AI Summary
5 min readA coroner in a small town in the Canadian Appalachians inherits the family business and quickly learns that the bodies arriving on his table are never locals. They are always outsiders, found in the surrounding wilderness, and they often arrive in states that defy explanation. One of his first cases, just days after taking over from his father, involved a man who appeared to have died from a fall but had no broken bones. When the coroner cut open the corpse's throat to investigate a blockage, he pulled out a leather wallet. The sheriff, a weathered man who had held his post for over twenty years, told him not to think too hard about it. "You'll see weird shit like this plenty work in this profession," he said. "It ain't a threat to you if you ain't a threat to it."
The Family Business
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:30) **The Coroner's Reluctant Calling** - The narrator introduces himself as the sole coroner of a small town in the Canadian Appalachians, a job he inherited from his father despite hating it, and sets up the premise of sharing strange stories from his ten years of service.
- 2 (04:40) **The Strange Pattern of Outsider Bodies** - The narrator reveals the central mystery: he receives several bodies a week, but not one in ten years has been a local resident, implying something is systematically removing outsiders.
- 3 (07:33) **Two Bizarre Cases Teased** - The narrator briefly lists two other strange cases—a man found in a log looking a year decomposed after only 12 hours missing, and a man with no lower body and no scarring—before pivoting to his main story.
- 4 (08:05) **The First Strange Out-of-Towner Arrives** - The narrator recounts his first strange case, which occurred just four days after he took over the practice, as a body is brought in on a frosty morning near Halloween.
- 5 (10:00) **The Corpse's Impossible Condition** - The narrator describes the body's state in detail: it is bloated, pale, bluish-green, and appears to be far along in decomposition, yet there is no smell at all, defying normal forensic expectations.
- 6 (12:20) **The Search for ID and a Hard Object in the Throat** - The narrator searches the body for identification, finding only a gum wrapper and a zippo lighter, and then discovers a hard object lodged in the man's throat.
- 7 (14:07) **A Wallet Pulled from the Throat** - The narrator performs the incision and, with the help of a paramedic, extracts the object, revealing it to be a palm-sized leather wallet lodged in the cadaver's throat.
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Show Notes
Confessions of a mortician
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