Scary Stories - Autopsy

The first body that landed on the new coroner’s table, four days into the job, had a wallet lodged in its throat. The man was found face-down in a creek at the bottom of a small cliff, about a kilometer outside a tiny town in the Canadian Appalachians. The sheriff said it looked like a fall killed him. But when the coroner cut open the cadaver’s neck to remove a hard obstruction, he pulled out a palm-sized leather wallet. The driver’s license inside showed a college-aged man from out of state. The corpse on the table, bloated and blue-green after marinating in water, bore no resemblance to the photo. And despite the advanced decomposition, there was no smell.

The coroner inherited the job from his father. It was a family line he never wanted, but he gave in after years of fighting. Now, ten years in, he has plenty of strange stories—but no one to tell them to. The town has fewer than 1,000 residents, mostly of Native American descent, and it sits in the Appalachian mountains of Canada. You might think a coroner in a place that small would have little work. But the narrator receives several bodies a week. None of them are locals. Not one in ten years. Hikers, transients, people from other towns—they turn up dead in the woods or the creeks, and they always end up on his table. The locals who die are sent elsewhere, which he finds statistically impossible but has learned not to q