If you’re in the business of handling dead bodies you’ve seen some shit, both literally and figuratively.
You probably also have a decidedly dark sense of humor to help get you through the grimmer parts of the job. So when someone on Reddit’s ever-curious Ask Reddit forum recently asked people who perform autopsies what the weirdest thing they found while examining a body was, the answers were both bizarre and often darkly entertaining.
If you don’t have a well-developed sense of gallows humor you should probably dip now.
Here are some of the weirdest things medical examiners found in people’s bodies.
1.
Pennies. Hundreds of pennies, nearly six dollars worth inside the skin all over the arms and legs. Deceased was a hermit, lived alone, ordered out for every meal. Apparantly he’d been surgically implanting pennies in his skin for years.
2.
An 88 year old grandma died of carbon monoxide poisoning. During the autopsy we couldn’t open the back of the cranium. After much drilling we realised that her cranium was around 3-4 cm thick all the way around, leaving her with the smallest brain on a grown woman I’ve ever seen. She was fully functioning and never seemed affected by it in the slightest. I’ve never seen anything like it since…
3.
I worked as a pathology assistant. My boss once found a 6 inch builders nail in a chaps thigh. He’d died on site after an accident but the nail was all healed over, even where it had nicked the bone so it must’ve been there a few years.
4.
While completing the post-autopsy repair for a gentlemen, I found a plastic ladle tucked under the ribs. It was probably left by some poor autopsy technician who got yelled at for losing the good ladle. I offered to send it back to the coroner, but they never returned my calls.
5.
Uk gang members mother died of a heart attack during a home invasion (aggregated burglary) 87 years old. Gang had burst in looking for drugs and money.
No signs of assault but the circumstances required a full examination to be sure nothing suspicious had occurred. During the post mortem 2 ounces of smack found in her anus.
6.
Elderly pensioner died alone in his home. Not suspicious at all. Small mobile phone (flip-phone) found in his rectum. No explanation ever determined.
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7.
There are the normal abnormal things like extra spleens, extra ureters, surprise tumors, and swallowed foreign bodies (the record holder was $6.25 in assorted change).
The one that wins is the sharpie in the bladder, with the cap on. I was the one that got to explain what sounding was to the resident and lab assistant.
8.
I was once in a mental health facility for only a short amount of time, and I met a women who’s daughter passed away from a drug overdose and had been upset at her for selling her grandmothers necklace for what she thought was drugs, but when the autopsy came back it was found in her stomach.
Apparently she was swallowing the same necklace for years and I can imagine why someone would do that.
9.
I was volunteering at the coroner’s office and the doc pulled a very large, intact avocado pit out of a man’s stomach. We all kind of looked at it and went, “Huh.” Cause of death was a heart attack.
10.
Wow, I’ve got a lot of stories for this one….
We once had a homeless dude who OD’d on opiates (this comes in a LOT). During the external exam, we removed his pants and they were just FULL of bacon. Like, at least 40 packs of bacon. Turns out he had shoplifted a ton of it then shot up in some run down house and died with it all in his pants. It was pretty shocking.
We also had a guy who took a bullet to the back of his head, execution style and after the x-rays determined the bullet was not in his head anymore, we couldn’t find the exit wound anywhere. Once we took out the brain, we discovered it exited perfectly out of one of his nostrils leaving no trace of an external exit wound.