Author: Matt Gilligan / Source: did you know?
Being a mortician has to be a pretty bizarre job. I’m sure some people are great at it and totally comfortable with all that it entails, but regularly working with dead bodies has to be unsettling at times.
AskReddit users who work as morticians share the strangest things they’ve found on bodies.
DEAD BODIES.1. The buckle
“My father owns a crematory in Texas, we once cremated a man (with no clothes and not in any container) and along with his ashes came a massive belt buckle. I kid you not, we have no idea how it got in him but it was definitely there. It could have been from someone else, but we never cremate with cloths or in a container, so at least somebody has a belt buckle in them!
And for those curious, burning someone without clothes or not in a container isn’t a big deal. After a while, you become very desensitized to death. You really do get a good grasp on how a person’s body is nothing more than matter after their conscience has moved on. That being said, nobody but us, unrelated crematory operators, see the body at this time.”
2. Pierced junk
“Paramedic here.
For our morgue rotation, I saw a couple of interesting cases. The first guy was an older-middle aged black guy, found in his apartment that was sealed very well. He was NEON GREEN. Not really decomposed but intact and actually green. He had HIV, Hep C and all the comorbidities that come with those.
The pathologist said it was a mixture of all his meds and the environment of the apartment.
The next guy was a suicide who jumped from a bridge, he shattered his legs from the landing in the water.
He got caught on a piece of floating debris and half the body was submerged and half above water.The half above the water was mummified by the sun and the other half a bloated watery mess.
The last guy was brought in as we were cleaning up. Approximately 40-year-old man, morbidly obese still wrapped in his blanket from home. He had an apparent heart attack from all the coke and physical exertion with the woman he hired to sleep with him (who called 911) and then took off after taking all his money.
When they took the blanket off, this guy had THE BIGGEST piercing on his junk that anyone has ever seen. When they opened him up his heart was the size of my head.”
3. A mouse
“The weirdest thing was in a woman’s intestine. A dead mouse. Tiny little thing, too. Obviously, I never got the chance to ask how the mouse got there as this was post-mortem. Definitely unexpected though.
Later someone suggested it might be because of a mental illness. They used to work in a psych ward that had to place a patient on an ‘object restriction’ because she would place anything and everything up her lady bits.
Broken light bulbs, rings, pencil erasers, broken pencils… She always had to have a 1:1 (which means a staff member always had to be within arms reach of her and always have her in their sight) because she was so eager to shove anything she could find up there.
This is not uncommon and is usually a sign of extreme abuse.
Another weird one was 3 golf balls in a man’s stomach. His cause of death was lung cancer. Still trying to figure out how he ate golfballs/how long they were in there considering he was on life support for 2 weeks before he died.”
4. Horrific
“A mummified fetus.I was working in Africa and the usually very stoic Congolese surgeons called me into the OR, gagging. The patient was an elderly woman with a protruding abdominal mass.When they opened it, they found that it was a long, long dead mummified fetus which, as a result of an ectopic pregnancy, had somehow managed to both wall off after it died and somehow avoid killing the mother.
Her body had encapsulated the alien tissue and over the years, it had slowly eroded her anterior abdominal wall to the point where it finally caused her to have enough symptoms to get something done about it.
It was horrific and the smell was worse.
Happily, though, the patient survived the procedure and just left the surgical team with a gruesome memory.”
5. Still haunts me…
“He wasn’t quite dead yet, but he would be.
A guy came in for an outpatient MRI of his cervical spine. On the form where it asks if he ever had any metal in his body (specifically asks if he had been injured by a metal object), he selected no.
Same with a verbal questionnaire. Also, we do a keyword search in the patient’s hard chart for the term foreign body in case it’s documented – nothing came up.
He lays down, and I start taking images while talking to him through the speaker.
During one of the image sets, he starts pounding on the inside of the scanner and screaming. Figured he was claustrophobic, so…
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