I once worked in the late 90s as a pathologist in a morgue. And we drank a lot there every day. Exactly at 12.30 I went to the market and started preparing lunch while the older comrades were “wise and...
Time of the Dead
Once I had to get a job as a night shift worker at one of the morgues. The work is not dusty, within three days, the clientele is flexible, without any special complaints. At first...
Case at autopsy
I'll tell you about our pathologist. This is a young man of 25 years old with quite attractive appearance. In the middle of the semester he replaced our teacher...Abandoned morgue
Thursday evening I was sitting in a chair watching TV when my phone rang. This was my friend, with whom we are engaged in “photostalkerism”...
Watchman at the morgue
This story happened to my friend Andrey about 6 years ago. At that time, he could not find a job for a long time, and then he was offered to work as a watchman in a morgue for good money by his standards. He agreed...
Forensic expert's story
I had been working in forensic science relatively recently, about six months. They allocated a whole building to us and equipped it with everything we needed. Of course, in...
Crying in the morgue
One of my relatives worked in forensic medicine for 20 years. When I was little, I asked her: “Aren’t you afraid to work with the dead?” She always answered me that I should be afraid of the living...
The autopsy showed...
At school in the 6th grade, a new boy was placed at my desk. At the end of the school year, he and I were inseparable, but after graduation, life separated us...
Locked in the morgue
When I was 18 years old, I entered a medical university because I was always drawn to knowledge in this area, and I wanted to bring more benefit to sick people. This...
In the morgue
I worked as a security guard at a morgue. It was a medical university: students studied there, on the second and third floors there were auditoriums for lectures, rooms with skulls...
City morgue
The young orderly worked in the city morgue not so long ago. Just a few days, but even in this short time, he managed to listen to a lot...
This terrible mystical story happened back in Soviet times, at the end of the 20th century, in one of the morgues. Prosector Gerasimov performing an autopsy of a corpse...
The thick silence of the morgue could be cut with a knife like a sausage. The night watchman Matvey Ivanovich, a retired military man with a shaved head and a gray mustache, loved this evening hour. Charon's employees have already left, the doors are locked and you can take out a thermos, sandwiches and a fresh newspaper from your briefcase. The guard didn't trust computers.
The world should not change because American television sinned with the typewriter, he grumbled.
Paper news seemed more familiar to him: they rustled, smelled of printing ink, and you could wrap dinner in them. The deceased citizens of the morgue behaved quietly, without interfering with solving crossword puzzles, eating sandwiches and drinking tea. It was this silence of the room, well isolated from the world, that he loved most. The noise in the life of a retired soldier would be enough for three civilian destinies.
The pathology department was small, if not tiny: on one side there was a refrigerator with cells for those leaving for another world, on the other there were cabinets with medical instruments and a table for anatomical studies with water taps and a large scale pan. There was a flat wooden board hanging by the front door, onto which the doctors pinned various papers with thumbtacks. Right there, at the desk of Khrushchev’s times, sat Matvey Ivanovich with his thermos. He made himself more comfortable on the chair and was just about to open the newspaper with sandwiches when a strange sound similar to snoring broke the silence. This is how guests snore when they fall asleep after a feast in the next room behind a closed door. However, there were no adjacent rooms in the morgue: it was located in a separate annex. Guests arrived here after serving their earthly sentence in full, and by definition could not snore.
The watchman put down the bundle of sandwiches and listened. The sound died down, but did not disappear completely, clinging to the edge of audibility with a torn decibel. It was unclear whether the ear heard a subtle note or whether the imagination completed it in the head. Matvey Ivanovich shook his head like a bulldog after a bath. The snoring became more distinct and came from the far corner. From under the table with the scales and the sink.
Outrageous! - muttered the watchman, rising to his feet. His thought was as direct as a torpedo shot: the pathologist drank too much free alcohol and fell asleep on the floor. However, no one was found under the table. Apparently, the old soldier’s hearing failed him: snoring was heard somewhere behind him - from the nearest refrigerator compartment. Afraid to believe the impossible, the watchman came up and carefully opened it. The snoring suddenly stopped. Matvey Ivanovich froze in indecision, but then nevertheless pulled the gurney with the deceased on himself. He lay serenely under a cold white sheet and did not make any sounds.
“Sleep well, comrade,” muttered the watchman, rolling the dead man back into the refrigerator. Then he walked around the perimeter of the room, looking under tables and between metal cabinets. Matvey Ivanovich stopped at the window, wiped his sweaty bald head with a handkerchief and, putting it in his pocket, glanced at the hospital courtyard. A black cat of twilight danced around a yellow lantern on a concrete pillar. Snow flew out of the darkness in large flakes - slowly and solemnly, like manna from heaven. For a whole minute the watchman watched him motionless, gradually calming down.
“Ffffuuu,” he exhaled noisily and headed towards the table with dinner and a newspaper. But Matvey Ivanovich was not destined to get to the sandwiches: a sharp single snore hit his ears and immediately died down. Out of surprise, the watchman even sat down, bending his legs and pulling his neck into his shoulders. Then he turned around and quickly rushed to the refrigerator. Bustling nervously, he opened the cells one after another, rolling out their inhabitants under the bright light of the ceiling lamps. When the last gurney left the cell, the guard stopped and counted the morgue personnel. The seven deceased citizens lay before him, their arms stretched out disciplinedly along their bodies under the sheets. Realizing that he was doing absolute stupidity, Matvey Ivanovich slowly walked along the row, carefully observing the dead. Nobody moved. He walked back, and at that moment a short snore was heard from behind. The watchman rushed towards the sound, but a new snore - just as brief and impudent - sounded from the other end of the row. Despite the complete absurdity of the situation, the thought flashed through Matvey Ivanovich’s mind that the dead were mocking him.
Hrrrrrr! - and the watchman rushed to the leftmost gurney.
Zhrrrhrrr! - and he ran back.
The snoring stopped as suddenly as it had started. Breathing heavily, the watchman stood in the middle of the room and turned his head around, not trusting the silence that followed. Cold sheets were thrown to the floor, and seven dead faces stared with closed eyes at the ceiling. A confusion reigned in Matvey Ivanovich’s head, reminiscent of the thickening twilight outside the window. A lonely idiotic thought crawled out of him into the light of the lantern of reason: “we need to turn them on their sides, people don’t snore on their sides.” Gathering the remnants of his sanity, he pushed the thought deeper into his subconscious. Another one immediately appeared in her place. She seemed less crazy to the watchman. Taking a mirror out of his briefcase, he checked all the deceased one by one: no one was breathing. Then he carefully examined the inside of the refrigerator and, having found nothing, was about to roll the deceased back in when two quiet but long snores were heard almost simultaneously, merging into a real roolade. Unable to bear it, Matvey Ivanovich jumped to the nearest gurney and turned the dead man on his side. Rulada broke off. Puffing and listening every minute, the watchman laid the others on their sides. I listened. Silence. He picked up the sheets from the floor and carefully covered each of them in turn. I listened. Silence. He stood watching the dead. On their sides they looked unnatural, like giant dolls, but no one was snoring. Matvey Ivanovich washed his hands under the tap, dried them thoroughly with a towel, sat down in a chair and froze. Silence. He glanced at the open thermos with cooled tea.
Maybe an auditory hallucination? - he asked out loud to someone unknown.
The new idea made the retired military man extremely happy. An auditory hallucination, of course! An echo of the previous service. A banal shell shock of the subconscious. He looked triumphantly at the future dinner and froze, paralyzed by new snoring. Right in front of him, looking out of a newspaper bundle, sandwiches were snoring loudly. Yes, yes, the snoring was coming from the bundle! Matvey Ivanovich’s cheek twitched involuntarily. The nervous tic affected the brain like a starting pistol firing on sprinters. Thoughts rushed from their place, pushing each other away with their elbows.
Ventriloquism of the dead! - one of them shouted ahead of her rivals.
Auditory hallucination! - another one screamed, rushing forward.
You're just crazy! - the third took off into the lead.
The watchman jumped up, swept the package off the table and kicked it. The sandwiches scattered across the floor and fell silent.
We need to return everything to the way it was,” the outsider thought hobbled to the finish line. Matvey Ivanovich, like a sleepwalker, obediently took a dustpan and a broom, swept up the bread and poured it into the trash can. Then he rolled the dead into the refrigerator, forgetting, however, to turn them over on their backs and a couple of sheets on the floor. He put a thermos and a mirror in his briefcase, clicked the lock and... Snoring hit the room like a stream of water from an overturned barrel. It came from everywhere: from the cabinets, from the ceiling, from under the tables. Everything was snoring! Unable to bear this cacophony, the watchman hid between two metal cabinets, covering his ears with his palms and closing his eyes...
... Two years have passed. The former watchman spent four months of that time in a psychiatric hospital outside the city. It turned out that driving a real military man crazy is not so easy. As soon as he found out that the doctor was higher in rank, the old soldier’s brain fulfilled the order to return to normal and provide the wearer with mental accompaniment of physical existence. The brain even overdid it, showing initiative: Matvey Ivanovich learned to use a tablet and parted with paper newspapers forever. One spring day, after driving my old “nine” out of the garage, the summer season began! - Matvey Ivanovich drove into a car wash and sat in a chair, slowly typing a lengthy comment with his index finger under the latest news about sanctions. In his commentary, he painted Obama in the darkest terms and had just moved on to characterize Mrs. Merkel when two men entered the room. Apparently, they continued a long-standing argument, because the first thing the retired military man heard were the words “You’re wrong!”
You're wrong! - one of the men said condescendingly. - Firstly, the inexplicable is a temporary category. Today it is inexplicable, like the virgin birth, but tomorrow even the child knows that he was conceived in a flask. Or vice versa: yesterday they knew how to build pyramids, but today they forgot and began to invent fantastic versions. Secondly, the inexplicable is a personal category. The same fact is common for me, I may not even notice it, but for you it is a miracle.
Nonsense! - the second one waved it off. - There are things that are clear to everyone. And there are those that no one can explain. Do you remember how I told you how a couple of years ago an entomologist died?
Do not remember that.
Yes, I told you! Professor. In this very entomology he was a celebrity. He returned from New Guinea with a bag of some unknown beetles. And he got sick. He lies in a separate room and demands to bring his bugs. In general, I don’t know how, but the head doctor gave him permission. I was looking after his laboratory assistant then. It was a joke! These bugs have spread throughout the hospital. When they are nervous, they scare away those around them: the neck rubs against the next segment and the sound is similar to loud snoring. No one was allowed to sleep for three days!
And what does our conversation have to do with it?
Yes, that’s not what I wanted! One incident occurred in the hospital morgue after the death of an entomologist. Creepy! In the morning, doctors enter the morgue, and there is a complete mess: tables have been moved out of place, there are two sheets on the floor, instruments... The guard is huddled between the cabinets: he covers his face with his hands and is shaking, as if in a fever. Overnight I lost my mind. They open the refrigerator, and there are dead people lying on their sides. And two without sheets. It was as if they crawled out of the refrigerator at night and then came back. By the way, it is impossible to open the cells from the inside and close them back behind you too. How do you explain this?
Shall we smoke? - his interlocutor avoided answering.
Went!
And they went outside, not noticing how strangely an elderly shaved man with a tablet was looking at them.
I was born and raised in Kalmykia. Since childhood, I have been interested in detective novels, so it is not surprising that after finishing school I went to study to become a forensic scientist. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a job near my home, so I had to leave my parents for the Russian outback.
Here I fully understood what life in a foreign land is like. To say that no one loved me here is not enough. I was a newcomer, a stranger, and with a specific oriental appearance. A forensic scientist is generally not a very romantic profession, but in the department where I worked, the most unpleasant and dirty work was dumped on me.
I never remember that I had the opportunity to go to a crime scene - people were invited there, but I had to spend my working time in the morgue, examining dirty, sometimes half-decomposed corpses, and not just examining, but often collecting them in parts.
Worst of all, the morgue was run by a terribly unpleasant woman named Claudia. She was already over 50, she was listed as the chief nurse here and was terribly proud that her relative occupied some important position in the city administration.
For the same reason, the other three morgue workers were afraid of Claudius and tried never to contradict her. This lady immediately disliked me.
It all started with what she once called to his face a narrow-eyed Chuchmek. I did not tolerate this and answered her quite accordingly.
From then on, our enmity began - Claudia ran to complain about me to her superiors, but they reacted to her complaints without much enthusiasm: I was helped by the fact that I was a good specialist, knew my job and was needed in my place.
Of course, they called me to the authorities, had a preventive conversation, asked me to be more restrained, but that was all.
She also had a daughter, probably 13 years old. The girl’s name was Lena and she had Down syndrome. Claudia raised her alone, and in order not to leave the mentally retarded teenager at home alone, her mother took her to work. Of course, this was strictly prohibited by the rules, but who could say anything to the actual owner of the morgue?
As far as I understand, Lena grew up here. The morgue was something completely ordinary for her, however, she did not bother anyone. She came in the morning and sat quietly in the corner of the rest room with a sketchbook and pencils. Everyone here was already so accustomed to it that no one was embarrassed by the fact that there was a child next to a freshly opened corpse.
However, as is often the case with Downies, for her 13 years the girl was already quite tall and curvaceous, so her mother put a white robe on her, and if strangers were in the morgue, they simply thought it was one of the staff.
Surprisingly, it was with Lena, unlike her mother, that I quickly found a common language. Gradually, we even became friends with her. As far as I could judge, Claudia did not pay any attention to her daughter’s development, she gave up on her, so the girl was uncommunicative and too inhibited.
She spoke slowly, taking long pauses between phrases, but if you got used to this manner, you could notice that the girl answered questions quite reasonably. Sometimes we just remained silent - it didn’t bother us at all.
But, like any normal person, it seemed unnatural to me. A child should not grow up in a morgue, next to corpses. One day I asked Lena why she didn’t tell her mother not to bring her here.
It seems that the girl did not understand my question - she did not even think about the fact that she should not be near the dead. I often noticed how Lena approached the dead on the tables, stood next to them for a long time, and it seemed to me - don’t laugh - she was talking to them.
I asked her about this - and she confirmed my guesses. Why? Yes, because they ask her to do so.
Do the dead talk to you?
No. They just cry often. And they really need someone to be nearby at this moment. Here I stand.
Can you hear them crying? The dead cannot cry, they are dead.
They can. Sometimes they even scream in fear. When darkness falls on them.
Darkness?
That's what they call it. They say it is a black and cold void. Darkness. They are afraid of her, try to run away, but they fail. Darkness comes for everyone. Then they start screaming and calling for help. But no one comes - except me.
Why are you going? Do you need it? It's scary, isn't it?
A little. But I feel sorry for them very much. It’s not at all difficult to listen when someone cries.
Has it ever happened that they asked you for something?
She hesitated for a moment to answer, and then nodded.
Remember - they brought the boy three days ago?
I remembered. Then they brought a boy to us, who, having quarreled with his mother, swallowed pills. It was not possible to save him.
He really asked me to go to church, light a candle and tell God his name. Darkness fell over him, but no one met him, and he did not know where to go. You know, the dead told me that when it was my turn to go into the darkness, no one would light a candle for me either, because my mother did not baptize me in the church. And I'll be lost too.
I paused, not knowing what to say to this girl. Then he asked:
So what, are they all like this?
No. There are also evil ones. It is dangerous to approach such people; they can grab you and drag you along with them.
Of course, I decided that the girl was just fantasizing. Or maybe she was a little damaged in her mind - is it any wonder if you have been around the dead since childhood? It’s not easy for an adult to endure here either. And then one incident happened that made me think.
I was in the morgue when an angry colonel burst in. At first I couldn't understand what he was talking about. The colonel claimed that we sent a living person to the morgue, left him without medical care, and that’s why he died. He was furious and threatened to put us all on trial.
I tried to calm him down, explained that the person he was talking about had a completely destroyed brain, so there was no way he could be alive, even theoretically. But the colonel continued to scream, he claimed that when the victim regained consciousness, he told the nurse the name of his killer.
It was his driver, whom no one even thought of at first. He was detained and irrefutable evidence was found.
Don't get me wrong - I saw the man he was talking about. A middle-aged businessman was brought to us with a completely crushed skull. To be honest, there wasn’t much left of his head at all, so he couldn’t regain consciousness and talk.
They began to figure out who the dead man was talking to. As you probably already understood, it was Lena. Since she was wearing a white coat, the investigator mistook her for a nurse.
In general, I don’t know how, but this matter was hushed up. But Lena stopped appearing at the morgue from that day on. Claudia finally decided to leave her at home out of harm's way.
Two months after this incident, I still managed to go to my homeland - a place was freed up for me, which I was incredibly happy about. We never saw Lena again. After another six months, I accidentally met my former colleague at a refresher course, and from him I learned that everything was the same in the morgue again, and Claudia was taking Lena to work again.
And after some time, I unexpectedly dreamed of Lena. It was very dark around, I only saw her figure in the distance, but I knew for sure that it was her. And she shouted only one word to me:
In the morning I woke up and decided to call my former colleague to find out if everything was okay with them. It was from him that I learned that Lena had died. As it turned out, the mother had gone to a corporate event during the day, and the guard simply did not notice the quiet girl in the corner of the hall when he was closing the morgue for the night.
When she was discovered in the morning, she was lying on the floor, and her palm, as if in a vice, was clamped in the hand of the hanged man, who had been brought in the day before.
That same day, even though I am a Buddhist, I went to an Orthodox church and lit a candle near the image of Christ. I told him Lena’s name. I still do this sometimes. I really hope this will help her find her way in the Darkness.
No matter what anyone says, death is a rather unpleasant thing even in its most peaceful manifestations, and it’s not even worth talking about violent death. One sight of a corpse pulled out of a burnt car, removed from a noose, or fished out from the bottom of a lake can easily trigger a gag reflex and send even the most seasoned and courageous of us kissing the toilet. However, there is one category of people in the world who regularly have to deal with death and all its ensuing (pardon the bad pun) consequences.
In contact with
Classmates
Yes, as you probably already guessed completely correctly, we are talking specifically about pathologists and mortuary workers - seasoned people with strong nerves and an equally strong digestive system, who, in principle, are difficult to surprise with anything. However, “difficult” does not mean “impossible at all.”
Today we have prepared for our readers a selection of quite entertaining, albeit slightly shocking stories about the strangest and most unusual causes of death that these “knights of the scalpel and saw” had to deal with.
"Hit the Bullseye"
“I’ve been working in the morgue for many years, but this is perhaps the strangest death I’ve ever seen. Basically, nothing particularly trashy or scary. An ordinary guy, a worker, was pulling equipment out of a van with his colleagues. The van door was held in place by a spring, and the bolt that secured the spring could not stand it, flew off and hit the guy right in the carotid artery.”
“The bolt didn’t even penetrate the skin, but the artery ruptured from the impact, and the guy died from blood loss in a matter of seconds. He just sat down on the grass and died; his colleagues didn’t even immediately notice that something was wrong with him. If the blow had hit any other part of the body, he would have gotten away with a couple of bruises, but the bolt hit “straight in the bull’s eye” - some unfortunate square centimeters, where the injury turned out to be fatal.
"Not the best method of suicide"
“A young girl, twenty-something years old. She decided to commit suicide and threw the switched-on oil heater into the bathtub. The current was too small to kill her on the spot, but enough to paralyze her while the device slowly heated the water in the bath. In general, in the end she was boiled alive. Perhaps not the best method of suicide.”
"An attempt is not torture"
“For ethical reasons, I will not name names and the name of the city, but the story itself is unusual. I was recently brought in for an autopsy on an older man with two gunshot wounds in the head. He first shot himself with a 20-gauge shotgun in the bedroom, but survived, so he crawled to the garage, reloaded and finished the job. If it weren’t for the specific nature of the wounds and the trail of blood that he left throughout the house, the police would probably have decided that it was a murder.”
Mass grave
“I’m not a pathologist, but I also have a story in store. I work as a forensic archaeologist, and several years ago we excavated a mass grave near a village that was captured by the Nazis during the war. There were a lot of bones, clothes and personal belongings of the dead. It’s sad and scary, but what can you do, work is work. So, at the very edge of the burial we found the body of a girl, presumably 13-14 years old, killed by a shot in the forehead.”
“It seemed strange to me, because usually the Germans executed prisoners with a shot in the back of the head, but the truly terrible details emerged later, when the remains were taken to the laboratory. It turned out that the victim was shot with a relatively modern automatic pistol, and she died around the 70-80s. Someone shot a 13-year-old girl in the forehead and threw her into an old mass grave.”
"Saw Returns"
“My ex worked in a morgue. She said that they had one... uh... I don’t even know what to call it correctly, “client”, I guess. So, this “client” committed suicide... with a jigsaw. It stuck out from her frontal bone. Obviously, it was not easy to kill herself in such an exotic way, and judging by her injuries, she tried several times before she completely failed. The former said that she and her colleagues had to make a lot of effort to remove the instrument from the skull.”
My father, who once worked in a morgue as a pathologist, told me about this story. He himself is a cheerful person in life, likes to drink sometimes, and in general he often tells all sorts of stories from life. But this one. After all, the most vivid and memorable.
I won't go off topic. So, the rest of the story will come from the father’s words.
It was a normal working day. It was getting dark, there was no desire to go home, because your mother was at sea and, in fact, no one was waiting at home. My partner was single and decided to go to the nearest store for vodka and a snack. Well, I came and drank a bottle of pickled cucumbers. We sit and talk about life.
And a man came to us in the middle of the day. 36 years. At the same time he died from a heart attack. And so, in the middle of the conversation, my partner went outside to smoke. It was already getting dark. And the devil pulled me to go to the next room, where the corpses were, including him. He lies on his table, covered with a rag. I decided not to turn on the overhead light and turned on the table lamp. I’m standing there, sorting through the documents, when I feel someone put a hand on my shoulder. I thought that Lyoshka smoked and came back. Only, the door of the room didn’t creak and I didn’t hear any footsteps.
I turn around. In front of me stands a corpse that was just brought in 3-4 hours ago. Pale, cold hands, standing in the clothes his mother gave birth to. He looks straight into the soul with his green eyes. And he says: “Greetings from your brother, mother and father. They can’t wait for you. They miss you. You’re the last one left.” And with these words he falls to the floor. I checked - there was no pulse, and in general it was just an ordinary corpse. I quickly put him back, covered him again and went back to the room where they were drinking. I see Lyoshka brought two more bottles. He drained one almost in one gulp, the second he already drank with difficulty, and sat choking.
Lyokha understood that something was wrong, but did not interrogate him, this was not in his principles. After all, how could the corpse know that my brother was killed in Afghanistan, that my mother and father died, even though they were not old. Some kind of damn thing.
I remember that in the morning Lyokha and I woke up in the same room. He slept sitting on a chair, I was on the sofa. There were three empty bottles. Having checked the room where the corpse lay, I discovered that everything was the same as I had left at night.
The man was taken away and buried. I quit after a couple of weeks and never returned to this field of medicine.
After that incident, my father was clinically dead. Literally for half an hour. As he said, his whole family was there. Something like the soul separated from his body and the soul, passing through the tunnel, united with his relatives. But they told him that he came to them early and he returned to life, agreeing to meet when he was 65 years old. Now he is 58 and every year he wants to celebrate his 65th birthday more and more...
