AI Summary
5 min readThe Coroner Who Learned Not to Look Too Closely
A small-town coroner in the Canadian Appalachians took over the family business reluctantly—eight years of schooling followed by ten years of service at a job he hated. His father had embalmed the locals before him, and the expectation was simply passed down. But something strange emerged early in his career: in a decade of work, not a single body that came through his doors belonged to a resident of his own town. Locals died, of course, but their bodies were always sent elsewhere. The corpses that arrived at his morgue were outsiders, and they arrived with disturbing regularity—several a week in a town of under a thousand people.
The bodies themselves were stranger still. One had all its teeth pulled and scattered in the woods, with no other damage. Another man went missing and was found twelve hours later stuffed into a hollow log, looking like he'd been decomposing for a year. A third had no lower body at all, no scarring, no sign of amputation—yet identification photos showed him with two fully functioning legs at age 58.
But the coroner's first strange case set the pattern for everything that followed.
The Body That Didn't Smell
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction: A Family Trade** - The narrator introduces himself as a reluctant coroner who inherited the job from his father in a small Canadian Appalachian town.
- 2 (05:23) **The Unsettling Pattern of Outsider Bodies** - The narrator reveals the central mystery: he receives several bodies a week, none of whom are residents, and describes three bizarre examples to illustrate the pattern.
- 3 (07:57) **The First Strange Body Arrives** - The narrator sets the scene for his first encounter with a bizarre corpse, four days after taking over the practice, on a cold October morning.
- 4 (09:47) **The Corpse's Bizarre Condition** - The narrator describes the body's grotesque appearance—bloated, discolored, and waterlogged—and begins his examination, finding no broken bones despite the supposed fall.
- 5 (13:53) **Discovering the Wallet** - The narrator cuts open the corpse's throat and retrieves a palm-sized leather wallet that was blocking the airway.
- 6 (15:39) **The Sheriff's Dismissive Advice** - The narrator concludes the man did not die from a fall, but the sheriff dismisses the idea of murder, telling him to ignore the weirdness and focus on his job.
- 7 (18:39) **Years of Ignoring the Weird** - The narrator explains that he followed the sheriff's advice for years, ignoring the bizarre cases, until a corpse on his table sat up and screamed.
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Show Notes
Confessions of a mortician
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