40 Autopsy Doctors Share The Most Bizarre Cases They’ve Ever Seen

A woman died under mysterious circumstances and was found to have a bunch of lizards in her stomach.

JamesRenner:

It was in the autopsy report and is a bit of a local legend. If the doctor made it up or put them there, it's equally interesting imho

I shadowed a medical examiner several times but the weirdest thing I ever saw still kind of haunts me. There was a woman that died suddenly and had all these bruises on her body. There were detectives and cops all around us because they thought it was a case of domestic violence. However, she was schizophrenic and was not on any meds. During one of her episodes, she would beat herself violently and self-inflict all of these bruises and wounds on her. But the way she died was crazy.

She beat herself so much that these bruises developed huge blood clots and broke off into the blood stream. They eventually ended up in her lungs (pulmonary embolism). We opened up her lungs and they were just full of blood clots. Her legs were full of them too.

She basically beat herself so much that she suffocated. It was so odd.

fff8e7cosmic:

I have mental issues (still trying to see someone about it), and I've hit myself during episodes before. But that's just terrifying. Here's to hoping I'll never get that bad.

I’m not a mortician or autopsy tech but a buddy of mine died in a motorcycle accident last year. He was going through a green light and some lady was taking a left at the light during a yellow blinking yield signal. She didn’t pay attention and turned directly into his path, causing him to slam directly into her right front fender. I requested a copy of his autopsy report because he, by all accounts, physically didn’t look too messed up. I expected some sort of severe brain injury but his aorta was actually lacerated and his entire chest area was soft and spongy. The brute force of him slamming into the Jeep pulverized his chest.

doctor_thanatos:

Not uncommon in young people. Ribcages are more flexible in younger people. As a result, blunt force chest trauma is a common finding.
The aorta is attached firmly by the great vessels of the arch (right brachiocephalic, left carotid and left subclavian arteries.) The aorta is not attached firmly again until the diaphragm. So it is very commonly transected about 1-2 cm after the takeoff of the left subclavian artery.
The characteristic injuries in motorcycle wrecks are separated pubic symphases associated with the pelvis striking the gas tank. Also a cervical spine fracture right at the base of the skull where the helmet ends. The helmet protects the head, but not the neck.
Sorry about the loss of your friend. Sadly this is a very common story amongst FPs and motorcycle crashes. It's tragic, but what would be a fender bender in a car, can be fatal on a motorcycle.

We had this guy who had some heart issues, came to the hospital with some heart failure symptoms, got progressively worse and worse and then just couldn't go anymore. This guy had extensive imaging, testing, the whole deal. Well, when we were doing the organs, everything looked fairly okay, even the heart didn't look THAT bad for the picture they gave us. Then, I slice open the liver (which was admittedly a bit larger than normal) and boom, it was about 80% replaced by a nasty, nasty abscess. I'm talking liters of pus. He didn't have a fever, they didn't see anything on imaging, clinical or even blood cultures. We were never sure if the heart issues were maybe worsened before he got to become septic, but that is still the largest liver abscess I've seen in my life.

countzeroinc:

That's crazy that standard liver function tests didn't pick up on something that severe.

My dad used to do bloodwork for the pathologists office years ago. He had this teenaged kid come in and they were trying to work out cause of death. It was technically a heart attack and it turns out they had an undiagnosed heart condition but it was probably trigger by the sheer amount of d***s in his system. Ultimately they kept that detail to themselves and didn't tell the family.

Not a doctor, autopsy tech.

Nothing particularly strange. Mostly suicides and natural deaths.

The strange thing is when you start working there suddenly all the patients are around your age. It's just coincidence but feels freaky.

I was 19 and had several cases that were under 21. Luckily never any kids.

One guy died behind the wheel and crashed into a Cadillac dealership. Ended up totalling several cars.

****Listen to your doctor**** if they tell you to do something. Like walking after a bone break. If you sit on a chair and never walk you could end up with a blood clot that breaks off and kills you via pulmonary embolism (person had several thumb sized dvts in her calves and one in the lung)

Also don't be afraid to get help if you're suffering. S*****e isn't the answer.

notlia:

I think it surprises people to find out that the people doing the autopsies are not doctors. There's a doctor there usually, sometimes just at the end, but it's done by someone with a job title like yours who at most has to complete a technical qualification (not belittling, I know how hard this job is, my partner did it for a long time).

When I was in EMS training we had to do ME rotations to learn gross anatomy.

The ME told us of a case they had the previous month where they had an unattended death in a rental property of a single 40 something person with no known medical history.

Autopsy was unremarkable until the labs came back: carbon monoxide poisoning. They reported it back to the police who investigated.

Turned out his heating system had a weird malfunction that would emit massive amounts of CO.

In this case the autopsy saved someone else's life as the heating system was fixed to avoid it from potentialy k*****g the next renter.

Anon:

And that's why my country requires yearly CO monitoring for such heating systems. It takes five minutes for someone to come and measure.

Annie McCann.
Because despite her injuries and having her car taken for a joyride after she was supposedly already dead, suicide by drinking a half bottle of Bactine is SO PROBABLE.

two_one_fiver:

So I agree with the toxicologist (I'm in pharm/tox by trade) that lidocaine is probably what ended her. It is a potent cardiac d**g and highly lipophilic, so absorption/distribution can vary wildly from person to person. Route of administration REALLY matters in this case, too. I'm imagining its oral bioavailability is variable as well. I don't doubt for a second that a petite girl can easily be destroyed from one BBW (Bactine Bottle's Worth, get your mind out of the s**y gutter, I just invented that unit) of lidocaine. Now you know what they say: when all you have is a pharmacological hammer, everything looks like a toxicology nail. So I might just be seeing what I want to see here.
As for the rectal stretching, that could definitely be postmortem relaxation. It does happen. Embalmers are d**th professionals but they're not pathologists and I'm not sure what I would conclude about this without seeing histology. You could see if there's tearing first of all, but you could also figure out white cell count which would tell you if the injuries are postmortem or not.

Shannan Gilbert's hyoid bone was partially missing, and her larynx was missing. The coroner thinks it could be strangulation but there's not enough evidence to say it was cause of death. I, like a lot of people thought she died by drowning in the marsh after running away from the John's house. So now I don't know what to believe.

two_one_fiver:

LISK is one of the cases I read about the most, but I hadn't heard about this. Michael Baden is, of course, one of the best pathologists in the world and is frequently called in to conduct independent autopsies for this reason. He hosts a series called "Autopsy" that I highly recommend. I found it on Amazon Prime once upon a time.
A broken hyoid bone and crushed larynx are typical signs of strangulation. So if they were missing that kind of suggests to me that someone knew that they'd reveal the cause of death and attempted to remove them. IMO that supports the hypothesis that the crimnal has law enforcement experience.

Not me, but one of my friends is a mortician. While she was in mortuary school, she had an acquaintance come in dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. The funny thing is that I had met this guy a couple weeks earlier because he worked at restaurants making balloon animals for kids as a way to advertise his party rental business and I went into a restaurant he was working at for lunch and grabbed his business card. They rented out popcorn machines, and bounce houses, had clowns who would show up, stuff like that.

Well anyway, he planned his own s*****e ahead of the date in great detail. He had paid off all his debts, rented a hotel room and ordered himself a pizza as his last meal. He wrote all over his body under his clothes in sharpie, who his friends were and their telephone numbers so they could be contacted, love notes to his family, etc.

My mortician friend was feeling devastated because legally she wasn’t allowed to contact those people and tell them what he had wrote. She was concerned because she didn’t think the police, or whoever recovered his body had checked under his clothes to see all that correspondence and it was her job to scrub the sharpie off to make him presentable for his viewing. We were discussing this over lunch when I went to pay and she saw his business card in my wallet and exclaimed, “That’s HIM!”

It was just too eerie, and a strange coincidence. A few months later, I was in a different restaurant and a lady came up to my table trying to sell balloon animals. Turns out she was from the same party supply company, and was one of the friends my mortician friend told me was written on his body. I couldn’t let it go, I felt like I had to tell her about the sweet notes he wrote about her. She didn’t seem to care at the time. I hope I didn’t hurt her heart, but if it was me I would have wanted to know.

I've seen positional asphyxia suggested as the Somerton Man's cause of death before, and I've never been quite sure how that would work. The other cases of positional asphyxia I've seen have been deaths like Kendrick Johnson's, where the person was somehow physically restrained and unable to move into a position which would allow them to breathe properly.

But since breathing is an autonomic function, wouldn't the Somerton Man have automatically changed position so that he wouldn't suffocate? How does positional asphyxia occur when the person isn't restrained?

glittercheese:

If the person has decreased consciousness, like from substance, this can also happen. Basically the part of the brain that would normally cause you to change positions is depressed and therefore doesn’t function properly.

I mainly deal with perinatal autopsies (still births and neonatal deaths) but one time I did an adult as a favour because the other pathologist on duty was the neighbour of the deceased. The neighbour had a known tumour and declined any investigation into what it was because they thought it would be incurable. Sadly it ended up being a very easily treatable tumour, and a small biopsy would have easily diagnosed it.

Details deliberately vague to protect identities.

Just a bit ago, I was in a Human Anatomy class where they worked with cadavers. The one my class worked on died due to heart issues, what exactly they said, I don’t really remember now. However, when we cut open the thorax and abdomen to get to the GI tract and heart and lungs, a tumor had grown in the mesentery of the small intestine and lived in its own pocket, pushed and pierced through the diaphragm, and squished up near the heart. Looks like it was a misdiagnosis that ended up taking her life. The doctors were close, but it looks like they never got around to seeing if she had any tumor issues.

I’m in 3rd year medical school in Spain and I had a one week rotation in pathology a few months ago. For legal purposes we have to store samples of brains of unborn babies of natural abortions. Some were a few months old and others almost to term. I got to cut the brains into sample pieces and take pictures and it was amazing to see how the brain forms and evolves so much in just a month or two. It was also pretty overwhelming that they belonged to babies..
We weren’t allowed actual autopsies this year because of Covid..

I’ve only assisted, I don’t actually perform. I work in Pathology at a teaching hospital so we do the autopsies on the patients who die at the hospital. Most of the time, we know the cause of death because they were admitted to the hospital. A few not so creepy but interesting things have happened to me. One, we opened a woman up and she had a laceration on her liver, not fresh but there was scarring. We didn’t cut through her to the point where we’d cut the liver and she had no history of surgery around that area in her chart so that was super weird. Another is doing an autopsy on a cancer patient and opening them up and seeing tumor just everywhere, spread through the entire body. It’s just a wild experience and not something I really enjoy doing, but it’s also fascinating to learn about the body this way.

Not human corpses but did a few necropsies on animals and found some odd stuff. Majority of it was cancer, heart failure, or odd accidents. Very rarely was it something horrifying.

Had a cat that only was born with 1 kidney and it was too small, looked like it stopped developing while young.
Had a dog that best described looked like a train wreck, it had multiple surgires from swallowing random objects and did a number on the digestive track when it got older. Could see where intestine in multiple spots were removed and put together again.
Had a tortoise have hay shoved up its nose and best described only 1 functional nostril, it was completely blocked the body encased the foreign object, it passed from poor nutrition.
Had a bird manage to swallow a squeaker from a dog toy, not sure how no one noticed that.
Fish also will swallow anything, top 5 were: ping pong balls, those small solider figures, a ballpoint pen, small Christmas ornament, and a fake rose.

Took a dissection course once in college. The cadaver had a pacemaker installed, and every class without fail, his pacemaker would go off. Sounded like an ambulance siren!

Also with the same cadaver, when we opened up his thoracic cavity, we noticed he had a very severe case of cardiomegaly (enlarged heart). I’m talking the size of a large males head. We also noticed that his left lung was essentially missing, only a small portion was showing. At first we thought he’d had a lobectomy or something. Turns out, his heart was so enlarged that it pushed his entire left lung underneath his heart. We discovered this after removing the heart from the chest. One of the strangest yet coolest things I’d seen.

There was another older cadaver we worked with that had 4 lobes on his right lung rather than the typical 3 lobes. I thought that was interesting.

Heterotaxy Syndrome in a 50ish year old. Way, way past the usual lifespan.

Whole fish in the esophagus overlying the trachea causing the decedent to asphyxiate. The tail was partially perforated where EMS put the ETT through the fish. (Noted in the EMS runsheet "cords visualized and ETT inserted with no difficulty")

Probably more. Just don't remember them right now.

Sufficient_Tea_3063:

I find the natural, unexpected findings the coolest but a fish is pretty wild. We had 1 case of Situs inversus in my 15 years and of course I missed it.

Unknown brain tumor. May have caused them to swerve into traffic due to location.

Second/different case: pregnancy in m****r victim. Made it a double homicide.

My grandmother had a friend who was attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. She and her fellow classmates were scheduled for "cadaver" class where donated bodies were used. My grandmother's friend and her partner were assigned a body at the end of the rather large class room. When removing the sheet from their assigned cadaver she discovered that this was **her aunt** who had died two weeks previous. Yikes.