What they face in the morgue. The last way: Photo excursion to the morgue (79 photos). Vascular "preservation" of the body

No sooner had two scandals in Russia subsided, in the center of which were forensic experts - "the case of a drunken boy" and "the case of Dr. Misyurina" - when shocking news appeared again, the main character of which was a morgue employee. Recently, during the investigation of the mysterious murder of Oksana Aplekaeva, a participant in the Dom-2 program, a new fact emerged - the girl was raped not only before, but also after her death. Again, he confessed to the abuse of the corpse ... a forensic expert, an employee of one of the Moscow region morgues. What's going on with them in these morgues ?!

Love on the grave

The murder of Oksana Aplekaeva took place 10 years ago. However, it still worries minds. And because we are talking about the star of the scandalous reality show "Dom-2", whose participants have been dying one after another in recent years. And because the death of this girl turned out to be very mysterious.

Global Look Press / Russian Look / Natalya Loginova

Oksana Aplekaeva

In 2008, Oksana, who became famous on the set of the scandalous show, disappeared during the Moscow International Salon Crocus-Expo, which was taking place in those days, where she worked as a model. A few days later, her body was found on the Moscow-Riga highway. The investigation immediately established that before the girl was killed, she was severely beaten and abused several times. However, the investigation of the murder did not go further than this. Rumors about this case went around for a long time and different: among them was a rejected lover who lost his head from this, and a secret party at which Oksana could witness criminal events, which is why they decided to remove her. However, none of the versions was confirmed. The case was closed “due to the impossibility of identifying persons subject to criminal prosecution”. And now, 10 years later, it surfaced again. This happened when some time ago the investigators decided to re-examine the seized samples using the latest technology. Suddenly, the examination revealed something that no one expected: Oksana was raped not only before, but also after her death. And it immediately became known who did it after. It turned out that the samples of the discovered biomaterial belong to Alexander A., \u200b\u200ba forensic scientist who worked for 12 years in a morgue near Moscow, where Oksana's body was kept. By the way, under the onslaught of evidence, the accused had already confessed to everything and was fired from his job.

Just fired. Whereas in Europe or America for such a crime, a pervert would receive a rather long term. For example, in 2007, a 24-year-old New Yorker who worked at the morgue at Holy Name Hospital received it. Colleagues found him during intercourse with a woman's corpse. Subsequently, the court sentenced the necrophile to a 10-year term of imprisonment.

To the bone mortuary

Of course, anyone who hears this kind of news can really get scared. However, in reality, if there is any crime in the morgue, it lies in a completely different area.

What's going on in the morgue?

TASS / AP Photo / Dmitry Lovetsky)

An autopsy performed by a pathologist; establishing the cause of death, which is the forensic expert; treatment with a bacteria-killing substance and formalin, which is performed by laboratory assistants. Also necessary staff of the morgue are orderlies who wash and carry, dress and undress, embalm and preserve corpses; medical registrars who make entries in journals; make-up artists who comb the dead and, with the help of special cosmetics, bring them into proper form.

That's all the last chores. But without them, then nowhere. This, according to experts, is the main catch.

I would not blame the morgue workers for anything at all .. - Where the mafia is more serious today are funeral homes. This is where "dead money" flows like a river. Another thing is that, of course, these people have their own connections with everyone - with the police, with doctors, and with the morgue staff. It's true. And this business is very profitable. Simply because he stands on the fact that a person who has lost a loved one will not bargain, will give the last. And these guys will not hesitate, they will take it.

By the way, experts have been talking about the same thing for a long time. In their opinion, the main problem in this area is that information about the death of people in Russia today is widely sold and bought. In this process, of course, morgues are also involved. So it turns out that for one deceased in Russia today there are several agents. And the entire funeral market is overloaded with intermediaries, which entails not healthy competition, but competition of corruption opportunities. The main task is to "cheat a check".

Myths and death

In the meantime, until the funeral business as a whole is put in order, it is not surprising that frightening situations, and just myths, accumulate around morgues. Which, however, is not surprising - the topic is this.

Myth No. 1. The orderlies sell the water used to wash the dead to magicians and fortune-tellers.

Not. But the morgue workers have certain traditions. For example, there is a tradition of collecting items found in the pockets of the deceased: lighters, coins, etc. During perestroika, they say, often the contents of these pockets were very rich - in this way the relatives of the deceased tried to appease the orderlies.

Myth # 2. Morgue employees sell dead bodies for transplantation.

Not. Organs for transplantation are removed while the heart is still beating. In 20 minutes after cardiac arrest, irreversible changes occur in the cells, and such organs, according to transplantologists, become unusable material.

Myth No. 3. All morgues in Moscow specialize in "their" dead. Hangmen, drowned men and with knife wounds are taken to Izmailovo, blown up ones - to Baumanskaya, completely rotten - to Vernadsky Avenue.

Not. But in the 1990s, there really was a "special" morgue in Moscow, where bandits with firearms were taken. According to legend, it was opened after the "brothers" personally turned to the chief forensic scientist of Moscow with a request to open one. Simply because "we are tired of looking for our people all over the city."

"You don't need to film me!" - the voice of the head of the Republican pathoanatomical bureau, Valentina Pakhman, did not provide for objections. As it turned out, she does not like "jumping over her head" and, in general, "everyone should know his place." But Valentina willingly talks about her profession.

- How did you get to such a place? I can understand when a girl dreams of working as a therapist or pediatrician. But a pathologist ?!

“A girl who dreams of dissecting corpses is a crazy girl. Run away from these right at the entrance. A mentally healthy person does not want to dissect corpses. Thank God, we all came here by chance.
Some worked in the clinic, something didn't work out, and they came here. I was afraid of distribution to the regions. It was Soviet times, I was single. I didn't want to go to Batken. And the pathologist could stay in the city. That's why I came here. I had no plans to open the bodies. I had one plan - to stay in the city.

- Was it scary the first time? I once stumbled upon the Death Faces video wandering on the Internet, it still feels sickening.

- You are considering our work from the angle that we are opening corpses here and this is some kind of drive. The most important thing for us is the diagnosis. And those who think otherwise do not stay with us for a long time. We, specialists, are not ready to tolerate a number of people who are interested not in the final diagnosis, but in the process.
When I first went to the morgue, and there the orderlies put on clothes on the deceased, I was scared. After all, this is a dead man! I'm used to seeing them naked under the sheets. They were brought from the intensive care unit like that. They were corpses. For me, a corpse and a deceased are two different things. The first is the material to work with. The second is a deceased person. I am very kind to him.

We were prepared for such a state systematically. At first, we spent hours with this corpse at the university. I came home from school at nine in the evening, and before that I spent 80 percent of the time with the corpse. I studied it. Give it to me now, twenty-five years later, and I will recognize it from a thousand. He is dearer to me than many. I may not recognize my friends, but I recognize that corpse without difficulty.

- You seem so strict and professional. Do you feel sorry for people?

- Of course, very often. We are more compassionate people than other doctors. Sometimes in the interest of making a correct diagnosis, an arm or a leg must be opened. We are very reluctant to do this.

- What surprised you at work? If, of course, this is possible ...

- We are surprised when we find unusual manifestations of the disease. For example, a man came to us. During his lifetime, doctors gave him a phlegmon of the hip of the lower extremity. Dragged around all the hospitals. That's how he came to us, to the morgue, with an unspecified diagnosis.

Opened up. It turned out that he had a stomach ulcer, which usually causes peritonitis. It is curable, just in such cases, surgery is needed. But this person had such a powerful defensive reaction of the body that the peritoneum covered the ulcer and food went through the fistula retroperitoneally. From there - to the small pelvis, where the fascia of the muscles and arteries that go to the lower limb became inflamed, and then the phlegmon. In the retroperitoneal space, we found food debris. I saw this for the first and, I think, the last time in my life. The connection between the leg and the stomach was not established by any doctor. It's hard to blame them.

- Did a person come to you whom you felt especially sorry for?

- Yes. A woman who died in childbirth was brought to us. She had a heart defect. In childbirth, her condition worsened so much that it was not possible to save her. And the child was born quite healthy. We learned from the doctors that everything to her - EVERYTHING! - They said that you can not get pregnant. And she could not conceive a child for a long time. She received treatment, went to all the doctors and achieved her pregnancy. She achieved her goal and died. I felt sorry for this woman. It is a pity because she dreamed of seeing her child and did not see him.

- It is a normal property of the human psyche to empathize. And with your work, no nerves will be enough. Sheer grief. How do you talk with the relatives of the deceased?

- Sincere regret for the deceased evokes sympathy. But you have no idea how rare this is. Usually people show something else besides grief - self-interest, anger at doctors.

DISCOVERY TABLE IN MORGA

Probably the truly grieving person stays at home. After all, not all relatives come to the morgue. There must be someone crying in the corner. I just don't see them. Maybe that's why I have a perverse idea of \u200b\u200bhuman grief.

- In 2006, a law was passed, according to which relatives of people who died in hospital can take them home without an autopsy. And what is the effect of it?

“We are all losing because of this law. The doctor must see the results of his work. Even a plumber needs to know if a pipe has leaked after repairing it or not. And the doctor - even more so. And here the doctors turn on a natural human reaction: what difference does it make how to treat it, if they will bury it anyway?

From this, the quality of medical care for the population falls. And the fall became very noticeable in comparison with the time when everyone was completely opened.
Now only every tenth corpse is being opened. I don’t want to say the specific names of the clinics, but we have one hospital, which out of all those opened last year gave one hundred percent discrepancies. That is, each opened person died not from the diagnosis that the doctors made!
When you go to the hospital, you do not know how conscientious or competent your doctor is. And you have no mechanisms to make him do his job well. Screaming won't help. Bribes won't make him smarter. You give him at least how much money, the result is not-in-te-re-sen. And this is bad for the country's health.

- Don't your relatives understand how important this is? Or does no one even tell them about it?

- In theory, I have the right to persuade relatives to an autopsy. In practice, this never succeeds. Do you know what they say to me when I give this fiery speech?
Each of them says the same phrase to me: “Let’s give it to me without an autopsy, and you’ll start working for health care after me.” Due to the fact that everyone before him said the same thing, we have such a result. Due to the fact that the previous two hundred people told me exactly the same phrase.

HISTOLOGICAL EXAMINATION OF TISSUE

Taking a body without an autopsy, you kill someone alive, someone who comes to the clinic tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Maybe the doctors would learn a lesson and save someone. But nobody is interested in it.

- And how do the relatives explain their unwillingness to get to the bottom of the truth?

- The arguments are different. He had already suffered during his lifetime. In our country, according to Muslim laws, you cannot open it. What will you change ... Yes, maybe you will save your grandson in the future! But nobody cares about that. During all this time, I have persuaded two people. Consider nobody.

- Maybe they are afraid that you will take some organ?

- We let strangers on the autopsy. But for relatives this, of course, is undesirable, because it is very painful to see a loved one in this form.
But we are ready to let in any representative, friends of doctors, anyone who would follow what we are doing. There were cases when people asked to be present at the autopsy. We do not refuse anyone.

- Is it true that there is a kind of black market: do the morgue workers resell the organs of the deceased?

- Organs of a deceased person? What for?

- To transplant alive ... Kidneys, there, liver ...

- Do you know what an organ transplant is? They must be removed when the heart is still beating. Or at least when it stopped two minutes ago. Organ transplant in the morgue? Where is it non-sterile? Where did the deceased lie for several hours? In the cells of most organs, irreversible changes occur within 20 minutes after cardiac arrest. Two hours after death, according to the concepts of transplantologists, this is already rotten material.

After such a time, there can be no question of any transplant. Who will buy these organs? Who needs this liver?
We do not only open it. The fact is that cut out organs of living people are brought to us, we conduct their histological examination during their lifetime. These organs are brought to us in basins. We have a refrigerator downstairs in the morgue, which stores tons of biowaste. We are worn out to bury them. We utilize more than thirty tons of biowaste from Bishkek alone per year. And you say that we also remove them from the corpses?

- Then let's move on to another urban legend. People say that fortune-tellers constantly live near the morgue, who for money buy things taken from the dead from the orderlies and the water with which they were washed ...

- This is generally some kind of nonsense. Fair? They wash ... You should have seen how corpses are washed! Take the hose. Watering. All this merged into the city sewer, and that's it. What kind of water is there from him ?! You don't have to go to the morgue, any fortune-teller can get into the city sewer, it's all there.

- Let's touch on another myth: is it true that it is normal for you, pathologists, to dine in the morgue?

- There is no such thing, we do not do it. We are normal people. We have an office where we eat. But if on a dispute, for example, for a hundred dollars, I’ll dine there right now.

- Here I am sometimes too lazy to break away from production, and I eat right at the computer. Maybe you have the same situation ... Just so as not to break away from work.

- When I was a student and it was necessary to spend a lot of time near the corpse, I ate near it. But this is not bravado. We had a strict teacher, the break was only 15 minutes, and you are dying of hunger. You run into this stinking stall, and there are only pies for twenty kopecks.

INTERVIEW WITH PATHOLOGOANATOM VALENTINA PAKHMAN

You grab it and run, because you have to eat it and remember where the splenic artery is at the same time. Therefore, I had to chew this pie, standing by the corpse. But there was nothing extravagant about it. Almost everyone did it.

- How did you get used to the smell?

- We have no smells. The body smells like a man. He was in intensive care two hours ago. The only difference is that he was breathing then, but not now. In the clinic, the smells are worse. And here everything is clean, almost sterile in appearance.

- As far as I know, it is not even recommended for pathologists to wear masks, because smells can also say a lot about the disease. Aren't you afraid to pick up some kind of infection?

- What nonsense? We can wear a mask! We just don't do it - it's hard to breathe in it.

- But what about all these microbes?

- And those doctors who spoke to him a couple of hours ago did not risk catching this infection?
In general, the medical specialty is a priori dirty. If I start to suffer from phobias, then I will not be able to work. Imagine, I will be afraid of infections in the morgue. Some kind of unproductive phobia, isn't it? We'll have to change profession.

- As far as I know, now you are experiencing a serious shortage of personnel. Why don't young specialists want to come to you?

- Yes, because the salaries are small, and it takes a long time to study. For another five years after graduation, you need to study here before you can do something.

Opening a corpse is not difficult. But to make a diagnosis, to learn all these diseases ... Even surgeons are divided into highly specialized ones. There are no surgeons who can do everything. There is a vascular surgeon, there is an eye surgeon, there are pulmonologists or general practitioners. We must know everything. This is a huge amount of information.
I have been working for 20 years and still come across difficult and unfamiliar things. Sometimes I have to run to more experienced colleagues. And I'm not lazy, and I'm not ashamed. What if he saw, suddenly help? It happens that we all together puff our eyes into a microscope, and no one has seen this. And then the collective diagnosis begins.

- If you had the opportunity to rewind everything, would you change your life? Would you prefer something else?

- I would not want to change anything. I'm lucky. I found my specialty.

This is not an exemplary autopsy, which is shown in cinemas, but typical for a provincial morgue, in which there is not even a refrigerator (it broke down a few years ago, a new one was never bought).

Here are the tools, in fact, in a travel bag. In "marching" - because our expert is interdistrict, one for three or four regions, which he wanders about two or three times a week, depending on the volume of incidents. Of all the props, we will need, in the main, a scalpel, a saw, a rib knife and a scoop (I don’t know how to scientifically call it), and also a "rasp" - something that looks like a rake with four bent teeth. No circular saws for the skull cap is mute. HonduRussia, sir ...

And here is our client: legs together, arms outstretched. The day before, he was found in his bed in the middle of a terrible shit, with a wound on his head. This, more often than not, does not mean anything: with alcoholics it is like this all the time - in the apartment it was as if they were fighting for a week, and the owner looks as if they were fighting with him. The usual state of both the apartment and the owner, so - as they say, "an autopsy will show." For the sake of fairness, I will say that the "criminal" corpses belong mainly to the same contingent.
(By the way, if you came to this post from somewhere out of the unknown, then, most likely, you already understood what is described here. So it's not too late to turn back. I warned you).

Stage one - opening the skull. An incision is made from temple to temple with a scalpel, from which the skin is displaced on the eyebrows and on the back of the head with a rasp. Cynics will immediately recall the anecdote about Little Red Riding Hood, who wore her wolfskin headdress ... uh, with fur inside ...

Sawing off the skull cover: cuts from the temples through the frontal and parietal parts. A lenticular hole should form. The skull lid is removed with the help of a raspatory, and I still cannot get used to the sound that is released at the same time. Unfortunately, I could not convert it from the internal format of the voice recorder on the mobile to a regular wav, otherwise I would have posted it too.

... this is what the result should be. A saw is visible in the background, it is made of some kind of soft metal, and so that it does not bend in the process, there is a special "stiffening rib" in the form of a bent plate that fixes the saw blade itself. Unfortunately, our soft saw dulls quickly, and even this cut was made by it in a dull state ... There were no traces of traumatic brain injury on the brain, that is, the wound on the head is superficial. Traces of a hematoma look like blood clots on the surface of the brain (and the hematoma itself, in fact, is a hemorrhage in the lining of the brain). With traumatic brain injury, death also occurs from compression of the brain by hematomas. Well, since there is nothing on the brain (the red spot in the picture is just a blot of blood), we put it aside for now and start taking the liver.

… We make an incision in the center of the chest, and then, using a scalpel, we move the skin, subcutaneous fat and muscles apart.

... We take out the intestines and put them aside.

Then - with a ladle we take urine from the cut bladder for analysis. Cynics will probably now remember the anecdote about a waiter in a restaurant with a string sticking out of his fly and a "spoon" on his belt. Urine (as well as blood) is sent to chemical experts, by the alcohol content in them, it is possible to determine whether the subject abused alcohol before his death, and how evil he used it.

Then, with a costal knife, we make incisions in the ribs on both sides of the sternum, and remove the cut. Access to the lungs is open. By the way, there is a noticeable red spot in the middle of the rib cage on the ribs. This is no longer a blot, in this place the rib may be broken.

... But, in fact, the lungs - together with other internal organs, except for the intestines, which we took out earlier.

This is how we determine if the ribs are broken - they just need to be separated from each other and wobbled a little. The rib that seemed to be broken, in fact, is intact, there was just a hemorrhage. But the lowest of those that are visible in the picture, the ninth, is indeed broken. It most often gets mixed during fights or falls.

And this (I specifically asked to show it) is the inner wall of the opened aorta. Judging by her ideal state, the deceased was no fool to drink. The cardiovascular system of alcoholics is always in excellent condition, and they practically do not get sick with the corresponding diseases. True, in the final stages of alcoholism, there are some changes in the heart. Which we, by the way, will now look at ...

... And let's make sure that in our case alcoholism has not gone far: it is also like that of a baby. And it looks so strange because it was hacked with a scalpel: you have to look for bodily damage.

Now the kidneys are opening ...

... and the liver. Here's the liver pumped up: it is unnaturally light. This is also a sign of alcoholism: a normal liver is much darker, almost brown.

This, by the way, is the very spoon with which the urine was taken for analysis.

And so - they are already taking away pieces of internal organs. They will go to expert histologists. During histological examination, organ damage and the time of death are determined - more accurately than it can be done with an autopsy.

Now it remains only to return everything that was taken to its original place. Within the margin of error, of course.

... And shred the brain left at last. He is also clean, without hemorrhage. In short, nothing fatal was found, except for a broken rib and a superficial wound on the skull. The primary diagnosis is alcohol intoxication. Histologists, perhaps, will find something else, but it will be at least ten days (adjusted for Russian conditions - in a month: histologists are sitting in the regional center, where the test vials still need to be taken).

If you put the brain in place, in the skull, then in the warmth the head will begin to leak. So the brain goes to the chest. Sometimes the clothes of the deceased are also placed there, if space remains so that the chest is not strongly pressed. But not right now.

Well, that's all, now all that remains is to sew up the deceased, and stuff him with formalin. Formalin is pumped with an ordinary ten-cubic syringe. I did not shoot this part of the process: there was no time.

The photo story and comments to it are intended solely to satisfy curiosity. They can also be used as a visual aid in lectures on the dangers (or benefits) of alcohol, to rid teenagers of suicidal tendencies, counseling detective writers, and the like.

end

Today, couples watched a video of a forensic examination of a corpse (popularly - an autopsy). Hour and a half.
After the film, the pictures are somehow not at all impressive.

The copyright is not worth it, tk. did not find the original source.
If the authorship of the photos and text belongs to you - let me know.

Funeral workers are experienced and discreet people. They have seen a lot, and it is not easy to scare them, or at least make them worry. But even the most experienced employees in this field have accidents that will turn gray even the most inveterate atheist. Today, funeral directors share some of the creepiest experiences in their professional practice.

A funeral home owner with 20 years of experience recalls preparing a body for burial late at night. The ceremony was to take place early in the morning, so he had to stay late. The work went on as usual, but, once again turning to take the tools, the unfortunate undertaker suddenly noticed out of the corner of his eye that the deceased was sitting on the bed! The poor fellow was so scared that he did not even have time to think what it was - he just flew out of the room, like a cork from a bottle, almost done with fright. However, the deceased was never resurrected, but what it was - either muscle spasms of rigor mortis, or an optical illusion, or a little bit of everything - the poor fellow never found out: it was beyond his strength to force himself to enter the room.

Imagine that you are an ordinary orderly in a hospital, and your job is to prepare corpses for tissue collection. Shaving the donor corpse takes a significant amount of time in preparation: both hands and feet must be clean-shaven before the doctor begins the procedure. Once he had to deal with the body of a man who had just passed away - so recently that rigor mortis had not yet completely bound the corpse. To shave his hand, the orderly took the deceased by the fingers and stretched his limb more comfortably ... and then the dead man's fingers slowly tightened on his wrist!

Of course, there was nothing supernatural in this - just a muscle spasm, characteristic of the process of rigor mortis. But the almost gray-haired orderly will hardly ever be able to forget this minute.

Many specialists who worked with corpses talk about how, at the beginning of their careers, they were terribly frightened when they heard the corpse grunt and groan. Such a fear is characteristic of newcomers to the profession, the old-timers authoritatively confirm. The fact is that the dead often have some air in their lungs. Any, even the smallest compression of the body forces the air outward. On the way, he passes through the vocal cords, expelling from them soft sounds, similar either to a groan of pain, or to the suffering of unrequited love. Do not be afraid of this: the sounding corpse is still deader than the dead. Actually, even novice doctors know about this, but when they first hear the groans of a dead man, they forget about everything in the world.

Liquid fraction

When a funeral director was asked which incident he considered the worst of his career, he immediately remembered the day he had to prepare the body of a very obese woman for burial. Death and heat in such cases do their job quickly - the corpse begins to leak: this is how physiological fluids come out of it. But this time the scale of the disaster was simply amazing! In the end, having pretty much smashed their heads, they completely wrapped the corpse in plastic garbage bags, and put clothes on top of the bags. This was the only way the funeral could take place without a flood.

Once, a pathologist was filling out an autopsy report right on the table next to the deceased, when the body suddenly trembled finely. By his own admission, he has not experienced such horror in his entire life. Only professional pride kept him indoors. Fortunately, after the attack of trembling, the body no longer moved. When the unfortunate, frightened pathologist began to question his colleagues, it turned out that some of them also observed a similar phenomenon. Either this is due to residual spasms of rigor mortis, or maybe with the release of gases - but, one way or another, most doctors know about such a trick. And the less experienced, as our story shows, can always be told by colleagues - if the talk about this property of dead bodies accidentally comes before the young doctor tests it on himself. Otherwise, problems with nerves cannot be avoided!

Many funeral and mortuary staff report that when a body is brought into a funeral hall or morgue, the lights in the room start to flicker. One nurse said: as soon as the body crosses the threshold of the morgue, the light in the morgue itself immediately goes out for a few moments. At any other time, there were no problems with electricity in the room. According to her, she was scared every time she observed this phenomenon, for which she did not find a reasonable scientific explanation.

The funeral agent recalls how the family of the deceased decided to release a pigeon into the sky at the funeral. The agent did his best to advise them not to do this, but the relatives were adamant. As a result, as soon as the pigeon flew out of the cage, one of them was immediately attacked by a hawk flying from a nearby tree and instantly tore it apart. The meaning of the symbolic action remained incomprehensible to anyone except the hawk, of course.

If a deceased person suddenly falls out of a glass eye, it can deprive the healthcare professional of self-confidence for the rest of his life. Actually, he doesn't even need to drop out. The assistant funeral director describes the funeral of a cute old lady as the worst story at work. According to the last will of the deceased herself, she was to lie in a coffin with wide open eyes - two, including an artificial one. The time before the funeral began seemed like an eternity to the assistant director: wherever she went, the damn glass eye seemed to stare at her without blinking. It sounds funny - but the girl was really scared, so much so that she considers this incident to be the most nightmarish in her life.

The dog is ready for anything for the sake of its owner - and he, as a rule, pays her in return. How far this reciprocity extends, a woman who worked as an assistant to the director of a funeral home learned from her own sad experience. One day she was asked to bring some old documents from the attic, and she obediently followed them. The first thing she saw in the attic was a child-sized coffin.

This is not uncommon for a funeral home, and the woman, whose hands were busy with papers, pushed him out of the way with her foot. And ... and immediately realized that there was someone inside! She rushed faster than the wind to the owner of the bureau with a message about the terrible find. But, as it turned out, the director knew this coffin very well: there was an embalmed dog in it, waiting for its owner to leave to be buried with him. True, there is no such service formally in funeral homes. But the owner paid enough to forget about the rules. The dog was embalmed no worse than the ancient Egyptian cats, and now she had to spend many years in the attic, waiting for the owner to die. This, I understand, is friendship!

A lot of awkward, strange, and even downright creepy situations occur at the funeral of twins, according to the pros of the funeral market. One funeral director recalls the funeral of a drowned boy, whose twin brother, by the will of his parents, came to the funeral ceremony in exactly the same clothes that the deceased was wearing. As a result, not only the funeral director, but also all those who had gathered without exception, from time to time looked at the boy standing next to his father and mother with horror, as if at a ghost.

Another funeral director recalls the funeral of a man who had clearly not communicated with his twin brother for a long time - so long ago that not all of his friends and acquaintances at all knew about the presence of a deceased brother who looked like him, like two drops of water. So, when this same twin appeared in the crowd of those who came to the funeral, it was very clearly visible which of the guests knew about the presence of the deceased twin brother, and which did not.

As funeral agencies say, the funeral of clowns is a completely separate case, when even the funeral director does not always know whether to cry or laugh. So, one representative of this profession asked to be buried in a full clown costume and in the appropriate make-up, and relatives and friends who came to the funeral, all, as one, painted themselves one teardrop at the corner of their eye, as clowns sometimes do when applying make-up. Do you think it was decent to laugh at such a great joke? And the family of another representative of this worthy profession asked that the manager and workers at the funeral in honor of the deceased should be in full clown clothes. And the agency went for it because the client was willing to pay handsomely for his quirk. Imagine what a circus was going on during the ceremony!

One morgue attendant still recalls with horror the case when a corpse without eyes was brought to him for embalming. And, most importantly, without warning him about it! He will never forget a few seconds of shock when looking into empty eye sockets! Of course, he quickly came to his senses and, closing his eyes, returned to work. Then colleagues from the pathology department claimed the blame for the incident, saying that they simply forgot to put the corpse in order after the examination. But the orderly himself suspects that this was not the most clever professional joke.

One funeral director considers the funeral of a toddler whose parents were divorced to be the most horrific experience in professional practice. At the funeral, the mother was completely distraught with grief and, having waited until the other participants in the ceremony turned away from the coffin, snatched the body out and, quickly hiding it under her coat, moved to her car. Together, the unfortunate woman was able to calm down. But, as the funeral director admits, he experienced the most terrible moments when he learned that the child died due to the injuries that it was apparently the mother who inflicted on him.

One funeral director considers the funeral of a man who has shot himself in the head with a gun to be the most gruesome of his career because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The relatives of the deceased insisted that he be buried in an open coffin, and they could once again see his face, which, given the nature of the injury, was, to put it mildly, difficult. Morgue workers literally collected the face piece by piece. Unfortunately for himself, the manager came to them to inquire about the progress of the work exactly at the moment when all the details of the eerie puzzle were laid out on the table, and the face of the deceased looked like an empty frame. According to him, he will not forget this terrible sight until the end of his life.

Many funeral directors consider the most unpleasant cases in practice when they are asked to bury a person whose body was found only long after death. So, one of the funeral homes was approached by the relatives of a man who died in a bathtub full of water and was discovered only two weeks after his death. With great difficulty, they managed to make sure that the body could be buried. And the relatives of a man who died in his own garage, and in the warm season, and was found only three weeks later, turned to another agency. In this case, despite the persistent requests of the family, the funeral specialists could not do anything - the body could no longer be honorably buried, and they could only be cremated.