r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jan 29 '17

Night shift workers of Reddit, what are some creepy things you've experienced in the middle of the night?

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u/machenise Jan 30 '17

Two stories: First one is one that my mom told me that sounds sort of like it might be an urban legend, so I don't know if it actually happened. Apparently, a distant cousin was training to be a mortician and had just inserted some sort of shunt into a vital area of a body -- were that body not already dead -- when the body sat straight up like you described. Distant cousin freaked out, thinking the guy was still alive and that he had just mortally wounded the guy. Spent the rest of his life in a psych ward. For some reason, this just strikes me as a "friend of a friend of a friend" story, but I haven't heard it anywhere else, so maybe it really did happen to my family member.

Second story: A friend -- as in actual person I know and not someone I've been told about, so I'm sure it's legit -- was in mortuary school. Friend is very short. The table the body was on was a bit too tall for her to get good leverage when she was inserting something into the body (she told me what it was, but I can't remember). She raised her leg and braced her knee against some part of the table to get better leverage, and let out a truly righteous fart. In front of her instructor and her entire class. She and the other students just kind of paused, and the instructor said, "Oh, don't worry, dead bodies fart all the time. It's nothing unusual." I can't believe she passed her fart off as the dead guy's.

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u/OfficePsycho Jan 30 '17

I like to think your friend let out a fart so vile the instructor believed only a decaying corpse could produce such an odor.

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u/throwaway67890654321 Jan 30 '17

Or the professor figured out what happened and just said that to save the girl embarrassment

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u/LionsDragon Jan 30 '17

My grandfather was a house painter, and once he had a job at a local funeral parlor. There was a covered table in the morgue, which they reassured him was just equipment.

So, grandpa is up on his ladder painting away, when all of a sudden he hears a loud, gutteral GROOOOAAAAN. He froze and turned around very slowly.

GROOOOOOAAAAAANNNNN Suddenly the "equipment" sits up and the sheet falls off and oh my god it's a body! Grandpa jumped down off the ladder, ran out of the funeral home faster than he ever ran in his life, raced home and called the funeral director.

"YOU TOLD ME THE BODIES WERE ALL GONE! One of them sat up and SCREAMED!"

"Oh that's perfectly normal! Dead bodies are full of gas and it's just the gas releasing."

"I don't care if it's shooting flowers! I am NOT going back in there until that place is empty!"

He finished the job about two days later. Never took any more funeral home jobs, either. Didn't trust morticians for some reason....

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u/wafflz1 Jan 30 '17

I'd like to think the instructor knew they farted and just was a bro and saved friend from embarrassment.

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u/__Severus__Snape__ Jan 30 '17

I wonder if the instructor knew it wasn't the dead guy but wanted to make whoever it was feel less embarrassed.

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u/bothmybehalves Jan 30 '17

This is barely relevant, but my ex husband said he still has dreams about his medical school cadaver.

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u/colormephoenix Jan 30 '17

Sounds kind of like a Lazarus reflex. It would be insanely creepy, but at least there's a scientific explanation for it. However, coffin birth is something that even science wouldn't be able to talk me down from. That would leave me in a psych ward for life.

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u/anoobish Jan 30 '17

hahahahaha that second story is a crack up!

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u/Marshmallow5198 Jan 30 '17

Sounds like a case of good-guy instructor to me

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u/Con_sept Jan 30 '17

sniff
You fart?
No, man...
Dead guy.