45 Autopsy Experts Reveal Their Weirdest And Most Unique Finds: “There Was No Brain”

My dad had a kidney ailment and was one of the first people to receive kidney transplants. In fact, because of the nature of his disease, he had received three kidney transplants by the time he died. He intentionally donated his body to science in the hopes of freaking out some poor student when they autopsied him for a class and kept pulling out kidneys like they were some twisted meat handkerchiefs from a corpse clown or something.

I miss my dad. He was awesome.

I did an autopsy of a young kid around 10 yrs old who had hydrocephalus and was altho quadriplegic yet retained some of his normal functions. Like talking and understanding, albeit minimally.
When I opened his skull, there was no brain. I was shocked. This was my first time witnessing something like this but there was approx 1.5L of fluid and just an empty skull. The brain was so severely atrophied it was tinier than a golf ball. Amazing how he survived till 10!

I've never performed an autopsy, but my friends (they were 3 siblings) growing up had a pathologist for a father. I was over their house so much, that I became a fixture in the family/included in most of their adventures.

Me and the oldest son got a hold of some liquor one night and got wasted. My father is an alcoholic, and it gave me a bad homelife/probably was a significant factor as to why I basically moved in with them.

We were caught. I was nervous and sad, expecting them to deem me a bad influence, and abandon me, a cycle I was familiar with. Their parents beckoned me in to the dining room, wanting a private talk. I braced for the worst, but Instead they sat me down, told me they loved me, and that I had to be careful with alcohol due to a*******n having genetic components. We talked a long time, and when it was over they informed Me I wasn't off the hook yet. Apparently they had a surprise for me and their son, which would blow my mind.

The next morning we were woken, and told to get dressed and get in the car with my friends dad (the pathologist). He drove us to his work, where he showed us a cadaver and the liver of a middle aged man who died of cirrhosis. It burned in my brain and I never forgot it. It had such an impact on me to see how alcohol destroys the body.

While I wish I could say i escaped alcoholism, I would go on to have my own struggles. But they probably would have been a lot worse if it weren't for this experience!

Not a regular autopsy performer, but I do a lot with forensic archaeology (mostly natural mummies now) and had to take an A&P class that involved cadaver dissection. Female patient died at 102 of natural causes. We found that the joint of her left elbow was replaced with something that legitimately looked like a car part. It turns out she’d lived somewhere in Soviet Eastern Europe and had the procedure done some time in the 1960s, and it looked like that replacement was done with whatever they had available. It was absolutely incredible.

An old woman with an incredibly thick skull all the way around. Her brain was much much smaller than it should have been but according to her family she was fully functional and displayed no deficits of any kind. She actually ran her own cheese making company and died from a carbon monoxide leak.

Strangest case I ever saw!

I worked with a guy who had a lot of emotional baggage. When he was a teen, he and his younger brother were rough housing, and he pushed his younger brother against a wall. He said his brother stood there for a moment saying he didn't feel right, then dropped dead. In the autopsy the coroner discovered the younger brother's brainstem had been "dangling by a thread," and any bump to the head could have detached it. That he made it through the toddler years of learning to walk was a miracle. Crazy story and I felt bad for the guy because he still blamed himself for what was truly just a freak accident.

My aunt who worked as a pathologist told me of the time she did an autopsy on a newborn baby who was born seemingly healthy but was unable to feed and then died.

The baby's esophagus was not connected to his stomach, it was connected to his trachea and lungs instead. And the lungs were full of milk.

In a previous career I was a US army CID agent, and every death investigation that required an autopsy we had to send an agent to photograph and observe for the case file.

One guy who had been stabbed through the heart with a steak knife by his wife was in peak physical shape, but when the pathologist pulled his brain out he said "look at this". I have no biology training, but the golf ball sized tumor on his brainstem was obvious even to me. Doctor said he had maybe 90 days to live at the time of his death.

The wife went to prison for m****r, and all she had to do was wait a few months and she'd have been a hero Army widow.

Performing an autopsy on an elderly patient with cardiac valve disease and found a 3 cm white plastic disc lodged in the ostium of one of the renal arteries. It was identical to the disc of the patient's tilting valve type mechanical aortic valve which was in place, intact, and functioning normally. We had no explanation for why an extra valve disc was present far downstream from the heart.

An in depth review of the patient's surgical history revealed that many years prior, during the installation of the patient's aortic valve, the cage for the valve broke while being installed and the disc had flown into the aorta and couldn't be retrieved. The surgeon immediately removed the broken cage, replaced the entire apparatus with another replacement valve and completed the surgery. We found no evidence that there was any subsequent investigation to determine the whereabouts of the lost valve component.

So for years (apparently unknown to most of his caretakers and even potentially to the patient) the patient had a cardiac valve disc lodged in his renal artery ostium, in such a way that it was non-obstructing and stable, and it was discovered as an incidental finding at the patient's autopsy.

Situs Inversus. Basically all the organs were in mirrored anatomical positions from where they should normally be. So so cool.

I performed autopsies for almost a decade. The most unique thing I saw was uterine didelphys with a septate v****a. Basically, the v****a split in two and went to two separate cervixes and two separate uterine cavities. The two parts of the uterus fused into one heart-shaped body. I only saw that once.

I observed a lot of things during my professional autopsies. The most notorious was a guy with four bullets '22 into the cranium. He didn't claim pain and apparently a normal.life. Daughter of him told me he was a g**g member when young. He died from a cardiac arrest at 60 y o.

As part of h**h school anatomy we went on a field trip to a local college to work with the bodies donated to science.

They had a sign “If you can’t find it they don’t have one”. A nearby body was missing some part of their digestive track (I forget what. Appendix?). They searched up and down. Just wasn’t there. No scar indicating removal either.

Another body was a dead biker. Heavy drinker. His body adjusted though. His liver was seriously twice the size of anyone else’s there (or more) stretching all the way across his torso. That liver was a beast.

I don't do anything with bodies, but I did get to go to a hospital as a teen and get shown some strange specimens they had. What I won't ever forget is that they had a spleen in a jar, except inside it you could see a little fetus, maybe golf ball sized? Ectopic pregnancy that managed to implant inside the spleen. I don't know the odds but it seems pretty crazy.

I worked for the coroner'a office many years ago and picked up someone who had killed themselves by throwing their face on a SPINNING TABLE SAW. So, c*****d in half skull of course and it only got through to just before the neck started. 


Imagining the pain you have to be in to choose that is nearly impossible for me. Like, staring at the spinning blade and deciding to do it. Wow.

I’ve never preformed an autopsy. My dad passed away from cancer and had his body donated to science at a local school how cremated him afterwards. What he wanted done with his ashes was have them loaded into live shotgun shells so when you shot them, his ashes would be spread. There’s a company that does this (Holy Smoke?) but we figured we would save money and just do it ourselves since I reload shotgun shells anyway.

While sorting through his ashes, we found part of his mediport, something that we figured was from his knee surgery, and a copper BB from a BB gun. When he was 10, he was hanging out with some friends and one of them had just gotten a BB gun for his birthday, was playing with the trigger and shot my dad just above his right eye. It went under the skin and was there the rest of his life. If you touched it, it would roll around a bit lol. I asked why he never told his parents he said “why would I want to get into trouble if I didn’t need to”.

I don’t do autopsies, but my wife has two blood types from as far back as they could tell past her birth. They just thought it was an error the first time it happened in middle school. I’m sure they’re going to find some interesting stuff when she dies (hopefully a very long time from now).

Not an autopsy per se, but back when I was working as a lab assistant, we received something that both the doctor in charge and I were stumped by. After many attempts at understanding what it was and c*****g different sections, I finally realized it was a pretty malformed embryo. The tiny little head still breaks my heart. I’ve seen a lot of weird anomalies and held different organs in my hands, but that was a full human that could have never made it to life. It hits you in a different way.

Not an autopsy technically but a cadaver dissection, one cadaver had a small extra muscle in her wrist. We had no name for it since obviously 90% of people wouldn’t have a muscle there. She would never have known in life that she had it!

Veterinary pathologist here: aside from a bunch of conjoined twins, situs inversus etc, one fun one I found was some ambergris in the intestine of a whale.