If You’re A Morbid Person, These 34 Stories From People Who Work With The Dead Are For You

9.

“My dad was doing some business on the other side of the state, pretty close to where his friend who was a mortician (we’ll call him Mr. Mort) lived. Mr. Mort invited him for a coffee but said, ‘Hey, while you’re here, can you help me with a particularly heavy one?’ meaning a larger body needed to be cremated. My dad was in prime shape and said sure.”

“There was a 350–400-pound lady that needed to be moved from a gurney to the conveyor belt contraption, to be rolled into the crematorium furnace. Normally, the bodies were placed into some kind of cardboard coffin, but she was too large to fit, so she had to go in wearing a hospital gown. After some planning and effort, they successfully moved her over to the belt, pushed her into the furnace, and turned it on.”

“The crematorium was nearly automated. Basically, all he had to do was push a button, and it did everything it needed to do to properly turn whatever was inside to ash. So, my dad and Mr. Mort set it and walked down the street for a coffee. About 20 minutes later, they saw a firetruck go by but thought nothing of it. Then another one went by. This was a small town in western South Dakota, so there weren’t many firetrucks. They walked outside and saw flames coming from the crematorium, some oil trickling out from the building, and smelled burnt ham.”

“What happened: The lady was too large for the machine. There wasn’t enough space around her body in the furnace to generate the heat necessary to properly turn her to ash. There was enough heat to melt her skin, though, and turn her fat reserves into hot oil, which leaked out of the crematorium. The oil set the building on fire (thankfully, it was in a separate garage, so the entire mortuary didn’t go up in flames), and flaming oil started to flow down the driveway and down the street.”

“The first fire engine was parked too close to the fire, and the hot oil flowed past the tires on one corner, melting and popping them. So they just had a bit of pandemonium of firefighters spraying the flames, and others jumping into the two firetrucks to move them away ASAP.”

—u/Bugloaf