5 Horrific Things You See Collecting Dead People as a Job

I never even met my boss. All I knew was a disembodied voice that called and said, "We've got one at X," then abruptly hung up. Ghost Boss would call a lot, and at any time of day. Lack of regulation meant we were on call 24/7, with no limit on how much they could make us work. There were times I'd drive for 15 hours, come home, take a five-minute teaser-nap, and then Ghost Boss would send me on another 15-hour trek. All of this netted me a cool $9 per hour.

Our vans were old, battered, and dirty. They were under a permanent Amber Alert just on general principle. My windshield had a huge crack running the entire length, the transmission was dangling by a thread, the engine would continue to run after you took the key out, and you had to punch the dashboard if you wanted the wipers to work. I was actually pulled over by the cops on my last run because I had no light over the license plate. It hadn't gone out or anything -- it just wasn't there.

The inside of the van was even worse -- filthy, rusted out, and filled with discarded rubber gloves, dirty clothes, and blood-stained towels. This is where your loved ones go. On the other hand, I never heard any of them complain and would have run like hell if I did.

We bolted immediately, wet gurney be damned. I never found out if they did anything with the baby, like, you know, send it back for a proper burial so the place wouldn't be haunted by a tiny ghost. Hopefully they've at least remembered it's there by now.

Then there was the time I picked up the big brother of Frankenstein's monster. Though, in truth, I didn't "pick him up" so much as I desperately pulled and tugged like the Olympic strongman that I am not. I got him to the morgue no problem, but while taking him out of the van, the gurney's wheels failed to lock -- the whole thing immediately collapsed under his ample weight. I was able to lift and lock the wheels under his feet, but there was no way I could move the other end even a centimeter. Naturally -- and despite being buckled in -- he slid to the floor.

So now I had a defective gurney, a mountain of dead man that I couldn't budge, and a long, long hallway standing between me and the cooling room. I eventually accepted that the only solution was to drag his ass there. But before I could even start, a pool of horrific-smelling fluid started spilling from the body bag. Consumed with equal parts panic and disgust, I stepped into Lake Eerie, slipped, and nearly fell on the body. Luckily for my nerves, a nurse finally took pity on me and helped out by steadying the feet end of the gurney for me. I heaved with everything I had and finally got the body back where it needed to be.

The trek down the hallway was shockingly disaster-free, but once inside the cooling room, the entire goddamn gurney tipped over. All of the available refrigeration units were too high up. So I did what any professional would -- I gave the fuck up. I simply unbuckled Andre the Giant Corpse, let him roll to the floor, and slapped a Post-It note on his chest: "Sorry, too heavy to lift by myself. Thanks."

You thought the passive-aggressive Post-Its your roommate leaves on the milk carton were bad ...

There were disgusting sounds, too. The guy who sorta-trained me said that, during one of his runs, the corpse let out a low, guttural moan -- the result of carbon-dioxide buildup in the lungs. It sounded like a zombie rising up for a heaping plate of Brains Benedict, but in reality the screaming undead are just another day at the office for this job.

But, of course, it's not just the smells and sounds -- the sights are pretty awful too. Sometimes, I'd drive the dead bodies to medical centers for organ donation, where I saw an array of lovely things, such as rib cages being cracked open to get at the precious innards like a terrifying Kinder Surprise. The worst was skin donation. Did you know that skin is typically harvested from the neck down, so the body can still appear clean and untouched for an open-casket funeral? That's right, if your loved one was an organ donor, at their funeral they might be rockin' the Hellraiser beneath their Sunday best.

A co-worker mentioned that, on several occasions, he had gotten calls to pick up a body that hadn't officially become dead yet. They were usually on a respirator or some other type of life support and weren't expected to last much longer. So there he was, just hanging around the lobby, sipping coffee and patiently waiting for his cargo to be ready. If you're ever in that situation and some visitor who wants to make small-talk asks what you do for a living, learn how to lie.

An even more unsettling situation took place fairly recently. Two locals were in a terrible accident. The local news reported that they were killed instantly, except that wasn't true. I worked with the guy who ended up transporting them to the morgue, and they weren't dead when he showed up. They weren't exactly up and dancing, but their hearts were still beating and they were both breathing. Their injuries were too severe to survive, however, which is why they called for a transporter.

Worse still -- they held on forever. It was a painfully long wait before they died, meaning the transporter had time to make a sort of emotional connection to them. He even attended their funerals after they finally passed. Making a connection is perhaps the worst thing you can do when working around death. The more distance you keep between yourself and the "cargo," the easier it is to just load them up, send them to the cooler, and move on to the next chunk of flesh. It's not a pretty way to think, but then, it's not a pretty business. Hey, that's why they pay you the big bucks to do it.

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For more insider perspectives, check out The 6 Strangest Things Nobody Tells You About Life in Korea and 5 Things You Only Know If You Grew Up in a Communist Regime.

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