hadn’t moved at all.
He’d been pronounced dead at the hospital after purposefully swallowing insecticide.
Yep, he didn’t want to live.
He got a second chance anyway.
A witness saw the entire thing when the man, about to be pumped with those fluids, just
woke up.
That witness told the media that the mortuary attendant and a worker “took to their heels
screaming” and instead of helping the guy ran out of the room.
How it happened is still a mystery, but it’s thought that a drug that man was given while
he was alive slowed down his heart rate so much it looked like he was dead.
Still, that sounds like a lame excuse for bad doctoring.
10.
It happens in the US, too Some of you Americans might now be thinking,
well, that could never happen here, that couldn’t one day be me...
Oh, it could.
In 2014, a 78-year old man named Walter Williams was pronounced dead.
He wasn’t breathing and had no pulse to speak of.
Many people witnessed this, it wasn’t as if some kid on the street had checked the
pulse.
Sometime later the guy was taken out of the fridge and laid on the gurney as the staff
at the morgue prepared to embalm him.
Suddenly, old Walter just started kicking his feet.
Just imagine if that was you.
It’s assumed that his pacemaker stopped but miraculously when it started again, he
was still alive.
When he got home, he said he was happy to be able to hang around a while longer.
No one really knows how this happened, but according to The Guardian newspaper, it could
have been the fault of the person that pronounced him dead.
Now let’s get spooky.
9.
Dead in the water Ok, so this time the guy was dead, like seriously
dead, dead-dead.
He’d drowned and had been fished out of the water.
Still, later that night as his body was contained in one of the cabinets a mortician said she
heard little tapping noises coming from the cabinet.
Freaked out, she went to inspect.
What had happened is that while the man was in the water a crab had somehow made the dead
man’s body its home.
It just wanted its freedom.
That’s by far not the craziest thing found inside a corpse.
8.
Bang, bang, you’re dead This one is just plain weird.
It’s from a mortician who answered a question regarding what the craziest thing was that
he’d ever seen in his career.
During a busy holiday in the US, a woman was brought in and was absolutely dead, no doubt
about it.
The body was put on the gurney and all the embalming stuff had been connected to her,
so now all the staff had to do was turn on the embalming machine.
After they did that, they could leave her for a while.
While in another room they heard a series of bangs, which was very strange indeed.
At first, they thought it was something like a pacemaker, or maybe even a brain stimulator,
but when they went to inspect her they discovered she had had a very small pistol inside her
most precious cavity.
Yep, this one is kind of unexplainable, although the person said he was aware the woman had
taken her own life.
7.
Strange positions If you’ve seen our many shows on death,
you’ll know very well that due to something called rigor mortis the body can move around
a fair bit when dead.
It’s a myth that bodies just sit up in bed, but they can perform other quite impressive
tricks.
A paper published in the US National Institutes of Health said one body was found “defying
gravity.”
It was laying on its back, but its limbs were raised off the ground.
In fact, we’ve seen the photo and it looks like a yoga position in which someone would
have to break lots of bones, and even then, it’s complex.
The people that wrote about this said if a body is found in such a weird position it’s
usually because a crime had taken place.
Now for something rather disturbing.
6.
Infestation This story comes from someone who was in medical
school but part of the work was to occasionally visit the county medical examiner’s office.
One day a call came from the cops who said they’d found a body that had likely been
in a house for three weeks.
It was a hot summer, too.
When the body arrived at the office it was in a bit of a state, to say the least, and
the smell was terrible.
It turned out that the owner of the house was a hoarder and the place was full of tins
of old cat food and all sorts of stuff you can find in the streets.
Needless to say, it wasn’t tidy.
The person said when they opened up what was left of the body it was just full of insects;
maggots, flies, cockroaches, beetles, and more.
That person said, “I still get the willies thinking about all those bugs pouring out,
running around on the floor, flying around the room.”
5.
Infestation part II Another person you might find around dead
bodies is someone who studies insects.
These folks are called entomologists.
One time one of these guys was called to view a body because by extracting the insects and
studying them you can sometimes get a more precise time of death.
He admitted that the job is grotesque, but one time was much worse than others.
We’d like to describe this ourselves, but the person does such a good job of detailing
what he saw we’ll give the floor to him.
In his own words he said: “The most odious cadaver was the partial
skeletal remains of an eight-month-pregnant mother who gave life to a plethora of maggots,
bot flies, and moth larvae that were consuming her hair like some monstrous funeral shroud.
The tiny bones of the baby were disintegrating under the unrelenting feasting of ham beetles,
as its flesh was too dry for maggots to find purchase; they preferred the malleable flesh
of the mother’s face and breasts.”
We apologize for having to tell you that one.
4.
The eye guy Another person you’ll find in a medical
examiner’s office is someone who takes eyes from the dead so they can be transplanted,
which sounds like a much better occupation than the bug collector.
One guy, or girl, said they had been called in to grab some eyes and had the shock of
their life.
The decomposition of the body wasn’t bad at all, but the face was pretty much all gone.
It had been picked clean, as he said, with the blame being put on a cat or cats.
Hey, if you die, you can’t feed them.
He said at times he’s also had to deal with a pile of bones, hair, and just a lot of goo.
We found tons of human soup stories, but we think they get repetitive after a while.
We’ll just add this, though.
One time a man had died in the bathtub and he had stayed dead in the water for a long
time.
When they found him he really had turned into human soup.
3.
Oops This guy said it had been 40 years since he’d
been an orderly at a hospital but there’s one thing he’d never forget.
He’d been assigned to work in the morgue, which didn’t bother him until he met a 420
pound (190kg) dead woman.
He said she’d been cleaned up and it was time for an autopsy.
He had one simple job to do, but let’s remember the girl was on the heavy side.
That job was to move her from the gurney to the slab.
He at least took the light side, which just meant supporting the head during the transfer.
The problem was, her head was very slippery.
He lost his grip and the woman came crashing down and broke the tiles below her.
Since she was freshly dead, blood pooled around her head.
It turned out that the fall had cracked her skull.
When the doctor saw the mess he looked at the young orderly and told him that it was
good she was deceased because that fall would have killed her.
Ok, so this next one could be the grossest.
2.
Bad doggies One guy worked at the morgue and his job at
times was to go and pick up the dead bodies.
He arrived at one scene to pick up a dead woman and he said the place was an utter mess.
The problem for him was, the body was on the second floor and the way up there was by a
spiral staircase.
Logistically, this made things difficult.
Before he and the team even went to the second floor, the cops warned them that her dogs
had been up there and “got her a little bit”.
Well, that was an understatement, to say the least.
Her body was slumped in a chair, except quite a bit of her was missing.
The dogs hadn’t only eaten her face, but they’d also eaten her breasts.
Her implants they weren’t partial to, so they were on the floor.
The guy said before they’d started eating her, they were so hungry they’d attacked
each other.
As for getting her out of the chair, he said that was some hard work.
She was covered in blisters, something he said you really don’t want to pop because
dead person leakage is just not good for your health.
This is how he said the mission ended: “We loaded her onto the stretcher and carried
her out of the house.
She stank up the minivan all the way back to the city.
It was winter and quite cold out, but we had to drive with all the windows down to try
and survive the putrid odor.”
Right last one.
Let’s move on from gore and tell you a story that will give you nightmares.
1.
Live forever This comes from the Lake County coroner's
office in Chicago.
The senior deputy coroner is a man of science, but he said for years people have talked about
hearing ghostly sounds of people walking around the autopsy room.
Some staff put this down to spirits leaving the body.
He said one time there was a dead woman brought in by the name of Anna.
She’d died in a nursing home in the 1990s.
When she was taken to the morgue she was left with the other dead bodies, but when she was
taken to the funeral home things started to go wild.
He told the Chicago Tribune that the van doors started locking and unlocking and the windows
started going up and down.
When he arrived at the funeral home he got out of the car, but guess what, the doors
locked on him.
Anna was alone in the car.
Another guy told the Tribune that he didn’t believe in ghosts at all, but one day something
strange happened that he couldn’t explain.
He arrived at the scene of an accident only to see a dead 15-year old girl in a crashed
car.
The thing is, the people at the scene all told him they’d watched her walk away from
the accident.
All of them said this.
He was the only one that knew she was dead in the car.
Now you need to watch, “What Actually Happens During an Autopsy.”
Or, for more frights, “Funeral Home Secrets They Don't Want You To Know.”