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Sometimes Funeral Homes Just Lose A Body Entirely

An Australian woman who succumbed to cancer in 2018 had prepared for her passing by donating her body to science. Except sometime between dying and science, the hospital misplaced her remains. Three weeks' worth of misplacement, in fact. They had run out of room in their morgue, so they transferred the body to a funeral home, and then, like that one orange at the back of the refrigerator drawer, everyone forgot about it. Her body could no longer be used, since there is a time limit on these things, and presumably the hospital offered the family a coupon for a free oil change or some such.

One funeral home, upon realizing they couldn't find the right body, tried to fix the problem by parading out three different bodies in the hopes one would be a winner. None were, and it turned out the right body was put in the wrong grave. At least they tried, though, unlike the funeral home in Tennessee that lost the body of a baby and did, you know, nothing. That's the end of the story. They got fined $1,000 for it, though, if you're wondering what the going rate for a lost human body is these days. And yes, babies do tend to get lost in some terrible ways, like the one that got tossed out with the linen at a hospital. Go ahead and click that link if you want to make your life worse for a while.

If you're looking for the absolute most atrocious tale of lost bodies, though, you'll have to choose between two stories so insane that they'll make you want to die in an explosion so no one has to worry about your remains at all.

The first is the story of Julie Mott, who died at age 25 from cystic fibrosis. One day after her funeral, her body went missing, and it was never found. The funeral home had subcontracted embalming and transportation to a third party that had access to the building after hours, but they never found out what happened to the body. Her parents won $8 million in a lawsuit, so there's that, at least.

Across the pond in Scotland, Lydia Reid lost her infant son back in 1975. He died at seven days old, and Reid says that when she asked to see him, the hospital showed her a different child. They told her she was suffering post-natal depression when she complained. She spent years trying to get anyone to listen, insisting the hospital had been using the body parts of dead children for research purposes, something the hospital admitted to, in general, years later. Finally, in 2017, Reid was able to exhume the body of her son to determine what had been done to him. And instead of answers, authorities discovered clothes that had no human remains in them. There had never been a baby buried in the casket. For over 40 years, Reid had been lied to, and her child's fate will likely never be known. What a bunch of assholes.

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There's Way Too Much Creepy Body Abuse

More than once in my comedy career, I've taken on the challenge of addressing something heinous and utterly reprehensible while still trying to keep it light and entertaining, as is my duty. So with that in mind, lemme tell you a joke. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get the fuck away from the nurse who got caught having sex with a corpse.

As if all the other ways you could desecrate a body weren't bad enough, the number of people who abuse bodies for their own kicks is weirdly higher than it should be. As in, it should be none, and yet there's something. That nurse, who was caught by the husband of the deceased in the act, is just the tip of the necro-creep iceberg. A worker at a Toledo funeral home was convicted of sexually abusing a corpse after he was deemed to have treated the body in a way that would "outrage reasonable community sensibilities." You don't want to know what that means explicitly, and may be more outraged to learn it's only worth a year in jail.

A morgue worker, also in Ohio, admitted in 2014 to having sex with over 100 corpses between 1976 and 1992, because every garbage fire has to have a fuel source, and it's apparently this man's soul. The worker would get drunk or high and abuse the bodies, and other staff even knew about it. It only came to light when one of his victims, who had been murdered, was examined and the worker's DNA was recovered. Since the actual murderer hadn't raped her, police needed to track down who did. The rest is skin-crawlingly gross history.

Over in Russia, morgue workers take their bone-chilling atrocities into the big time, like the worker who decided to befoul a reality TV star who had been murdered. Her body had been exhumed after police were unable to find her killer, and instead they discovered forensic evidence from a morgue worker whose only punishment for necrophilia was being asked to resign, since it's apparently not any more illegal there than meddling in another country's election.

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Cheapskates And Thieves Will Try To Make A Buck Off Your Corpse

There are a lot of victimless crimes a person can commit, like pooping on your neighbor's lawn or pirating a movie you ended up not liking. Maybe it's from some misplaced sense of cosmic justice that people think it's OK to commit certain acts if no one really suffers for it that they can see at the time. Which is why, every so often, someone tries to pull a fast one on a corpse. It's not like a dead guy's complaining if you steal his gold fillings, right? Incidentally, that happens. People steal gold fillings from the dead. And that may be the least of your posthumous concerns.

For example, cemetery owner Jemar Lambert allegedly figured he could save money by burying a bunch of people in the same plot of land, stacking them on top of each other like a decomposing Connect Four. Lambert's cemetery was running short on space, so when he wasn't putting together bodies like short stacks of pancakes, he was apparently just cramming them in wherever he could find a few square feet of space, whether he owned the land or not. That ended up getting him ten years of probation.

Workers at Illinois' historical Burr Oak Cemetery tried a similar cost-cutting method when they simply dug people up, tossed out the tombstones, and sold the spaces all over again. They ended up being convicted of desecrating bodies, because most people in society aren't on board with treating human remains the same way you'd treat tree stumps.

While people stacking bodies or reusing plots of land could be considered lazy descrators, there are more proactive ghouls in the world as well. A human body is a gold mine to the right person, and you're just going to throw it away like expired deli ham? Not funeral home owner Michael Francis Brown. He realized medical research was a booming industry that had a serious supply and demand issue. How do the doctors and scientists of tomorrow learn what your brain looks like if there aren't enough brains to go around? He stepped in to fix that issue by chopping up the bodies that he was supposed to be burying, and selling them literally piece by piece for scientific research, without actually obtaining consent to do so.

Now, how does a guy like Brown get the idea to sell off body parts like they were tamales at a ballgame, which may or may not be a thing that happens outside of TV shows I saw in the '80s? He could have been inspired by the LA coroner's office, which was caught selling the corneas of literally thousands of bodies to an eye bank without obtaining consent from families.

Canadian morticians, who you'd think would be all "So sorry for your loss, allow us to bathe the dearly departed in maple poutine," may be even worse, if these shenanigans from Calgary are any indication. These shifty bastards sold expensive caskets to families, and then swapped them for cheap ones for cremation so they could resell the expensive ones. The husband and wife duo were charged together, and the husband copped a plea to fraud to drop all the other charges, which included cutting the finger off of a body so they could steal a ring. That's some low-class shit right there.

So I say again: When it comes time to die, just arrange an explosion. It will save everyone a lot of trouble, and the kids will love it.

Uh, were y'all aware you can just buy toe tags for bodies? Yikes.

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For more, check out 5 Horrific Things You See Collecting Dead People As A Job and 5 Horrifying Truths About Funeral Homes (From An Undertaker).

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