When you hear the phrase “dead house,” you might picture a sterile morgue with neat drawers. In reality, the dead house was a grim, often chaotic place where bodies lingered amid leaky roofs, vermin, and desperate last breaths. Below, we count down the 10 gruesome tales that expose the darkest corners of these forgotten mortuary chambers.

Why These 10 Gruesome Tales Matter

10 Poor Conditions Of The Houses

In Albany, Western Australia, the year 1889 brought a particularly bleak chapter. The deceased were crammed into a tiny shed perched on prison grounds, where a leaky roof turned the interior into a dripping mess. Rainwater fell straight onto the cold bodies, offering no dignity to the “unfortunates.”

Inside that grim structure, a battered wooden table served as the makeshift altar. A threadbare blanket was tossed over each corpse, shielding only the most intimate parts before the bodies were eventually shunted into an unnamed pit in the earth.

Yet Albany’s sad scenario paled beside the horrors reported from Beechworth, Victoria, in 1877. Hospital officials declared their dead house “dangerously unsafe,” citing an accumulation of “putrid matter of the very worst description.” Dr. Dobbyn grimly described it as “merely a place for bottling up the germs of disease.”

A committee eventually resolved to erect a new facility, but doctors warned that tearing up the old floor and disturbing the underlying soil could unleash a deadly plague. The building’s filth was so extreme that some physicians accused the hospital of murder for merely sending workers to dismantle it. Their recommendation? Leave the ground untouched, lest hidden germs escape.

9 Rat Infestation

In Bantry, Ireland, the year 1911 saw a heated debate over the condition of the local dead house, which at the time was a repurposed workhouse chapel. Families could claim their loved ones there, but the building had become a veritable rat haven.

The infestation was so severe that massive stones were stacked atop coffins simply to keep the vermin from gnawing at the corpses. The sight of rats scurrying over fresh graves sent shivers through the community.

The council’s discussion grew heated, with at least one participant arguing that the rats’ feast on the dead was no cause for alarm—a stance that shocked many listeners.

8 Woke Up With Two Dead Bodies

Picture this: San Francisco, 1870. A German patient, presumed lifeless, was whisked away to the hospital’s dead house and placed between two already‑lying bodies. The keeper sealed the case and retired for the night, assuming all was quiet.

At the stroke of midnight, the German abruptly awoke, shrieking and thrashing about. The startled staff roused the dead‑house keeper, begging him to investigate, but he was too terrified to move, hoping the specters would settle themselves.

Finally, under pressure, the keeper opened the lid. There stood the German, pale in his death‑gown, perched atop the two corpses. Overcome, the keeper fainted on the spot.

The frantic German bolted through the corridors, his panic so intense that nurses had to wrestle him to the floor. A physician arrived, administered calming care, and eventually restored his senses.

7 A Place To Finish Dying

Los Angeles’s Chinatown once housed a grim “dead house” that doubled as a final refuge for the terminally ill. An 1888 report described it as a tumbled‑down hovel where afflicted Celestials were tossed to await death.

One chilling incident involved a leprous man discovered by a police officer. The officer found the emaciated figure moaning in agony, his flesh seemingly rotting from within.

Given the contagious nature of leprosy, officials chose to leave the man where he lay, awaiting a decision. No further record follows, but it is likely he perished within those squalid walls.

6 No Running Water

Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1886, faced a glaring omission: its dead house lacked any running water. A concerned citizen penned a letter to the editor, highlighting the dire state of the facility where autopsies were routinely performed.

The letter described a room without a bench, a door that never latched, and a free‑for‑all traffic flow that left bodies exposed, sometimes even intruding upon ongoing autopsies. The lack of basic sanitation was a blatant disregard for the deceased.

Although the colonial surgeon pressed for improvements, budget constraints stalled progress. Public outrage grew as the community realized the dead were being treated with utter neglect.

5 Salisbury Prison

John G. Weaver, a member of the 2nd Ohio Cavalry, recounted his capture during the Civil War and subsequent transfer to Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. The prison’s conditions were harrowing: starvation, dampness, and mud plagued the inmates.

Every morning, guards collected the dying and the near‑dead, shuttling them to the prison’s dead house. Weaver described the sight: bodies piled together “like cordwood,” half‑naked and wasted, awaiting transport.

From the dead house, a “dead wagon” ferried the corpses to mass trench graves. The relentless flow of bodies meant the dead house was perpetually filled, a macabre testament to the prison’s cruelty.

4 Twice To The Dead House

In 1901, Robert Hughes was transported by police cab to Newcastle Hospital in Australia. Upon arrival, a swift examination inside the cab declared him dead on arrival, and his body was wheeled to the dead house.

Placed on a cold slab, Hughes suddenly twitched, gasping for breath. The startled police summoned a doctor, who confirmed Hughes was, astonishingly, still alive.

After a rapid re‑examination, Hughes was moved to a proper hospital bed, where—just five minutes later—he truly passed away. This time, his body made a final trip to the dead house, never to rise again.

3 The Moving Skull

Pranksters in medical schools often staged ghostly hoaxes, but one New Orleans doctor experienced a truly eerie encounter in 1884. After a patient with an aneurysm died, the body was sent to the dead house for autopsy preparation.

Working under a lone gas lamp just before midnight, the doctor heard a shuffling sound from a corner. Assuming he was alone, he turned to investigate and saw five skulls being readied for anatomical cabinets.

He resumed his work, but the shuffling persisted. Suddenly, one skull began to glide across the floor toward him, its hollow eye sockets fixed on the doctor.

He sat, pipe in hand, watching the skull inch forward. The movement grew more pronounced, and the doctor, trembling, finally lunged and seized the skull.

Inside the skull’s cavity, a rat had become trapped, its tiny claws scrabbling for escape. After freeing the rodent, the doctor returned to his dissection, the bizarre spectacle fading into the night.

2 The Grief Was Too Great

Paris’s dead house, perched on the Seine’s bank, served as a somber repository for victims of violent deaths. Families could claim their loved ones, or the bodies would be interred in pauper’s graves.

In 1839, two men ran the establishment, living on the building’s upper floor with their wives. They kept meticulous records: names, causes of death, and dates of arrival.

Among the many tragedies, the story of little Leonore stands out. A winter day found the child’s frail body laid on a marble slab, carried in by a grieving nurse.

The nurse, tears streaming, explained that a stagecoach accident had caused the child to slip from her care and suffocate among luggage. She begged the dead‑house keeper to revive the girl, then pleaded to see the child’s bright blue eyes one last time.

When the nurse realized the impossibility, she departed—only to later be wheeled into the same dead house, her own body dripping onto the floor, placed beside Leonore’s tiny form, awaiting a claim that never came.

1 Makeshift Dead House

When catastrophic accidents occur, authorities often scramble to create temporary morgues. One such disaster unfolded in Victoria, Australia, in 1908 when two trains collided, shredding carriages and igniting flames that trapped victims in a nightmarish blaze.

The wreckage left 43 souls brutally killed and 232 injured. The chaotic scene was littered with mangled bodies: a headless corpse beside a mother clutching her dead infant, and a man suspended between wrecked cars.

Relatives and thrill‑seekers flooded the station, desperate to glimpse the tragedy. Medical staff and railway workers worked feverishly to extract the living and then the dead.

To manage the overwhelming number of corpses, a makeshift dead house was cobbled together from two waiting rooms. All furniture was stripped away, and the bodies were laid side by side on the cold floor, blood seeping from fresh wounds and staining the boards.

Dim lamps cast a grim glow over the scene, revealing torn clothing and pallid faces as families shuffled in, six at a time, to claim their loved ones. The harrowing episode remains a stark reminder of how quickly a dead house can become a temporary mausoleum.

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.