You know in the movies where the pathologist or mortician or whoever sets their sandwich on the dead guy? Nobody would ever do that in real life, right? Of course not. It was a bowl of cereal. -ITeechYoKidsArt

I helped with an autopsy where a woman wasn't found for a few weeks and her cats started chewing on her. -riphitter

You have smelt nothing until you have smelt the farts of the dead. -TheGarp

Refrigeration mechanic here, our company took on a contract for a funeral home that did it all (storing, embalming, cremation etc) one of my first repairs was to replace a failed motor in their main body cooler. It’s definitely a strange feeling being the only living person in a ice box containing 25 dead bodies. -TomaszRS

My best friend growing up lived in the "upstairs" of his family owned funeral home. We used to play hide and go seek in the caskets until one day one of the "empty" caskets wasn't empty because they had just gotten a "delivery" from a different funeral home. -slytherinprolly

My wife is a mortician. she's had quite a lot of wacky experiences. this is more funny than creepy, but once she was trying to break up the rigor mortis in a decedent's hip by flexing the entire leg up. her grip slipped and the leg swung down, the heel cracking her right in the face, resulting in a black eye. -iamblankenstein

Maggots crawling out of orifices always got me. -bemi_san

I had a friend in Boy Scouts whose dad got a job in a morgue washing the hair of dead people. On his first job by himself, he wheeled the body under the faucet and turned it on. Then he hears a shriek and, "THAT'S COLD!" He ran out of the basement like a bat out of hell. His boss was at the door laughing his ass off as his partner crawled out from under the gurney. -Broad-Blood-9386

Funeral Director here. About 15 years ago I had a lady whose husband passed from a terrible motorcycle accident. When she came in to make arrangements, she mentioned that she wanted his leather jacket back. Not terribly uncommon for people to want the personal effects back however in this case the jacket was ripped and torn and saturated with blood and had bone fragments embedded in it.

Personal effects from the corners office are usually returned in a sealed bag. The second it was given to her, she took it out and put it on. It smelled terrible. I truly hope she is doing OK now. -sttgal

The funeral home I worked for liked to embalm as soon as possible after death. I had embalmed a man that was dead for less than 30mins-an hour. He was still warm and rigor had not set in yet. I kinda just held his hand for a minute before I got started. -Abisnailyo

One of the decedent's grandsons faked a breakdown over the casket. He stole all her jewelry. Didn't take long to figure out and a large brawl broke out. Jewelry was retrieved. Two weeks later grandson turns up needing to be processed and buried. Creepy as hell. -tossaway78701

Sometimes a fresh corpse will get shaky limbs. -alien-eggs

Sometimes when people have died, and we turn them over to clean and dress them, they still have air in their lungs and will make grunting noises when moved. Scared the crap out of me, the first time I experienced it. -Kvoller

I had to go to the funeral late one night to get some things ready for my manager to go pick a body up as it was a friend of hers and she just wanted to show up and go. My wife came with me for the drive and I was in the basement while my wife waited up stairs.

The basement has two parts to it. One is newer and the older section (which we called the catacombs) is where we kept caskets, supplies, etc. I was getting the spare stretcher ready, making sure there’s gloves and other supplies with it when I heard my name called but it came from the catacombs. It was a deeper voice too that made my hair stand on end. I had just been in the catacombs too which made it creepier.

Wasn’t my wife and there was no one else there as we left before my manager came in. No idea what it was but it definitely freaked me out. -Crucifix1233

Worked at a mortuary for a few years. We have methods to keep the jaw shut for viewing, otherwise it would gap open due to the angle of the head and neck. During a viewing the device failed and this gentleman’s mouth literally popped open.

The lead embalmer was not on site so I did my best. Ushered the family out of the room and superglued his mouth shut, but he didn’t have teeth and supergluing just his lips did NOT work. It looked as if he was attempting to scream. I had to call in one of our other mortuaries in town and that embalmer used a giant needle and thread to sew his mouth shut from under his chin to his palate. -Maelja

I delivered pizza to a crematorium. Dude set down his pizza on a cardboard coffin to get money and I couldn't stop looking at the box on the conveyer leading into the crematorium chamber.

I pointed out "isn't that a little disrespectful?"

The dude came back and simply said "oh, don't worry about him, he won't mind." -MatthewLeStar

I worked at a funeral home for quite awhile. When I first started, about a month in, I was working a holiday weekend. Only people working were the transport guys & me. They came to drop off a body & went right back out. I thought they were still there and needed to ask a question. I walked into the embalming area & this dude was SITTING UP ON THE GURNEY looking right at me when I opened the door and it literally made me pee a little in fright.

Turns out the transport guys picked up the body from an area hospital. He'd passed away while in a slightly reclining position & rigor had set in. -nachosquid

My creepiest moment was when I was in the morgue by myself at 4am. I was using the lift to put a body into a crypt. It had reached roughly eye level when the power went out. It is now pitch dark. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, then all the fans died, and all I could hear was the crinkling of body bags. That's when I started to hear disembodied voices. I couldn't make out what they were saying or where they were coming from. The power comes back a few moments later on and I move on with my night. (Turns out the voices were just the automated "the power has gone out, switching to generator power" message. Haha.) -Swazz_bass

Before covid, I worked at a funeral home that wasn't particularly well run. I was a funeral assistant, and one of the embalmers was notoriously difficult to deal with. Her name was AJ. About 4 days before this story, AJ had picked up a deceased man who had died of septicemia and who was to be cremated due to the fact he was already in a bad state on death. So AJ had the brilliant idea to leave this gentleman on the rolling cot for four days unrefrigerated, figuring it wouldn't matter since he was being cremated and it was a slow week.

Of course, I got the job of moving him to the crematory with AJ. We walked into the embalming room and found that the decedent had bloated and was leaking a grey liquid sludge out of his urinary catheter onto the floor. If pestilence had a smell, it would've been this liquid. It smelled like a warning to the base lizard part of my brain. To describe this liquid as smelling bad is an understatement. The liquid was something you could feel and sense in the air.

AJ and I donned our gear, and luckily since she placed him on a cot already, we didn't have to do much in the ways of moving the body. Unluckily, the cot was relatively old and one of the cot wheels had to be manually unlocked using hands, as the foot pedal was too rusted to effectively use.

AJ told me to unlock it, and so I carefully bent down and unlocked the wheel. Well, AJ got the bright idea to shake the cot violently as some sort of prank, sending the grey liquid over the edge directly onto the top of my head, dripping down under my eye protection and mask. I closed my lips and eyes so the liquid running over them would stay out of my body, and calmly walked to the employee bathroom in a sort of numb state of shock. The funeral home owners saw my sludgy appearance and sent me home paid for the rest of the day. -solitarytrees2

My brother used to work as a mortician. He told me a story once where he was in one part of the building (a funeral home) and all of the sudden he heard some faint screaming. So he went to the front doors to see if anyone was there and calling for help, but no one was there. He shrugged and went back to work... and then heard it again.

He said it sounded like two men and a woman. He looked around but couldn't find the source of the noise.... then he checked the body prep room where he heard it just behind the door... two males and one female were laying on their prep tables. Definitely the creepiest thing he's ever experienced (or at least based on what he told me). -warmteamug