8. Chicken Dinner?

I worked as a Funeral Director Assistant in Toronto for 3.5 years. Nicer way of calling me “body removal”.

I had a coroner’s call involving a chicken. Old man was running a bath with his pet chicken, took a step in the tub, slipped with the chicken cradled in his arms and went face first into the filled tub. Drowned the chicken and himself. Coroner requested the chicken to be transported with the deceased in the pouch (body bag).

Weirdest thing I ever had to remove.

9. God Smited Thee

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.

10. Caved in

I worked with the M.E. in a small town in Canada when I was a resident. While I was there, an older woman who was a hoarder had her house filled to about 5 feet (1.5m) deep with piles of newspapers and magazines. She was found literally drowned in the papers; upside down, wearing only a housecoat, her naked bum in the air and her torso and head buried in the papers; she possibly was looking for a specific item and the papers caved in, trapping her. We couldn’t get her to lie on the gurney properly. It was pretty horrifying.

11. Boiling body

My family use to live in a mortuary when I was a child. We could live there for free but my father would have to be “on-call” for periods of time; which meant going and picking up the deceased from wherever they may be.

One such instance a large apartment complex started smelling something terrible coming from a particular room. Landlord found the old lady that lived there dead in the bathtub. Not so disturbing, right?

Well, my father goes to pick up the body. Apparently she was getting in the tub to take a bath and had a heart attack. The water was running, already hot, and she accidentally knocked loose the drain with her foot. So what happened for the next two weeks (they estimated) is she lay there in marinating in hot water. Now, you’d think the water would eventually cool, right? Nope. They had those industrial hot water heaters since it was shared by the apartment complex and it easily kept up with the hot water demand.

So she had been sitting in this hot water for a couple of weeks.

12. Good aim

Paramedic here. The city was doing construction work on a local street and had put up a bunch of metal sawhorse barricades. The ones with the orange and white reflective stripes and the little orange strobe light on them. Some guy was trying to pull out of his driveway and apparently went to move one of the sawhorses. He slipped and fell against one and [cut] it cut him in the armpit. The wound was less than an inch deep and maybe a half inch long. Hit an artery and killed him.

13. Less is more

In a mortuary science program and on call to do removals. I didn’t go on this removal but when I was dropping off at the ME office there was a younger guy out on a table. They were unraveling cords from his neck when we walked in so we asked what his story was. He was found hanging in his room from some cords with heavy accessories/jewelry around his neck, wrists, and ankles. The necklaces/bracelets were made from thick twine or some thicker string with some wooden beads and large (fist sized) stones. Apparently he also had some sort of shrine set up in front of him. Quite interesting.

14. Sex Toys

I worked as an autopsy tech intern for awhile. Weirdest case we had while I was there was this 500 lb man who lived in a small trailer home and wasn’t answering his phone for about a week. His sister got nervous so she took a drive over to his place. Noticed a rank smell before even opening the door. She found him face down and blue. Investigators got on scene and they actually had to tear the wall off the trailer home to get his body out because he was so huge. We didn’t have a body bag big enough for him so we had to ‘close’ it with duct tape. His body was already so decomposed that the family just decided on an external exam. Turns out he had a thing for sex toys and had one in his butt when he was found. Probably died of a heart attack.