AI Summary
5 min readThe narrator, a coroner in a small town in the Canadian Appalachians, inherited the job from his father. He resents it, but he has kept at it for ten years. The town has fewer than a thousand residents, yet he receives several bodies a week. None of them have ever been locals. The bodies are always outsiders—hikers, transients, people found in the woods. The narrator has a list of strange cases, but he focuses on his first one: a man found at the bottom of a cliff four days after the narrator took over the practice.
The sheriff, a man in his sixties named Williams, brought the body in on a frosty October morning. The corpse was in an advanced state of decomposition—bloated, discolored, swollen—but there was no smell. That struck the narrator as wrong. He examined the body and found no broken bones, which contradicted the assumption that the man had died from a fall. When he probed the throat, he felt something hard lodged inside. He cut open the neck and pulled out a palm-sized leather wallet.
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Scary Stories
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (02:31) **The Coroner's Unwanted Inheritance** - The narrator explains his family legacy: forced into the role of town coroner despite dreams of being an artist or musician.
- 2 (04:12) **The Strange Town and Its Outsider Corpses** - The narrator sets the scene: a small town in the Canadian Appalachians where every corpse he receives is an outsider.
- 3 (08:10) **The First Strange Out-of-Towner** - The narrator focuses on his very first bizarre case, just four days after taking over the practice.
- 4 (09:50) **The Corpse That Didn't Smell** - The narrator describes the moment he knew something was deeply wrong: the body showed advanced decomposition but had no smell at all.
- 5 (10:54) **The Unbroken Bones** - The narrator examines the body and finds no fractures, contradicting the fall theory.
- 6 (12:08) **Something Lodged in the Throat** - The narrator discovers a hard object blocking the corpse's airway and decides to cut it open.
- 7 (13:37) **The Wallet in the Throat** - The narrator pulls a palm-sized leather wallet from the cadaver's throat, a discovery that shocks no one but him.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Confessions of a mortician
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
More from this podcast
Scary Stories →