People Who Perform Autopsies Are Sharing The Most Shocking Things They Discovered About People After Their Deaths, And It’s Genuinely Fascinating
A while back, a Reddit user asked, “Autopsy doctors of Reddit, what was the biggest revelation you discovered about a person’s death after performing the autopsy?” As a person with a morbid curiosity about, well, the morbid, I was seated reading the responses. Here are some of the most shocking things coroners, doctors, med students, and forensic pathologists discovered during autopsies…and make sure you’re not eating when you read this post.
NOTE: Some of these stories are pretty graphic, so if you’re sensitive to death or gore, you may want to skip this one! However, know that we did not include stories featuring suicide or the death of a minor, if those are specific concerns.
1. “I worked at a coroner’s office for a while, and once we had a guy who we thought had died from an OD of meth. Well, we started the autopsy, and I went to cut his lungs out, and blueberry muffin mix started coming out of them. I stuck my finger in his mouth, and it was full of blueberry muffin mix. And it was in the throat. Turns out he got just high enough to pass out while eating the muffin mix, and he ended up choking to death.”
2. “During my internship rotation a couple of years back, a 40-year-old guy came in because he ‘suddenly collapsed’ while drinking with friends. He came in unresponsive, with a bleeding mouth and not breathing, so we had to intubate him. For some reason, the endotracheal tube (the stiff tube placed inside the trachea to help the patient breathe) wouldn’t go in, but we managed to suction copious amounts of blood clots. After CPR (still with unsuccessful intubation, so we had to bag him with a face mask), the patient was declared dead and diagnosed with a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. During the autopsy, they found out that the guy was apparently shot by a gun from the top of the head (the entry wound was obscured by his hair, and was barely bleeding at all), and the bullet somehow went through the back of the guys throat and made a hole behind the base of the tongue, which the endotracheal tube kept slipping into.”
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3. “Former homicide detective here. Suspicious death, 30-ish male found alone by cleaning staff in the back row of a sparsely attended sci-fi movie. Strange scratching wounds around/in the mouth. Some petechiae in the eyes and on the cheeks, but no signs of strangulation. No obvious signs of chronic illness or disease. Presented as a healthy, normal adult male. Found on his person was a wallet with normal contents and a single canceled movie ticket, indicating he had gone alone. Weird, spy movie shit is going on here. Autopsy: A large amount of popcorn was compacted in his esophagus. Like a half cup. Dude was apparently excited by the movie, stuffing popcorn in his mouth, and choked. The scratch marks around/in his mouth were self-inflicted, trying to dig out popcorn (verified via fingernail scrapings, his was the only DNA present). It was a loud movie; he was in the back, and no one saw or heard him choke. I’ve never eaten popcorn again.”
4. “I’m a whole body scientific donation technician, meaning I’m the person who dissects cadavers after they are donated. We very commonly would get young cases, normally overdoses. We once had a mid-thirties female who went to the medical examiner before donation, but they only did an external evaluation. I went to check her genitals to see if I could palpate a uterus, and found a condom full of pills. The body became a crime scene, and we couldn’t touch her. When we finally were able to continue, they asked us to photograph the pills to send to the examiner’s office. They were mostly Advil and Zyrtec — easily one of the weirdest things I’ve ever found.”
5. “When my parents were in medical school, they attended an autopsy of a patient who had died in a car accident. The autopsy revealed that, apparently, this guy had survived a chest shot in Vietnam years ago that the surgeons/medics left in rather than perform risky surgery. The accident had migrated the bullet to his heart and was ruled the cause of death.”
6. “I was an investigator for a state medical examiner for just over two years. We got a mom who had ‘drank herself to death’, according to the husband, after relapsing on Mother’s Day weekend. I just felt like something was off and sent her for an autopsy. She had a ruptured liver; the dude had essentially beaten her until she bled internally to death. Later, while out on bail, he stole a semi truck, crashed it in a pond, got out shooting at a deputy, and they killed him.”
7. “A skeleton was found in the nearby mountains. It was very clear he died in an accident 20+ years ago; however, he had to be identified via DNA. It turned out that his dad was not his biological father, but his uncle. It sparked a whole public family drama show, because the family was well known in my area.”
8. “When I was a med student in my final year, I did a placement in forensic medicine. We had a body come in; some guys had gone to the cops and said their friend had died after he’d fallen and smacked his head on a coffee table a few weeks prior, and, in a panic, they’d dumped his body in the median of one of the big highways. This is in the middle of summer. By the time he was brought in, he was pretty significantly decomposed, but his body was still intact. The autopsy revealed a small subdural haemorrhage (bleed in the brain) consistent with the story. Then we discovered a ruptured liver (the laceration was about 10-15cm long), spleen, and heart, as well as a complete collection of broken ribs. This guy hadn’t just fallen and hit his head on a coffee table; he had been beaten to death with excessive force. It turned from a suspicious death to a homicide case pretty quickly after that.”
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9. “This story circulates every year at my medical school. A body came in with a gunshot wound to the chest. There was no exit wound. They tried to locate the bullet during the autopsy. No success. They then did a whole scan (X-ray or CT) of the upper chest/abdomen/pelvis. No bullet. At that point, someone said fuck it, let’s scan the whole body. Lo and behold, the bullet was detected in the popliteal fossa (area behind the knee). It had embolized/traveled from the heart all the way down the arterial system to the knee, where it got stuck in one of the narrower blood vessels.”
10. “Forensic pathologist here. Two come to mind: I had just moved back to my home state, where my family lives. I got a case with a man with a distinctive last name in the family tree. I sent a text to my mom to see if we were related, but before she texted back, I pulled the sheet back and already knew; he looked like me. It was my great uncle.”
“I got a case where it’s a ‘house fire’ death. On exam, he’s got multiple, textbook stab & incised wounds. I spent the next 30 minutes getting gaslighted and quizzed by PD about ‘Are you sure?’ because they thought this was a straightforward house fire. Un-fun fact: fires are not an uncommon way for people to try to conceal a homicide.”
11. “In college, I took a figure drawing class, and the teacher was adamant that you couldn’t draw the figure if you didn’t know what was in it, so he dragged us over to the anatomy lab and had the anatomy teacher show us two cadavers that were being dissected by their med students. When it came time to ask questions, of course, ‘Have you ever found something weird in a body?’ came up. The story is as follows.”
“They got a body, and for legal reasons, they weren’t told much about the person aside from medical history. They were told that the older man was a sort of rock star type who had been a one-hit wonder in his youth, and to use extra discretion with him in particular/not to tell the students, who might recognize him. The lab was full of 20-year-olds, and so nobody recognized who he was (I’m unsure if the teacher even knew, but it didn’t sound like she did) or what his deal was, so they wrote it off as non-useful information aside from his lifestyle. He had drug use and alcohol issues in his life, and they were told he partied a lot. Cool.
The body had a raging boner like 100% of the time. The teacher didn’t think much of it aside from the fact that he was particularly endowed, and everybody wrote it off as not necessary to their studies. So they went through the general dissection. One kid wanted extra credit, and the teacher said, ‘Sure, dissect his penis/see why it’s still hard, and write a report (apparently they don’t usually do that for that particular class; the penis itself goes untouched during their dissection, so it would have otherwise always been a mystery).
The kid found an actual rod that he had medically inserted under the table (it was not in his medical records) so that he would always have a boner and could get it up while on drugs. They suspect it was done over 30-40 years before his death.
They removed it and kept it in the lab, I believe, to show their students as part of a section on under-the-table medical surgeries.
Anyways, that was probably the best day in figure drawing class I’ve ever had.”
12. “My mom and dad met on this autopsy. The body was male, around 35-40 years old, and apparently fit, but he had a bulge in his stomach and intestinal region. His body was way too heavy for its size — something was wrong, obviously. The X-ray showed something DENSE in his belly; the nurses wouldn’t say anything about what killed the man and were still shocked. They opened the guy up, started digging, and found something solid inside the stomach. It was way too dense and heavy just to move it aside. The intestines were also blocked by that same something — something had punctured the intestines, but it was not easy to pull out, and the smell was horrid.”
“Hazmat suits up — whatever was in there was not a tumor, and the smell wouldn’t be friendly if it was even safe. They opened the stomach up, and something brown, metallic, rusted, and almost welded together came out. It was a bit bigger than a baseball, heavy as fuck, but not a bomb. It seemed made of other crap — the thing made a kind of clicking sound inside when moved. They opened it up; the ball was made of various materials, including bent pins, disassembled watches, dull knives, forks, spoons, paper clips, needles, and other metallic objects. The intestines told the same story; the guy died choking on a small metallic ball that just didn’t want to be eaten.
The family denied everything and even said the psychiatric hospital was harming him. After investigating the man, they discovered the guy was eating metallic objects for fun. His family denied that anything was wrong, despite entire collections of cooking utensils disappearing, and even expensive items like watches, jewels, and gold necklaces, because they believed God was telling them to keep the fortune inside of him to take it to the heavens to pay for everyone’s entry. The entire family was bonkers.”
13. “My dad used to perform autopsies. His best story was that they were brought a body that had no real indication of any issues. After examining the body, the only thing of note was that there was blood coming out of the guy’s rectum. They begin the autopsy, and the guy’s organs are completely liquified, and the body cavity is filled with lead shot. It became apparent really quickly that someone had shoved a shotgun up his ass and pulled the trigger. This was in the ’70s, and I still have to wonder what this guy did to piss someone off enough to get a shotgun up his ass.”
14. “Not exactly an autopsy per se, but it was a patient found unresponsive, with CPR in progress by EMS. The man was clearly unhoused, based on his appearance and smell. He reportedly had not been seen for several days by his friends and was eventually found behind a fast-food restaurant dumpster. We were briefly able to get a pulse back, and when the nurse cut his pants off to place a catheter, we saw the cause: He had fashioned some sort of makeshift cockring out of the neck of a plastic bottle. It was way too tight and completely cut off the circulation; the penis was fully black and necrotic. I did a bedside ultrasound and found his abdomen full of free fluid (which is bad); most likely, his bladder had ruptured from being unable to urinate for days. His labs suggested he was in septic shock and full-blown renal failure as well. He did not survive much longer than that.”
“In my final year of training, we had a cadaver lab to practice advanced airway management techniques (e.g., difficult intubation, Cricothyroidotomy, etc.). While I was helping an intern do a basic intubation, she commented that the tube wouldn’t pass. ‘I think she has some kind of growth or mass in her airway.’ I took a look, asked for some foreceps, and pulled a half-eaten hot dog out of her larynx. It, of course, had been embalmed along with the rest of her. Cause of death identified.”
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15. “Medical examiner here. This probably isn’t a big ‘wow’ revelation, but it certainly made an impact on me. Very early in my career, I did an exam on another doctor who worked at the hospital where I trained. I didn’t know this gentleman personally, but was acquainted with him by reputation; he was a very happy-go-lucky sort, much loved by everyone in his department. He died unexpectedly at a young age, of what turned out to be a drug overdose on pharmaceuticals he had been diverting from the hospital. I don’t think anybody saw that coming, myself included. It was a lesson to me that anybody can fall victim to addiction, and that it’s hard to know what anybody’s private struggles are.”
16. “I’m a former police officer and attended several autopsies to record info for investigation files. One guy had been shot and killed, so the cause of death was pretty plain, but the pathologists doing the autopsy found a tumor the size of a walnut on his brainstem. He said the guy would have been dead in a few months even if he hadn’t been shot. Another guy was dead due to a steak knife being stabbed through his heart by his wife. She claimed she grabbed the knife because she was scared he was going to kill her, and when he lunged at her, the knife ‘just went in.'”
“But when the doctor pointed out a half dozen or so marks that looked like freckles around the wound, he swabbed a developer solution that clearly showed they were tiny little poke marks. I was able then to get her to confess that he was goading her, ‘Go ahead, do it,’ until she hauled off and stabbed him. It’s not always like TV shows where the autopsy is the ‘aha!’ moment that solves a case, but sometimes it really is.”
17. “I did the autopsy of both a robber and his victim. The robber shot the victim in the back when he tried to escape on a motorcycle, and the robber was shot by the police in the exact same situation. What was interesting was that they both died from exactly the same lesion. Both of them had their fourth lumbar vertebra shattered and their aorta (main artery of the body) sectioned at the same level. I thought of it like an extreme example of instant karma.”
18. “This happened in anatomy lab when I was in medical school. In the preclinical years of medical school, most medical schools have students enroll in an anatomy lab where we dissect cadavers as part of the course. One of the anatomy labs had a cadaver who had passed away from complications from kidney failure (according to the identification tab). While that anatomy team was dissecting some of the leg and buttock muscles, they found a bullet in the gluteus medius. No idea how it got there, and totally unrelated to the cause of death. I like to imagine the guy signing paperwork to donate his body to science, thinking that the med students dissecting his butt would get a funny surprise.”
19. “I heard a story once about a guy who died, and completely unrelated to the ‘main complaint’, during the autopsy, they found a grapefruit in his ass. Apparently, it had just been there the whole time.”
20. “A friend of my dad’s was suspected of having alcoholism. He was very wealthy and well off, but showed every sign of alcoholism. His wife and family left him because they thought he was lying about drinking, and he lost everything because of it. After he had eventually died of sclerosis of the liver, an autopsy was carried out, and it was found that he had a rare condition that essentially distilled all the sugars in his diet and his body and turned it into alcohol, of course making him present as a drinker to the untrained eye.”
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21. “My grandmother had a massive stroke in her thirties that paralyzed her entire left side, and died in her sixties from a heart attack. While doing the autopsy, they found out that she had bad lung cancer, but she never had any pain from it because it was in her left lung. She was a very heavy smoker, so it made sense; it’s just wild that she had lung cancer and never knew.”
22. “My dad is a doctor. A poor motorcyclist hit a pole headfirst at 80mph. He was motionless and had no pulse, but looked fine on the outside as he had a helmet on. The man’s brain had been severed in half.”
23. “Sometimes bodies become swollen or bloated. It’s a fairly normal thing. Depending on the position when they died, some parts swell more than others because of pooling blood. There was this one older man who died in a car crash. Not uncommon for older folk to have slow reaction times. It was a fairly straightforward autopsy. He ran a red light, was hit, and died on impact. However, a few days later, some of the swelling still hadn’t gone down. Usually, it only lasts a day or two, but this guy was pitching a tent long after it should have become flaccid again. So they did some digging. It turns out this man had an implant for erectile dysfunction. One of the testes was replaced by a little pump, and an inflatable cylinder was placed in the penis. He was fully inflated at the time of the accident. They determined that he was probably masturbating in his car and became distracted, causing the accident.”
24. “My friend once cremated a lady, and when they pulled the table out, there were three sets of forceps sitting there. Most likely she died in surgery, but I always thought it was wild that those were left in, and whatever metal they’re made of clearly has a higher melting point than cremation temps.”
25. “I did an internship in a coroner’s office for the summer. My job was to help with autopsies, clean up the office, dispose of old bags of organs (bags with pieces from each organ are required to be kept for five years unless it’s a homicide, SIDS, or unknown cause of death), do data entry, and handle other odds and ends. On my first day, I helped with an autopsy of an unhoused man who was living in a storage unit. Remember, it was summer. He was relieving himself in buckets in the storage unit. He died in there and wasn’t found for a month. Anyway, when we rolled him out into the autopsy, you could smell him through the bag. I can’t articulate how bad it was; I was gagging before we even started. But then something weird happened: one of the technicians put a sheet down on the floor before we rolled the cart onto it. I was like, ‘Why? We’re gonna have a disgusting, stinky sheet now.’ That’s when the bag was opened, and I didn’t see a body.”
“I saw hundreds of maggots crawling all over, and they started to fall off the cart. I was then informed I had to stomp on all the maggots as they fell so that they wouldn’t spread throughout the building. So here I was, playing the worst game of Dance Dance Revolution in history over a half-liquified skeleton, holding my nose so I wouldn’t puke.
The other story is that in the basement, where we would keep all the organ bags and stuff like that, we also had notable objects from old crime scenes, like murder weapons, etc. Anyways, there was a buttplug in a bag that had the case number written on it. Now I found this during the first week of my internship, and I kept wondering, how does someone die by a buttplug? Now I had access to all case files as I had to enter data and all that jazz. So, eventually, I ended up looking up the case, and it turns out an older guy had it in as he was jacking off to a magazine called ‘The Spanking Times.’ Obviously, he died, as his buttplug was in our office, but the autopsy showed he had a heart attack, presumably as he climaxed. I suppose there are worse ways to go.”
26. “When I was young, I knew a 19-year-old guy who was found dead in his apartment. The landlord was convinced it was an OD. The family asked for an autopsy. It was TYPE 1 DIABETES! He was undiagnosed. He probably felt like hell, went into shock, and died. It was very sad because if he had gotten medical care in time, he probably would have lived. And then the police sent the bill for the autopsy to the family to add insult to injury. That was back in 1990.”
27. “I saw a post-mortem in college. Guy pulled out a giant colon, then peeled it back on the bench to reveal a huge foot-long and probably six-inch-diameter cigar of impacted shit. He died because his bladder burst from the pressure. “
28. “When I worked for the ME office, a pathologist came and got all of us to check out a post she was doing. The guy had what’s called Situs Inversus. All his organs were backward. Left lung on the right, stomach on the right, etc. No mention of it in his medical history.”
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29. “I worked as a prosector in college, labeling cadaver parts for the students. I finally opened up the abdominal cavity on a lady, and she had three kidneys. The term before I had a lady who only had one, so I guess it evened out.”
30. “Med student here. We had a guy OD on cocaine, which he frequently used. He’d dealt with alcoholism for 30+ years and had a history of seizures. Evidently, he had been hit in the head with a baseball as a young adult and never saw a doctor. I went to take his brain out, and this dude had a walnut-sized hole in his skull. And the brain underneath looked like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to it. He had been walking around 30+ years with this hole in his head and having seizures because of it. No wonder he started drinking. His liver was absolutely normal, though.”
31. “I took Anatomy and Physiology II with lab in college. The lab was working on cadavers being prosected by more advanced students. A prosection is the dissection of a cadaver (human or animal) or part of a cadaver by an experienced anatomist to demonstrate for students anatomic structure. Anyway, one of the cadavers (we had a male and a female for obvious reasons) was a big ol’ linebacker lookin’ dude. Like, an older bodybuilder type? IIRC, his age at the time of death was in the late 50s. The anatomist had removed his heart, and we were examining it because it was very enlarged and contributed to his death. We all had to hold it in our hands to feel its heft, including its size and weight, and compare it to the heft of the female’s heart, which was normal-sized, about the size of a large apple. The male’s heart, for comparison, was the size of a small cantaloupe.”
“I went first, for whatever reason, and the instructor lifted the enlarged heart out of its preservative bath and placed it in my hands. I damn near dropped the thing when it shocked me with what felt like a jolt of electricity. I (understandably, I think) made a startled noise, and the instructor took the heart back before I could juggle it onto the floor.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I forgot to warn you, look out for the pacemaker.’
Apparently, when someone has a pacemaker, there’s a battery too, and they don’t bother taking it out/off. They simply snip the leads and leave them there, so if you touch both bare leads, you get a mild shock, even through your exam gloves.
That was a mildly disturbing experience.”
32. “I assisted with a post-mortem when I was a student. It was a female patient who had died in her forties. Her medical history had extensive complaints of abdominal pain. One doctor even referred to her as a ‘hypochondriac’, and others commented on her apparent anxiety. We opened her abdomen, and she had extensive scar tissue; she was absolutely massacred inside from endometriosis. She suffered for decades and never got referred for a laparoscopy. She didn’t have fucking anxiety; she had a medical condition.”
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33. “I was living in northern BC, Canada, and a friend of my then-boss was found dead beside a lake with no obvious cause, so an autopsy was performed. He was, if memory serves, about seventy years old and in excellent physical condition. He had gone out on the lake in his boat and capsized, and swam back to shore. But when he got there, he must have decided to rest and fell asleep with his feet in the water. He died of hypothermia. I think of this a lot when I consider survival situations. Everyone, if you’re in trouble, don’t give up too soon. Don’t quit, don’t stop to rest until you’re sure it’s safe to do so.”
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34. “I am not a pathologist, but when my father died from drowning, it was noted he had acute cirrhosis of the liver. The corner also removed a bullet from between his heart and spine that Dad received in Vietnam. It was very degraded. He had also lost a thumb and several feet of intestine there, the evidence of which was noted in the report. Dad had served 22 years in the Army and had been awarded the Purple Heart three times. He lived a hard life after, and it was speculated he would have passed soon from cirrhosis of the liver had he not drowned.”
35. “I saw this woman at the morgue who came from the hospital with pneumonia being the cause of death, so we didn’t care for much else while dissecting. When the responsible doctor came to sign the chart, he asked if I had seen what was under the bandage on her wrist. I said no, because I thought it wasn’t important. When he took it off, there was a 15cm ulcerated skin cancer. When looking for it, we could see there were more all over her body, metastasized from head to toe. I’d never seen anything like it, and yet she died of pneumonia.”
36. “While in medical school, we had to observe an autopsy and could assist. One of the lectures was to observe for head trauma. You do this by hitting the skull with a hard object (such as a scissor or the like). A hollow sound is normal, but a dull sound indicates trauma. One of the other students did this exam and found a dull sound. The coroner had not yet himself examined the person and was very surprised, as he had not been informed by the police of head trauma. They then continued to examine the head, and they found a gunshot wound through the skull. All of a sudden, the person was a crime scene, and they had to call the police again and leave the person as untouched as possible.”
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37. “Master’s in forensic pathology here. You’d be surprised to know the number of people who have life-threatening issues that were never diagnosed, and that they didn’t die from. I saw an older guy who died of pneumonia in the hospital. On autopsy, the guy had both an enlarged heart and a couple of medium-sized aneurysms in the brain. Another guy in his 70s apparently came into the ER and had chest pain, then died shortly after of a heart attack; it turned out he also had cancer. In less natural circumstances, I saw a guy who had been shot in the head a couple of times. Three definite entries and a blown-out skull, but police only found one bullet. They couldn’t find the other bullet in his head at all. We assumed the police missed it and went on as normal with the autopsy until we got to the chest cavity. The other bullet was just chilling beside his lung. Turns out it entered the skull, hit the inside, ricocheted down his neck, and into the chest.”
38. “A suspect had been arrested for murder. During the autopsy, it was determined that the decedent had been shot postmortem, several hours postmortem. The decedent’s cause of death was an MI [Myocardial Infarction, aka a heart attack]. So the suspect was charged with abuse of a corpse. It makes you wonder what goes through people’s minds.”
39. “My husband had a friend who died while playing Call of Duty. His friends who were there said he got frustrated, threw his head back, and died. It was a freak accident. During the autopsy, they found that he had injured his neck badly the week before in a wreck, and this final throw back of the head made the injury lethal.”
40. “I visited a dissection lab at a nearby university when I was in high school, and one guy was laid out on the table in front. We asked how he died, and the professor pointed at a jar and said, ‘That’s how,’ and it was the guy’s heart. It was bigger than his head.”
41. “In my college intro anatomy class, we had an older female cadaver whose COD (cause of death) was considered ‘natural causes.’ A few weeks into class, after we got into the trachea, we found out she’d choked to death on a fragment of her own denture. Gold tooth and all.”
42. “My dad was murdered, and when we got the autopsy report back, we learned he had severe liver cirrhosis. He was lovable but dealt with alcoholism, and I think our whole family was in hopeful denial about the state of his health. It was strange to have to process the fact that he was dying anyway, and to be strangely grateful he died quickly by gunshot rather than torturously by liver failure.”
43. And finally, we’ll end on a non-human autopsy that was too wild not to include…”I worked at an animal hospital. They did necropsies for zoos all the time. An alligator died, and they shipped it to the hospital, refrigerated, etc, to stop the decay. They took it out and put it up on the table. After doing all the paperwork, they started opening up the alligator. After the first cut, the alligator opened its eyes. Turns out it wasn’t dead, the zoo vet mistook an illness for death, and the low temperature put it basically into a coma.”
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