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.”
