Of all the places in all the world you could hang out, the morgue has to be at the bottom of most peoples’ lists. Maybe as a visitor you’d be willing to breeze through but as a resident, well, that’s no fun at all.
In general, the morgue is a grim place, but it turns out, when you dig a little deeper, things sometimes get even worse.
10. Friends Stole John Barrymore’s Corpse from the Morgue
It’s never easy to say goodbye to someone you love, whether that’s a friend or family. Losing a person often feels like losing part of yourself and in the immediate aftermath your grief can feel like you’re even losing yourself. How we deal with our grief will vary from person to person and you may have heard that there’s no wrong way to express that emotion. That said, we can probably all agree that some ways of expressing grief are more usual than others. And some may be, to put it politely, frowned upon.
Actors Errol Flynn and WC Fields were known to be good friends with John Barrymore. The famous actor, and grandfather of Drew Barrymore, was a staple of Hollywood’s golden age. He died of cirrhosis of the liver and pneumonia in 1942. His friends didn’t take it well.
After he passed, W. C. Fields and Sadakichi Hartmann went to the city morgue and stole Barrymore’s body. According to Flynn’s memoirs, some friends a story about Barrymore’s aunt being so distraught that she needed to see him one last time, so they convinced the mortician to let them borrow his corpse for an hour. That and a $200 bribe sealed the deal.
The body was brought to Flynn’s house and placed on the couch as a prank and then they waited for Flynn to get home. Flynn supposedly freaked out on the porch of his house and the others returned the body having suitably traumatized Flynn.
9. Cruise Ships Have Morgues Big Enough for Several Bodies
For a certain group of people, a cruise is the absolute epitome of a luxury vacation. A beautiful resort on the sea with all the amenities, what more could you ask for? And sure, cruises have been known to be troubled now and then but most of them turn out just fine, right?
Nothing is always fine though and cruise ships have to be prepared for that. People live on board of these vessels for weeks at and over 30% of the passengers are over 60 years of age. About 14% are over 70. So it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in which a passenger might pass away rather unexpectedly while a ship is out to sea.
For that reason, though they tend to never advertise it, every cruise ship is equipped with a morgue. The morgues have small refrigerators able to accommodate several bodies. In a pinch, then a walk-in freezer can be used. Apparently if something extremely unforeseeable took out enough passengers, the ship would call for air assistance and a helicopter could transport bodies back to land.
As many as 200 people per year die on cruise ships, so it’s just part of standard procedure. Any ship should be able to handle 6 to 10 bodies.
8. There are About 40,000 Unclaimed Bodies in Morgues Around the US
Have you ever seen a TV show or movie when someone has to go to the morgue to identify a body? Often it’s a big, emotional reveal and sometimes it’s a twist when we discover the deceased isn’t who we thought it was. But what happens then? In real life, what happens if no one comes to identify that body?
Turns out, it happens more often than you might think. A lot more often. The real numbers are sobering and pretty sad, too. There may be as many as 40,000 unclaimed bodies in morgues around the United States. In 2021, there were 2,510 unclaimed bodies in Maryland alone, about 4% of the state’s total.
Some of these unclaimed bodies are those of homeless people, who had no friends or family to claim them, but not all. There are a number of unclaimed bodies that have families and loved ones who refuse to come and claim them. Sometimes it’s as simple a matter as not being able to meet the financial burden of burial, so they simply leave the body where it is and let the state worry about it.
Different locations deal with this in different ways. Los Angeles buries unclaimed bodies in a mass grave every three years. In 2016, the county buried the remains of 1,400 people in a mass grave.
7. You Can Buy a Corpse From a Philippines Morgue to Fake Your Own Death
Every so often a movie comes along in which a character faking their own death is a plot point. In real life this happens as well but it’s remarkably rare. Hard to say how often, though, since if it works we’d never know.
If you’re ever moved to do this yourself, or suspect someone else has done it, you may want to look towards the Philippines. Turns out there’s a lucrative industry there for Death Kits. That’s the thing where you pay about £350 for forged documents that say you died but, more importantly, an actual corpse. We just mentioned the US has an abundance of unclaimed bodies but so does the Philippines, and people started selling them to fake deaths.
There have been a few documented cases of travelers getting caught doing this. It’s also worth noting, as one PI pointed out, that if you engage in this transaction you are dealing with criminals who now have serious blackmail dirt on you so they can continue to milk you for money afterwards. Fake your own death at your own risk.
6. Parents of a Teen Who Died Discovered His Brain Had Been Kept at the Morgue in a Jar
Picture this scenario. You’re in high school and a friend and classmate dies in a car crash. It’s tragic and people are distraught but life does go on. Time passes. Months later, you’re on a field trip with a forensic science club from school and you head to the city morgue. While you’re there, you see a jar on a shelf. It contains a human brain and on the outside of the jar is a label with a name on it. The name is your friend who died in the crash. The morgue has been keeping his brain on a shelf for a few months. What do you do with that information?
For some kids in New York who this happened to for real and they ended up telling the sister of Jesse Shipley, who died in a car crash in 2005. Shipley’s parents had known their son was being autopsied, but they had also later buried him assuming his body was intact.
Medical examiners defended their actions by pointing out that determining cause of death is not a fast process and, in this case, they needed more time to gather evidence. A brain needs to be kept in fluid for weeks to prepare it for examination and, in that time, bodies are usually buried. They were simply following normal procedure. The family disagreed and sued but the court sided with the city. No rules were broken, and the pathologist was doing what their job required of them, while the family was still able to bury their son, according to the ruling.
5. The Paris Morgue Was Once a Hot Spot for Entertainment
In the modern age, horror movies are big business and fans love to watch a little grisly mayhem. You could argue it’s in our DNA. People love the macabre, as witnessed historically in cases like the Paris morgue being a jumping destination for a night on the town.
In the 19th century, the Paris morgue was like the zoo. People would show up to gawk at the corpses. If someone died mysteriously, crowds would form that were so large they spilled onto the street and stopped traffic. Everyone wanted to see the victims for themselves. The death of one little girl brought 150,000 people to come see her.
The story in a paper was one thing, but people wanted to see it themselves. It was bringing a grisly story to life, so to speak, and it was a huge form of entertainment. Vendors sold food outside, police had to keep the peace since the crowd often got rowdy. It was like an outdoor concert with the dead instead of bands.
4. People Still Regularly Wake up in Morgues
There’s an oft-told story about how, long ago, some coffins had little strings in them to allow the occupant to pull them and ring a bell should they wake up decidedly not dead and find themselves in need of rescue.
In the modern world, we don’t bury people with bells. But some folks do still wake up in the morgue. One woman woke up in the fridge after being declared dead 11 hours earlier. Another man was just about to be embalmed when he came to.
How did this happen? In the US, at least, many coroners are elected officials and don’t actually have medical training. So they have no qualifications to actually determine if someone is dead or alive if it’s not readily apparent as it would be to any layman.
3. There’s a Photographer Who Gets his Subjects From Morgues
Many artists seem to benefit from a muse. John Carpenter loved working with Kurt Russell. Andy Warhol was inspired by Edie Sedgwick. And Joel-Peter Witkin has corpses. He uses bodies from morgues and to say his work has been controversial is to grossly undervalue the word “controversial.” His work includes images that most horror movies wouldn’t use.
He sourced many of the bodies in his works from Mexico, where a deal he struck with a hospital let him use unclaimed bodies, and parts, to stage his photos. The end results are beauty to some and nightmares to others.
2. An Idaho Coroner was Accused of Using Human Remains as Fertilizer
In general, there are a few things you’d expect to happen with human remains. An examination to determine cause of death. Maybe a full autopsy. Embalming. Cremation or burial. And not much else. So when a coroner decided to take some remains home to use as garden fertilizer, well, that was not usual. That was an allegation made by a deputy coroner in Canyon County, Idaho, back in 2018.
This was one of several accusations lodged against the coroner which also included harassment and creating a hostile work environment. Whether any of that was ever proven remains dubious as there seems to be little media follow up.
1. Legally Selling Human Body Parts is Worth Millions
We saw that there’s a market for bodies to fake deaths already, and you’ve likely heard stories for years about black market organs for sale. Well, things get so much worse. And legal, too.
If you have ever lost someone and made arrangements for the body, you may have been approached by someone with a deal. You can get a cheaper funeral/cremation if you donate the body for study. You know, for science. Advanced medical studies, they call them.
Your loved one’s body becomes the property of a body broker if you agree to this deal. This is the part where it becomes a full on horror movie nightmare.
In Nevada, residents living near a funeral home started noticing a seriously rank smell. Also, someone was dumping blood-soaked boxes in the dumpster. Cops showed up to investigate and found a man in scrubs in the yard hosing off a frozen human torso. With a garden hose. In the middle of the afternoon. Bits of corpse ran down the street in the gutters.
The company sells body parts for research and study. Not for transplant, which is regulated. As such, there are few if any laws governing the practice. The bodies were not obtained illegally, and they don’t need to meet any medical requirements.
The brokers cremate some of the body, as promised, and the families get what they asked for. The company keeps the profitable parts and sells them to schools or research facilities for huge profit. At least one company was making over $12 million per year. And in four states that track data on these bodies, between 2011 and 2015, over 50,000 bodies and 182,000 body parts were shipped around.
In one case, a man made over $13 million in 6 years selling diseased parts that he’d cut up with chainsaws and preserved in coolers full of mouthwash.