Everyone dies (sorry to bum you out) but some people die in much weirder (and grosser) ways than most. Morgue workers, pathologists, and medical examiners share their freakiest stories and we're warning you now---things get graphic.
The football-sized hernia
Worked at a funeral home for a few years. First ever house call I took was to pick up a guy who died at home. Heard from his son that he hadn’t been to the doctors in 20 years. We take him to the medical examiner and discover he had a hernia on his scrotum causing it to be the size of a football. Not sure how he lived with that thing, but he was wearing jeans and a jockstrap to keep that thing in. His toenails looked like dragon toenails as he obviously couldn’t bend over to clip them. You know it’s f_cked up when the medical examiner calls another medical examiner on duty to say “hey dude, come check this out.” Source
A slow, silent death
Was a police officer and helped with a case where there was a guy in his 50s who died laying on his couch, he had told friends he wasnt feeling well for a couple days and figured it was some cardiac related event.
Nope.
Ready for an irrational fear? Guy had undiagnosed hemochromotosis (high iron) that destroyed his liver, his ongoing cirrhosis and the liver’s inability to process blood as fast as it was being pumped cause vericose veins in the lining of his esophagus. This was a decades long process. One day one or more of the esophageal verices ruptures and the guy slowly bleeds to death through his digestive system while thinking he had a stomach bug or something only to die taking a nap.
Get regular physicals folks. Source
The missing ring
Well not a dead body but….
I was a security guard at a hospital in Alaska. One of my duties was to bring deceased folk to the morgue, so I had a key to it. Get a radio call that some patient’s wife wants her husband’s wedding ring back. I assumed it would be on a deceased person.
I go to the morgue to look for it. I look all over, no gold ring. I even open the coolers, no bodies. I then look in the fridge. Body parts and a little Igloo cooler. I look inside that…
It looks like very old banana peels. I glove up and pull some out. Turns out this guy had gotten his hand shredded in machinery. I had to get the mangled ring off his mangled hand and clean it off and go give it to her. Source
Incredibly bad luck
The short of it: Man died from endometrial cancer. Man had a transplant prior, woman who gave transplant had metastatic cancer that had spread to said organ unknowingly. Man survived transplant but cancer cells from the transplanted organ populated and he ending up dying from HER cancer. Source
Probably the worst place to get stabbed…
My dad told us that they once had a guy bleeding out on the table from a stab wound. They stopped the bleeding but his vitals were still taking a dive. Someone points out there’s too much blood. They turn him, it’s coming out of his butt. Someone had stuck a light bulb up this guy’s ass, broken it, and stabbed him when he tried to escape – and he still escaped. They stabilized him but he died of septic shock. This was told to us over dinner, mind you. Source
The closet alcoholic
I’m an apprentice funeral director, but we had an autopsy tech come into my school once to do an autopsy demonstration. He was asked this very question and this was his answer. Male, mid 50’s presented with jaundice and other signs of alcoholism but supposedly no history of drinking. During preliminary observation techs noted a red liquid coming from the anal area. Assuming blood it was tested. Came back as red wine and blood. Turns out the deceased was a closet alcoholic who would give himself enemas with whatever alcohol he had, in this case red wine, the doctors concluded he pierced part of his colon/rectum with whatever he enema’d himself with and led to a bleed. Source
The “Predator” mouth
Working the ambulance for a “barricaded male.” After an hour of standby, trying not to fall asleep, a cop bangs on our window frantically to call us into the house. Guy put a shotgun in his mouth but must have flinched last minute and blew his face off. He was left with just a “screamhole” that was fluttering flaps of torn flesh not unlike a Predator mouth for a face. Only time I ever saw an ER nurse shriek at the site of it. Source
The guy with a missing lung
Did an internship at the office of the chief medical examiner. Guy committed suicide in a river by wearing a backpack of rocks. Was found soon and didn’t have much bloating etc due to the submersion. Upon examination, he had a lung infection where his right lung had disintegrated into green liquid. We removed 1.5 liters of green fluid from his chest cavity. His left lung was fine. It was determined after looking at his medical records that he had been to the doctors office five times before he committed suicide and that this infection had been going on for almost a year until it got this bad. Numerous doctors had overlooked it. Accounts from those who knew him suspected that he killed himself to stop the pain. Source
There are no words…
My ex-employer was a funeral director/coroner in Nebraska. He told some crazy stories.
Found a guy dead in his laundry room. Glass bottle taped to the agitator on the washing machine. Broke when the guy attempted to pleasure himself by sitting on it. End result: all his guts were in the wash tub.
Suicide by train. The guy basically exploded but his brain landed perfectly intact between the tracks.
Lots of horse f_cking stories where guys are kicked to death and found with their pants off in the stables. Source
Death by testosterone
Former biological anthropologist, as an undergrad I worked for a forensic anthropologist. This is the weirdest case she had that I got to see for myself.
It was from the 1920’s. My boss had inherited a coroner’s collection of odd/interesting bones he collected during his tenure in a major city. Back then, coroners could just take whatever they wanted from bodies without telling the families. If the individual was poor/indigent/an immigrant/a minority they really helped themselves, sometimes taking the whole body. This coroner took a LOT of stuff, even rearticulating some of the pieces, reconstructing how they looked when they were attached to the rest of the person.
So anyway, she has this collection she inherited, and several of the pieces are designated what she calls “death by testosterone poisoning.” They did not literally die of testosterone poisoning, but they all died because of risky, stupid, ridiculous actions. Think Jackass, only with no monetary payout. The weirdest one was from early last century, a white man in his 40’s who died from sepsis from multiple arm fractures that he got in an arm wrestling contest. Whymultiple fractures? Because even after cracking his humerus (upper arm bone) a bit, he couldn’t bear losing, so he just wrapped it up with some kind of splint, had some guy hold the fracture (just a crack at that point) and went for best 2 out of 3, whereupon he snapped the humerus all the way through, and broke his radius and ulna when he slammed his arm down on the edge of the table in anger (the preserved bones came with the whole story recounted in the coroner’s notes). One of the lower arm bones, (radius or ulna, I can’t remember which) protruded through the skin, and being too cheap/too stupid to see a doctor, the wound became gangrenous, and the infection entered his bloodstream. He died of septicemia a few weeks later. Looking at the bone, I could see all of the fractures, as well as where the infection had a attacked the periosteum and the bone itself, with no sign of healing. Source
The worst, most brutal delivery
This isn’t very uncommon, but what they had to do to save the mother was. I was doing clinical rotations and was told this story by an NP who used to work in India. So, nurse practitioner is helping a doctor deliver a baby in India. Well when the baby was dropping into the birth canal its shoulder and head got stuck. The doctor stuck his hand up to try and reposition the baby but it wouldn’t reposition. Baby died in birth canal. They still have to get the child out of the mother. Since the baby can’t come out vaginally, they opt for a caesarean. The mother gets opened up, and they still can’t get the baby’s head and shoulder unstuck. Try everything. They end up having to behead the child (remember child is already dead) while in the mother. Take the body out through caesarean and mother has to deliver baby’s head. Source
The fatal bump
I’m a criminal defense attorney. Had a client charged with murder for essentially getting into a shoving match with a guy. No external bruising or scratching. No evidence of trauma anywhere. They opened his head and found a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Turned out he had a ton of booze and blow in the tox report. The coke had constricted the blood vessels and driven the blood pressure up and the booze had thinned the blood out. When he bumped his head slumping back that was all it took and he blew out and was dead in less than a minute. Really sad case. Source
Everyone’s worst nightmare…
Friend is an autopsy tech. Apparently it’s not uncommon for cats or small dogs to eat the hands and face off a dead or incapacitated owner. His worst was an elderly woman who was paralyzed, but not killed, by a stroke and her little dog ate all her exposed skin before she was found. He did her autopsy after she died several hours after being admitted to the hospital. Source
That’s some summer job…
I’ve seen quite a bit. Working at the OCME has been a summer job that morphed into a side job while I’m in school. The top 3 most unusual calls I’ve been on:
A man went to hang himself and when he jumped off of his apartment balcony he left so much slack that it took his head off. His head was on one lady’s balcony and his body was on the ground. When we were there, we couldn’t find the head so we had to knock on a couple doors where the rope was hanging to in order to find it.
A man died of a heart attack while masturbating. The responding officers left the porn playing on the television just to make it awkward when I arrived. It was a cassette.
A man was sitting on the railroad tracks at a railroad crossing to commit suicide by train (where is very messy and annoying to have to pick up, mind you) but a drunk driver was “trying to catch air” over the tracks and killed the guy but threw his body off of the tracks before the train came a couple of minutes later. Source
That’s…umm…unfortunate…
Work in a nursing home/rehab. Guy essentially died from pooping. He pushed too hard, blood pressure dropped and that was it for him. Source
Death by misadventure
I worked briefly as a morgue assistant a few years back. The job mainly consisted of moving corpses and holding organs while the pathologist did his thing. By far the most WTF worthy death I saw was a guy who had been working in a factory, getting himself off by rubbing his cock on the underside of the high speed conveyor belt he was meant to be operating. He got caught and it tore off most of his crotch. Ruled as death by misadventure, he had bled out (torn femoral artery) before the paramedics even made it to the scene. Source
A deadly fungi
My grandfather did some work as a doctor in Indonesia. He told us stories of people who’d had pathogens living in them and eating them from the inside out, some in really grotesque ways. Some people had fungus on them that basically sucked their lives away.
So not a coroner, but still kinda interesting and gross. Source