Being an autopsy expert is unsettling enough just by the sound of the job title.
But if you knew the kind of gruesome things they actually come across, you’d probably feel even luckier to have chosen a different career.
And below, you’ll find the shocking discoveries they’ve shared—ones that might cost you your appetite… or your sleep. So if you’re curious and brave, keep reading. If not, you may want to sit this one out.
Warning: Some of these accounts are seriously graphic. Scroll at your own risk.
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#1
I worked as an Anatomical Pathology Technician, basically my job is to carry out the external examination of a patient and then eviscerate them, ready for the pathologists to dissect the organs and determine a cause of death.
When I was a trainee, it was a sort of “right of passage” for you to eviscerate the decomposed bodies. I always used to make my first incision and then leave the body to “gas off” which literally made your eyes burn it smelt that bad, but ultimately when it came to eviscerating the body itself, it seemed to make it not smell as bad once the gases had all been expelled. Maggoty bodies are generally the worse because the maggots literally get everywhere, dozens of times I could feel then crawling up my sleeves and inside my scrubs...
As you can imagine, you see some really disturbing stuff in the profession. But one that will always stick with me is a 13 year old girl I had to autopsy who had jumped from a bridge due to online bullying and had been in the water for about 3 weeks. I remember her coming in, being partly skeletal, sopping wet and covered in mud. I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sadness as I looked at her because of how young she was and that she had taken her own life due to bullying. I will never forgot looking at her few strands of long brown hair that were left on the remaining parts of her scalp. Anyways before we can carry out the autopsy she needed to be undressed, her jeans were full of sand and mud so I had to carefully cut these off of her and hose her down as I went along. As I was pulling off her jeans some of her muscle on the lower part of her leg was still clung to the bone and as I pulled the jeans over it it made her toes and foot starting twitching and moving... I had to stop what I was doing and take 5 minutes outside. Not because it scared me but it all just seemed to hit me in the that moment...
Image credits: Misfits_Jordan
#2
I shadowed forensic autopsies in college. The pathologists all were very good at separating themselves mentally from the situation and were unfazed by pretty much everything, but they all agreed s*****e cases involving children were the worst. One young boy hanged himself and wrote his s*****e note on his forearm. At autopsy, all distinguishing markings (i.e. tattoos, scars, etc.) need to be noted in the report, so listening to the pathologist read this little boy's s*****e note was very sobering and beyond heartbreaking for everyone involved.
Image credits: so_verysorry
#3
I'm a mortician. Upon preparing a body, during the cleansing stage of the embalming process, I found the person possessed a Prince Albert piercing. Whatever, right? Well it was pretty weird to see a octogenarian Baptist minister with a ring in his bird.
Image credits: ComradeTerry
#4
Spent two weeks shadowing a forensic examiner and a toxicologist in the medical examiner's office. One thing that they did *not* warn me about is that dead bodies will noise when rolled over and remaining air is expelled from their lungs.
So cut to me observing my first autopsy on a mid 50s male who committed s*****e by blowing his face off with a shotgun. The medical examiner and tech were rolling him over onto the table from the gurney when he let out a loud, zombie-like "Auuuuuughghghghghghhhhhhhhh" as the air went out from his lungs.
Seeing me jump and recoil back, the examiner laughed and told the body "Shut up! I haven't done anything to you yet!".
Image credits: justplainmark
#5
Not my story, but somewhat related. A while ago a couple of friends, went hiking nearby and came across the body of a man who had hanged himself two weeks prior. It was summer and the body was bloated and in a terrible shape. They called 911 and waited until the authorities arrived. When they took the body down, it literally broke in half spilling guts and fluids everywhere. The smell was atrocious, people vomited, etc. I guess this qualifies as disturbing.
Image credits: ronadian
#6
If I'm not mistaken, any medical professional who deals with a patient (dead or alive) isn't allowed to disclose any information about a person's body whatsoever. Hell, even as an anatomy student, we sign a specific agreement that says we won't talk about donors outside of the lab/room (with the exception of a private forum we used to describe our progress, abnormalities, etc).
Image credits: anon
#7
This might not be relative but a good friend of mine is a coroner. She picks up the bodies.
Anyway, she told me this story about how there was this older 400 lbs woman who passed away in her house. It was winter time and she didn't have many friends or family so her body remained undiscovered for 2 weeks. She passed away on a couch which was directly over a heater. When they went to move her, she split right in half long ways....
Image credits: anon
#8
Not a medical examiner but mortuary. The goriest was the woman who jumped off a twenty something floor balcony. She had landed on her feet, driving her shins up into her thighs and her thighs up into her abdominal cavity. Her spine was pretty much an accordion.
Most emotionally disturbing- a 16 year old boy who decided to go up against a marine and lost. He was really young looking, more like 14, and was just this scrawny little thing. Looked more like he should have been playing p okemon or something instead of trying to earn street cred by going after a guy who had just returned from Afghanistan with a knife.
Image credits: Beardiehelpmeplz
#9
Not an autopsy but I once removed a leg ulcer dressing from a patient and the wound was full of wriggling maggots. Patient was blissfully unaware.
Image credits: petermichael20
#10
I do autopsies.
Strangest - Several giant egg shaped fecaliths (rock hard poop) with multiple large clots inside the wall of the bowel completely obstructing the already hugely dilated lumen.
Worst smell - 10 day post mortem large bowel that was inflated like a balloon and filled with rather unpleasant orange goop.
Worst thing - 3 year old Munchausen by proxy victim.
Most interesting - I cut up and examine brains every Thursday. Brains are awesome.
Favorite related story - On a date with a girl and said "I like to listen to Slayer and cut up dead people."
"That's hot.".
Image credits: dolderer
#11
Not my story, but my grandpas. One of his first jobs, when he was 16, was picking up dead bodies with one of his friends and they took them to the morgue (idk how he got that job, it was a small town in Midwest America). He has a lot of stories, but one guy who died in a cornfield wasn’t found for awhile, so when he and his friend came to take him to the morgue, my grandfather grabbed his arms, friend grabbed his legs and lifted, they came off.
Image credits: agirlhasnoname10
#12
Pathologist here,
A couple of months ago we had a cadaver of a pretty skinny dead guy at my hospital. Nothing weird right?
Wrong.
This dude had an ENORMOUS p***s. I don't mean just large, it was literally so big that it was flopping well past the midpoint of his femur.
We reacted as it behooves a couple of grown-a*s, highly educated and serious men: by laughing our asses off and calling our colleagues to come check this out.
Image credits: ButterGoblinBegone
#13
Just sharing some stories I saved. I read them 2 years ago and they just stuck in my head :
(She was talking about an anorexic girl) " I posted before about wanting to do her autopsy (it's my job, I'm not creepy). Finally did one on someone who was even thinner last week. Their spinal column stuck out through their stomach while lying on their back. This person had been like that for 7 years and all organs were black and green and the skull was yellow and extremely thin. The organs were tiny and rested on either side of the spine with nothing on the spinal column. Thyroid bone was 100% visible through the neck skin. The muscles that sit over the skull were basically non-existant. A*****e was a hole sitting over the tailbone. The brain was literal mush as were the lungs. Their liver was half the size of a normal liver. The intestines were mostly dead and just fell apart to the touch. "
" Cause of death was liver failure with aetilogy for aspiration pneumonia. This person also had a small brain. The brain sits pretty packed into the skull with the dura tightly encasing it. This brain was not sitting flush with the dura and had clear gyri that kind of looked like gelatin. Fresh brains are typically pinkish and are very soft like a firm creme brulé… This brain just slopped out like what is typical in rather decomposed brains or people who were found days later in water.
Stomach acid was found all throughout the small intestine, lungs and ascending bowel. There was so much poop inside this person considering the starvation however it was bright yellow within the small bowel (literal bright yellow) which I have never seen before in my life. All of the organs were just sized weirdly such as the spleen being the same size as the kidneys (the spleen is pretty small) and the lungs just sat at the bottom of the chest cavity.. The lungs will sit flush with the rib plate, but when I removed the rib plate in this person the lungs were situated literally half way down so there was a space of about 12cm of nothingness.
Fat people are more disgusting inside (as in 200+ kgs.. They have litres and litres of liquid grease just in the cavities) however this person was just a shriveled sack with barely functioning organs. They were smaller than [name of another anorexic girl] which shocked me as I didn't think that was possible. They were about 172cm and 21kgs.
I could see the femoral artery without cutting them open. It was just there on the thigh against the bone. The skin around the crouch was like a pair of saggy skin underpants and it felt like it would tear every time I rubbed the leg (you push your fist up against the femoral vein on the thigh to get the blood to move upwards for sampling). ".
Image credits: novayante
#14
Friend had a relative/ friend of a parent that was a coroner or worked in forensics. One day a body was pulled from a river so the skin had shrivelled, butthey wanted to get the fingerprints. So the forensics woman cuts the skin on a finger so that she can slide her own finger in under the skin and smooth it out from the inside. I always thought that was super creepy.
Image credits: ChocolateSporks
#15
A friend (Nurse) of mine lives in a town near the mexican border. A man was brought in who was already dead (so it was no emergency, but his family didn't know what to do and thought there was an actual chance at saving him) and the scene was f*****g sick. Apparently, the man had exposed a d**g cartel and they put a hit out on him. The hit man presumably kidnapped the man and had removed all his nails, cut off his ears, nose, genitals, and eye lids, snipped all the major tendons and ligaments in his body, then they cut a hole in his throat and pulled his tongue through the hole and left him in front of a gas station.
Image credits: anon
#16
Not in the trade but long ago, my friend's mom managed a large hospital that included the county morgue. The cases she said were worst were drowning victims, like when the body isn't recovered for a while. People swell up a lot, and the smell is unique. Iirc JFK Jr fell into this category.
Med student friend said the body you *don't* want to learn on is that of someone who was morbidly obese. Basically you're learning anatomy, but there's a foot of fat between you and the pancreas.
I ended up working at the hospital mentioned above; ppl in the morgue line of work become so inured to it. I remember walking down by the morgue one time. In a lab room there was a pathologist sitting at one end of a table eating his lunch...at the other end, part of a leg he was dissecting.
Image credits: PretendJudge
#17
Did a rotation through the morgue during med school. ended up helping perform an autopsy on a younger man. should have checked the wrist band and seen that the name matched up with all the "RIP ___ ____" posts on facebook about a kid I knew from high school.
Image credits: papasmurf826
#18
The book Homicide: A Year on the killing streets, is one of the books that the shows The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets are based on.
It is written by David Simon who spent a year imbedded in the Homicide Unit of the Baltimore PD.
So they went to a murder scene in the middle of summer, and the body was not discovered for a long time. So the body was bloated and swollen. As the ME was loading it on a gurney to move it, the Detective says, "he is going to burst on you", The ME says, naw I got this.
Sure enough the body burst, so of course pretty much everyone in the room starts throwing up.
The detective steps out side and sees one of the cops that had just been in the room eating a massive Roast Beef sandwich. The detective was staring in awe and the cop says, it is extra rare I don't want my bread to get soggy.
The detective said, lord cops are sick f***s.
Image credits: IWW4
#19
I'm going to use my throw away for this:
So going with the gist of the topic: I work as an RN in labor and delivery at a high risk center, so we often get the worst cases. Unfortunately, fetal demises aren't too rare. Usually they are from congenital abnormalities or spontaneous abortions. Having worked in the past with adults who have died, working with dead babies is much more disturbing than I would have ever thought. Anyways, two stories stick out in my mind the most:
My first fetal demise was an induction for a 18 week old fetus (I don't remember the cause). Fresh out of school and loving working with happy healthy babies, this assignment terrified me. The mother delivered the baby completely intact in the amniotic sac. With the mother and father sobbing, I go to pick up the sac, place it on a blanket and take it over to the table to examine and assign APGARS; obviously 0/0. I stood there staring at this blob trying to remain professional and maintain my composure but was completely frozen with fear. My preceptor at the time said "If you're ok, go ahead and open the bag. Take the baby out, wrap him/her up, and hand it over to mom". I use my fingers to rip open the bag. Fluid pours out, the smell was something I'd never experienced before. Holding my breath, I take out the baby. At 18 weeks, the skin is very red/pink sticky and honestly alien looking. The eyes were bulging and we couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. I think I was more terrified to show the parents, who had already been through so much, because I knew they imagined their beautiful baby to look very different than from what I was about to hand them. I cleaned up, gave the family some alone time and stepped out of that room completely changed.
My next story happened when I felt a little more comfortable in these situations, as much as possible I guess. This baby was about around 18-19 weeks also, induction due to Anencephaly. The baby delivered by the time my shift started so it was now my job to take photos of the baby, foot prints, and create a nice memory box for the family. I took the baby in another room to dress in little clothes and try to get as nice of pictures as possible. The baby was so fragile it was like working with jello. The skull was actually open, no brain but oozing all over. I tried to adjust the baby to get a better angle for the picture when suddenly the head slips from my hand and spins around all the way around, one full rotation. Out loud I actually said "Please don't pop off, please don't pop off!". I spun the head back in place and gave up with the photos. I got a couple ok photos, but wasn't about to risk getting more to have to explain to grieving parents why their baby was suddenly decapitated.
Image credits: bobbarker2257
#20
My maternal grandfather was a crime scene photographer during his time - NOTE: This was in Bombay, India.
One of the cases he had spoken to my Dad about was this one about a serial killer who used to go about the streets of Bombay and whenever he used to come across homeless people, he used to take really huge stones and smash the heads of these people while they used to sleep at night.
I know, SUPER CREEPY.
But he used to be called to take the photos of those victims. My grandfather eventually died an alcoholic. I never got a chance to meet him. It's sad. My Dad was telling me about him and about how well read he was - He used to read apparently read ALL the articles in the newspaper from beginning to the end. My Dad says having to see such horrible crimes and to have to immortalize them in those photos and develop them eventually lead to his drinking. Apparently, my mom and her sisters used to find him passed out on the streets and had to hide the bottles from him. He was never a*****e or anything toward them. I just guess his profession may have drove him to it.
Image credits: anon
#21
S*****e by pills and alcohol.
That in itself isn't that shocking. The individual took an entire bottle of sleeping pills, drank a half bottle of alcohol and got into their hot tub.
The individual died but the body remained in the hot tub until the smell of the decomp alerted neighbors.
If you could imagine a body decomposing then liquefying in a hot tub, it still really doesn't do the actual sight of it justice.
The smell was so intense that many of us vomited (including the guys from Aftermath Inc. hired by the family to clean up.)
Best I can describe it is, the individual died in a hot tub which then became a giant crock pot of dead body stew.
Image credits: whoatethekidsthen
#22
I shadowed a medical examiner several times but the weirdest thing I ever saw still kind of haunts me. There was a woman that died suddenly and had all these bruises on her body. There were detectives and cops all around us because they thought it was a case of domestic violence. However, she was schizophrenic and was not on any meds. During one of her episodes, she would beat herself violently and self-inflict all of these bruises and wounds on her. But the way she died was crazy.
She beat herself so much that these bruises developed huge blood clots and broke off into the blood stream. They eventually ended up in her lungs (pulmonary embolism). We opened up her lungs and they were just full of blood clots. Her legs were full of them too.
She basically beat herself so much that she suffocated. It was so odd.
Image credits: viveron
#23
I've never performed an autopsy, but there was one time when I was in college we had an anatomy lap and apparently I missed the part the week before when the professor told us we would be looking at cadavers so the next week i walked in and saw all these blue bags on the table zipped up.
I didn't even think that much about them until the professor told us to gather around one of the tables. Then he unzipped it and there was just a dead body there. I was totally unprepared for that so I was like "whoa man." Then at the same time he unzipped the bag, the vent under the table turned on and it sounded like the dead body was roaring.
I had just watched the walking dead the night before so I thought it was coming alive and I let out a load scream like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj6_98tq4mY).
Everyone turned and looked at me, but no one said anything or laughed and then everyone just went back to watching the professor. It was crazy.
Image credits: anon
#24
My mother is a pediatrician, and had a very amusing story from her med school days.
So back then, she and her co-students lived together in a house with a house mother. Not quite a dorm or sorority, but similar. One day, they had spend the whole day dissecting cadavers - specifically the chest area. Everyone is quite hungry by dinner time. Well, in comes the house mother with a huge plate of.... ribs. The whole group just noped the heck out of there.
Image credits: hockeypup
#25
My sister works as a histologist and has helped out for one or two autopsies. She told me a story of how when they were doing an autopsy on this guy his bowels were extremely swollen, hard and stuk together. On further examination, he had swallowed a fish bone which pierced his stomach, into his intenstines and skewered them together, leading to his death.
Image credits: iLauraawr
#26
I used to work in the ER as a unit assistant (aka nurses' b***h) so we always had the worst jobs. It was maybe my second or third day and I had to go take a dead body of a little old lady to the morgue with another veteran unit assistant.
We rolled her back there, no problem, then we had to lift and slide her from the stretcher to the examining table in the morgue (only worked that job 6 months don't remember all the lingo). So she is in the body bag, but I feel her arm and use that to lift/push her. As soon as I start lifting she lets out a big groan. I almost had a heart attack. I thought she was still alive in there. I panicked and yelled "OH MY GOD WHAT DO WE DO!!!"
Later it was explained to me that it was just the air coming out of her lungs as we re-positioned her. But it was scary as hell at the time.
Image credits: ThereWillBeAnAnswer_
#27
My very first case was an elderly male who died in a house fire. The firemen were unable to extract him until after the fire was put out, so he was completely cooked. What struck me was how similar the smell is to a pig roast. When I opened the rib cage looked just like cooked ribs without sauce. The skin was crackling and oil and juices pooled in the crease between the skin and exposed rib cage.
I was off pork for about three months.
Image credits: cstoli
#28
I work with thousands pigs so it's not uncommon to see some dead. Normally we call someone to get the bodies and he'll come within a day. However once that Didnt happen and a pig was left for 5 days in the summer heat.
The sow had turned from pink to completely green like shrek, you could see where the veins were from the discoloration. it was bloated like a balloon, it's pupils turned White and foamy blood had seaped out the nose and mouth and one point. But in later days it was all dried and extra nasty.
When we get rid of the pigs we'd load in on a machine and push it into a pickup truck (burned the bodies)
So we go to wrap a wire around the leg and pushing into the body was like squeezing a wet spongy, it oozed liquid and the tissue ripped very easily. The wire kept slipping off the leg because it kept tearing. We realized that even if the wire could grasp it the machine couldn't support such a bloated body. It's a loading bay Thats on a tilt so the machine would tip over because of the weight. Unsure how to get the body in the truck we tried tying a rope around the head and the trucks hitch, pulled it close to the ledge eyes bulging even more. And then pushed it in the truck
It Was really disgusting but at the farm there is a lot of death so you have to get used fast, emptying buckets of dead pigglets is also nasty.
sorry if my writing is confusing english isn't my first language.
Image credits: Grapesoda2223
#29
Oh, my time to shine!
I did a forensic pathology rotation in medical school in Florida. Was working there one day when they brought an old guy in who had been found in his apartment in the middle of the summer with no air conditioning after about a week (So he had decomposed pretty quickly).
When bodies decompose the bacteria inside you eats the tissue and releases gas, so bodies tend to be bloated. So when they unzipped the body bag I wasn't surprised to see that. But I was suprised to see that his s*****m was about the size of a football (No exaggeration). This apparently occurred via the same bacteria process. Anyways, I was being keen, and I think they liked me, so they took a large bore needle and stuck it into the s*****m to let the gas escape. Then, they took a lighter and lit the end of the needle, so as the gas was escaping from the s*****m, it burned like a blowtorch. Lasted for about 20 seconds. They justified the process by saying it "decreases the smell in the lab".
Talk about seeing things that very few other humans have. The s*****m blow-torch.
Image credits: TSniddyHeavyT
#30
Not my story but a cop told me once that he went on a call to a house because it seemed like it had been abandonned. He goes up to the window to look in and cant really see, its to dark and it looks like a garbage bag is over the window. So they end up breaking down the door and get swarmed by thousands of flys, turns out the lights weren't off but there were flys all over them. The stench was horrible the body had been decomposing for so long it fused to the couch and when they tried to move the body they pulled the arm and it ended up ripping off.
Image credits: Beastingringo
