50 Strange Things Autopsy Doctors Have Discovered On The Job

My mom works in the transplant field, and two of my aunts are in medical. One Christmas I was home, they were passing around the table a pic on their phone of this guy on the autopsy table with his a*s rotted off to the bone. Turns out he was a paraplegic in a nursing home. The nurses just neglected cleaning his a*s for so long that it rotted off and he couldn't feel it, and it wasn't discovered until he was on the table (how??). I got pissed off because they were debating if they should report it. Like f**k yes you should, you'll be in one of those homes soon so you should really give a d**n about the treatment.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 mom grew up in a funeral home. She refused to let us climb trees as kids because her father buried a local boy who fell from a tree and impaled himself on a branch. I'm not sure if she saw the body or if she knew the boy, but it seems to have shaken her pretty badly.

Fortunately and unfortunately, my mom became a nurse and spent a good long time caring for people in a busy Philly hospital. She has saved a lot of lives, but she has also seen a lot of people die. I do not envy her, but I'm glad she does what she does.

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.

In school, we actually did dissection on human cadavers.

One cadaver had a pair of hand-cuffed hands tattood on him that said "when this convict dies, send him to heaven because he has already been through hell".

We had a student that had been a mortician in St.Louis and with a career change was becoming a doctor. He had embalmed that cadaver. No family would claim him so they sold him to our school.

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*.

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.

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.

Doesn't exactly fit the criteria but I'm gonna tell the story anyway.... I come from a smallish town. We have one mortician and everyone knows him. His daughter dated my cousin during this period of time.
One year, a different cousin got into a bad car accident right outside of the county and died on impact. Of course, they called it in and he was asked to come down to the scene and retrieve the body. He was told the estimated age of the girl, the make of her vehicle and which direction she was driving on the highway. The age and vehicle make matched that of his daughter who was visiting her boyfriend at the time. He couldn't get a hold of his daughter so he showed up at the scene fully prepared to be picking up his own child. Sadly enough, this scared him so badly that this was the last funeral he ever performed. 8 years later and he still visits my deceased cousins parents regularly, just to check in. It's clearly stuck with him.

Oh man, I might be late but this is good. We picked up a s*****e on a major holiday Thanksgiving or Christmas I can't remember. Took her back to the funeral home. Undressed her and had to wait for Medical examiner. Family decides to cremate. We had dressed her for a viewing, everything was normal. Later that day she was ready to be cremated, I put her in started the machine and went back inside. I had to embalm someone else. About an hour in I heard like five loud pops. First thought was a pace maker, brain stimulator, something I had missed. I let it finish swept it into the tray. And a f*****g small hand gun came out. Now I had seen all of her... Seriously where did she have that at? The only spot is inside her v****a. The question is why. It's been 10 plus years and I'm still wtf.

This guy commit s*****e by shooting himself in the back of the head two times and then hanging himself. I have no idea how he managed it. Not even sure how it's possible but who am I to argue with police?

The undertaker conducting a funeral service at a church where I was organist told me that he had to prepare a woman for viewing at a wake who had been killed by a gargoyle falling from the tower of an old church and making a direct hit.

Apparently, it did extensive damage - the kind that took him several days of reconstructive preparatory work.

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.

My dad did autopsies for a while. Said the worst was a little girl who's charred in the fetal position. Supposedly when her house caught fire she crawled under the Christmas tree, which then turned into a furnace.

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.

Am both paramedic and mortician, so I've seen some real doozies. One of the most bizarre was the fellow who, upon autopsy, had his cause of death declared as electrocution, despite the fact that the abandoned farmhouse he was in hadn't had electricity in decades. Lividity and decomp both supported the conclusion that he died where he was found, so it wasn't a body dump, but there was no possible way for him to have been electrocuted there.