I had a friend who was dating a guy who worked in a morgue. One day she finds pictures that he had hidden which showed him having s*x with different dead bodies.
It's horrifying to think that someone can do this, but it's personally horrifying to think of someone raping my dead body. It's become a personal phobea.

So many. But you get used to it.

Fat people purge when they die, and usually end up with vomit all over their face from the weight on their gut.
I end up feeling resentful of some very overweight people because I know I will have to pick them up when they die, and there’s a chance it’ll throw out my back.

Summertime=maggots.

Babies just look like they’re sleeping. Very peaceful.

Coworker unknowingly picked up his own estranged son who had overdosed in a car.

Picked up a 4 year old boy in Batman pajamas. Won’t ever forget that. That one was the worst

Also since I have you, I’ve noticed an uptick in young teen suicides in the last year. If you have someone in your life who is a young teenager (or anyone really) check in with them. Let them know they’re loved. I’m tired of picking up dead bullied girls.

Well this was not really a mortuary, but I was a student many years ago in the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Bill Bass, a sort of P.T. Barnum of Forensic Anthropology (not a faker, but a hell of a promoter) was the department head and a major focus of the department was forensic anthropology. (This was also before DNA testing, so skeletal forensics was essential in identifying bodies that were partially decayed.)

Dr. Bass would get about 15-20 cases every years--decayed or skeletal remains to hopefully identify or at least profile (race, s*x, approximate age, any distinguishing characteristics, and sometimes, cause of death). Usually these were vagrants, crime victims, or just historic or prehistoric (Native American) remains.

One time in West Tennessee they found a clothed but fully skeletonized body in a patch of dense vegetation in a little town in West Tennessee. The local sheriff and coroner loaded the body in the back of a pickup truck and drove the corpse all the way across the state (400 miles) to Knoxville so Dr. Bass could do an ID.

When the truck arrived, Dr. Bass went out and opened the body bag to find a complete skeleton that remained fully dressed. He looked the body up and down and then reached into the front pocket of the corpse's jeans and pulled out a wallet, which he opened to read off the name, address, race, height and hair and eye color of the deceased. The Sheriff and the Coroner were a bit embarrassed.

It turned out the dead guy had only been missing for about a week, but in the dense foliage of a West Tennessee thicket in mid-summer, the bugs and Beatles had completely stripped his bones of flesh. (Bass did do a follow-up to make sure the driver's license and the corpse were a match.)

Dr. Bass had many interesting cases... He founded the infamous Body Farm, has written several books (fiction and non-fiction) and has is featured (in fictional form) in many of Patricia Cornwell's crime novels.

Lady I work with used to pick up the bodies for the coroner. One time they had to collect a woman that was laying in a very hot attic apartment for a couple months. All her liquids ran out onto the floor and dried and when they tried to pick her up she started coming apart like an overly tender turkey. Her coworker sent her to the van to get more bags and when she got back he had finished bagging the lady. Classy. Changed how I think about turkey.

I'm still working on my licenses, so I'm not officially a funeral director and embalmer yet, but I've been going to the medical examiner's office to practice embalming with my school for several months now.

The people we work on down there are not in very good shape, usually dead at least a month before we get to see them. Needless to say, it's not a one-artery, low formaldehyde job. Each week we raise a minimum of six arteries (both carotids, both femorals, and both axillaries), plus the two radials if there's some trouble getting fluid distribution to the hands and forearms. To put into perspective, a typical funeral home case would only need one, maybe two arteries depending on the embalmer's preference.

There aren't a lot of "creepy" or "bizarre" cases that stick out in my mind, but uncomfortable things definitely come up. Whenever there's a young person on the table is sad. The degree of decomp can lead to a lot of difficult nights. The smell alone can really get to you.

The thing that always spooks me, though, is when I'm raising an axillary artery. The site that we look for it is the area directly distal (towards fingers, away from body mass) to the armpit. There are a lot of tendons and such in there, as well. When you're holding the person's arm up, digging around near the tendons, sometimes their arm will move. It happens a lot, but I still get momentarily terrified when the person "grabs" me.

Other than that, there's not much I can contribute to this question. I know some second-hand stories from other people, but anything directly from me isn't too exciting. I have lots of stories of conventionally gross things, but nothing really bizarre.

Mom was a mortician. Of the stories she’s told me, creepiest would either be the guy that had his face eaten off by wild boars while hunting(guess he wasn’t that good at it) or the guy that fell into a wood chipper. Funny(ehhhh....poor word choice) thing was, I was at a breakfast a few days later where fellow high schoolers were trying to gross out the girls at the table, and when they pointed out that I wasn’t really bothered by it, I kept chewing and said, “Yeah, my mom got that guy. Said it was f*****g gross.” Everyone goes silent, I stopped chewing and looked up to everyone looking pale. Shrugged, “Oh, y’all forgot she’s a mortician didn’t you”, and kept eating.

Uncomfortable for her was one that was also kind of sad. This woman was morbidly obese. Like, when they somehow all got her on the gurney at her home, when they were pushing it out, the wheels were pushing indentions down into the wood floors. Now this woman is what some bullies would call “a whale”. I wouldn’t, but we all know a******s. Well, apparently this woman loved the s**t out of some blue whales. Family kept going on and on about it. So the time comes for them to bring the clothes for her wake, they bring a big blue muumuu and a gaudy blue whale brooch. Then they hand her the cd to play. Usually it’s church hymns or sad country songs etc. No one listens to it before, because why would you. So the service starts, Mom pops the cd in, *boop* G*****N BLUE WHALE CALLS fill the funeral home. My mom was very professional with her job, but every funeral director had to excuse themselves to compose themselves.

Sorry for c**p formatting, on phone

Not me, but my best friend works in the death business... so, since she doesn’t have a reddit account I’m going to steal her karma because this is my favorite story. She tells me all sorts of lovely things about her job and the recoveries she has done but my favorite involves a gurney and some stairs. To set the scene, a family called in that their mother had passed in her apartment. Third story, narrow halls and no elevators. Anyways, she goes to pick up the body to take back to the funeral home with an assistant. So they get up there and lift this woman who is close to 300 lbs on to the gurney and begin their journey down to the van. Mind you, the whole family was there and pretty much in hysterics and crowd around as they make their way to the stairs. With family watching, they make it about halfway down the first flight of stairs when the body starts to slide. There’s no way to reposition so my friend who is at the foot of the gurney is now about a*s level to the freshly deceased. So, trying to make the best of the situation they continue their way down and try not to shift the body anymore. The thing about dead bodies is that gas starts to exit pretty quickly and I’m sure you know where my story is going. The body started letting out farts straight into my friend’s face. Pfffft, Pfft, Pfft, Pfft with every step down they take, and this poor girl has to keep a straight face while getting crop dusted by a dead lady with her whole family watching.

Tl;dr Nothing worse than dead a*s.

My ex inlaws were in the death business. They told me a story once about the county attorney whose wife passed away. The family was very wealthy and she had a mouth full of gold fillings. The attorney demanded that my inlaws retrieve the gold from her mouth. This required using a dental drill to drill down her teeth and dig out the gold. My ex father in law complied with the attorney’s wishes but was physically ill about having to do such a needless step to this lady.

Not a mortician but in middle school my friends‘ dad was. This wasn’t a situation about a body, just the mortician himself. He was a single dad and my friend’s sister was going to a school dance but hadn’t put on much makeup before and she didn’t want to be late. So the mortician dad volunteered to do it for her because “I put on peoples makeup every day.” When he finished she looked in the mirror and freaked out “I look like I’m dead!” He just nonchalantly said “what did you expect? I’ve only ever worked with dead people before” and just walked away.

I wish there was a picture of it, she looked like a deranged undead clown.

I always think of the person who was eating some fish that hadn't been properly de-boned and a sharp bit of bone he'd swallowed pierced his bowels which lead to sepsis, which eventually killed him. Oye. Since that day I have always been extra paranoid and careful when eating fish.

Idk this fits here but I saw a guy hit a deer on a motorcycle while on the highway, face-plant, be ran over by his gf behind him on her motorcycle and then she eats s**t. Long story short, he had no face; no teeth, no eyes or nose. She was really bad too, basically no face as well. Word of advice: wear a full face helmet.

A mother curled up around a toddler. However, that's too normal, no the mothers skin melted so the child was *inside of the melted mothers body*. Worst/best part? The kid was still alive. I found out after cutting the melted skin away and hearing a scream. Holy f*****g hell. Oh, and now, 8 years later, that kid has a scar on his arm where the surgeon ( the one for living people ) couldn't get the moms skin off. He says he always has a part of her in him. He's so dark, he could be my friend.

Not a mortician but this is related. My dad is a Property and Evidence Custodian at our state toxicology lab. He received some body fluids the other day from an autopsy that declared the man had accidently hung himself on his Life Alert necklace. Like, the guy just rolled out of bed, and the necklace got caught on something and suffocated him.

Ironic death but silver lining, good to know those necklaces can take a lot I guess.

So not so mysterious but my family use to live in a mortuary when I was a child. We could live there for free but my father would have to be "on-call" for periods of time; which meant going and picking up the deceased from wherever they may be.

One such instance a large apartment complex started smelling something terrible coming from a particular room. Landlord found the old lady that lived there dead in the bathtub. Not so disturbing, right?

Well, my father goes to pick up the body. 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 (they estimated) is she lay there in 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. My father said that 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.".

My ex was a cop, he got called to a s*****e by chainsaw, they arrived after the ambulance so were spared having to see the scene. Apparently the guy just started the chainsaw and let it fall back into his head.

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.

I asked the ME, and 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 ol Mrs Joe Camel sits right down on her sofa on her porch at home, plops the oxygen tank down next to her, and- oxygen tubes still in her nose- lights up her very last cigarette.

Boom.

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 s*****e 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.

Mortician here. The most f****d up case I ever handled was an elderly woman and her 40-something son. They lived in the same aparment and he cared for her 24/7 because she was paralyzed from the neck down. He had a heart attack and collapsed, dead, beside her bed. After about 3 weeks the landlord became suspicious when the rent had not been paid and found them. It gives me nightmares thinking about that poor old woman laying there starving to death while smelling the stench of her dead son. Her cause of death was "inanition" which I had to google.

Also had a lady last week who was rather large (not tryin to be mean...I'm a big gal myself) and fell in the bathtub and could not get up. Due to the way she had fell she was sitting on her legs. When they found her 3 days later and picked her up her legs were dead and the dead blood and toxins seeped up into her body and sepsis killed her. Imagine laying in that bathtub for 3 days watching your legs turn black. *shudder*.

I'm a firefighter. One of my buddies told me a story of his first fire. It was a single story, single family house. He made entry in the front door and started searching for victims while pulling a hose line to the fire. When he made it to the fire room he opened the door and went in. In a chair on his left there was a cpr mannequin sitting in a chair with a teddy bear right in front of it. He moved past it and got closer to the fire. The fire had fully engulfed the room and was a pain in the a*s to put out, but after about 10 minutes he was able to knock down the bulk of the fire. When it was completely out and he started to leave the room he noticed that the mannequin wasn't actually a cpr mannequin. It was a 3 year old boy who had been burnt so badly his skin was melting. When he grabbed the kid and tried to pull him away the kids skin sloughed off and stuck to the chair. The teddy bear was melted to his chest. He pulled the kid out of the house and started cpr. The kid ended up dying from the burns. There was a five year old girl with him who also died. The parents had left the kids alone that night to go to a party. When the 3 year old fell asleep on a bean bag chair he knocked over a lamp right next him which caught the chair on fire. Soon the kid was on fire as well. He started running around the room burning. He tried to open his bedroom door but the door had one of those plastic childproof things on it so he couldn't get it open. Eventually the kid gave up, grabbed his favorite teddy bear and sat in a chair. That's where my buddy found him. The girl died of smoke inhalation.

This is a huge, huge, HUGE tangent, but I gotta tell this story.

My maternal Grandfather was not the smartest man. He ran a successful funeral home, so he did have that going for him. One day, he decided he was going to get into politics. Does he decide to run for the local town council? Nope. He decides to run for coroner (despite not being a qualified meidcal examiner; that was ok back in the day).

Only problem was when he made all of his political signs. Instead of the signs saying "Grandpa DudeManJones for Coroner," they all said "Grandpa DudeManJones for Corner."

He lost the election, but he would've made a d**n fine corner.

My dad told me a few stories.

1) A guy had shot himself in his upstairs duplex, and he was up there for so long that his blood and other decay started to leak through the ceiling below. It was only when that happened that the people downstairs went to check on him.

2) Another guy from my town committed some crime and decided to skip his court date. He went on the run and his body was found many days later in the river. My dad said pieces of the guys skin would fall off if you touched him and he was extremely bloated. I remember the stench on my dad when he came home from that one.. He had to throw his clothes away.

3) He picked up another body who had slipped and fell under and oil drill thing (don't know the appropriate name) and the guys head was cut clean off.

These were regular stories told at our dinner table. I had an interesting childhood to say the least, but it was always fascinating!