20 People Who Perform Autopsies Reveal The Creepiest Thing They’ve Found Inside A Dead Body
"When they opened him up, his stomach moved, it was a snake that had burrowed inside his body, it struck and bit one of the techs before they realized what was going on."
These stories from real coroners on Ask Reddit are creepy AF.
1. Spoke with a pathologist at a conference, during her training at the medical examiner’s office, they were doing an autopsy on a body that was found by a river. They did a CT and something looked funny about his gut. When they opened him up, his stomach moved, it was a snake that had burrowed inside his body, it struck and bit one of the techs before they realized what was going on.
2. Pennies. Hundreds of pennies, nearly six dollars worth inside the skin all over the arms and legs. The deceased was a hermit, lived alone, ordered out for every meal. Apparently he’d been surgically implanting pennies in his skin for years. No fucking clue why.
3. My friend who does autopsies found barbie doll heads in the intestines of a 21-year-old woman. Yes barbie dolls, ken dolls, that stuff. The weird part is she died from COPD.
4. We had a guy who took a bullet to the back of his head, execution-style and after the x-rays determined the bullet was not in his head anymore, we couldn’t find the exit wound anywhere. Once we took out the brain, we discovered it exited perfectly out of one of his nostrils leaving no trace of an external exit wound.
5. My brother in law was in his early 60s and passed away from a heart attack. During his autopsy, it was noted he only had one kidney. He never had a kidney removed and the only surgery he ever had was to have his appendix removed. And the mortician said that it was in fact removed and not just a birth defect. The appendix surgery happened when he was very young.
6. One of my friends does autopsies and he said that he found 24 screws in the large intestine of a 75-year-old woman. The weirdest part is she died of a heart attack while in the shower. There was no possible explanation other than she was suffering from pica.
7. An 88-year-old grandma died of carbon monoxide poisoning. During the autopsy, we couldn’t open the back of the cranium. After much drilling we realized that her cranium was around 3-4 cm thick all the way around, leaving her with the smallest brain on a grown woman I’ve ever seen. She was fully functioning and never seemed affected by it in the slightest. I’ve never seen anything like it.
8. When I was a student I saw an autopsy of a man who had hanged himself. When we checked the main arteries in the heart he had a huge blockage. He was basically just about to have a huge heart attack so probably would have died anyway! Sorry pretty grim.
9. Back in the 90s, I worked for the company that was contracted to move bodies for the coroner. We picked up the body of a lady who had worked as a tailor in her youth. When they did the post mortem, there were several dressmaking pins and needles under her skin (mainly in her legs). There was also a pin lodged in her lung. The coroner thought she must have inhaled it. She’d suffered a pulmonary embolism back in the 60s which had forced her to retire. Maybe the pin was the cause of it. How she hadn’t felt the pins or that none of them had been picked up on x-rays or scans she’d had in later life, I don’t know. The cause of death was a stroke.
10. I worked as a pathology assistant. My boss once found a 6-inch builder’s nail in a chap’s thigh. He’d died on site after an accident but the nail was all healed over, even where it had nicked the bone so it must’ve been there a few years.
11. 5 years ago, in an autopsy I viewed, the patient was put down to have died from post-surgical complications from a colostomy (infection lead to sepsis and ended with MOF). When they began the examination and looked they found some surgical tweezers left behind which was attributed to being the cause of the infection because of how tucked away they were. I am unaware of what happened afterward but it was definitely referred higher.
12. Incidental finding of a toothpick lodged in the small intestine.
13. Accessory spleens were super common, but one lady had 14 of them, but no actual spleen. Just 14 little blueberry-sized accessory spleens.
14. Elderly female with five very old tampons in her vaginal canal.
15. Buddy told me he found a pair of dentures in someone’s thigh. Didn’t say a word to anyone about it for a couple of years either.
16. Guy called his ex-wife, told her he was ending it all, had a gun, drove out to the middle of nowhere, and…. Died of a heart attack. We couldn’t believe it either.
17. An old shut-in died from natural causes, and his body was found a few weeks after he passed.
During the autopsy, the coroner found what appeared to be thin copper wire running the length of the decedent’s arms, legs, and torso. It was embedded under the skin, with a single point or “outlet” emerging at the base of the neck.
The man had no family, so no one had a clue how the wires got there or why.
18. Saw photos of a young guy who had died at home and his pet fox then ate part of his face.
19. While completing the post-autopsy repair for a gentleman, I found a plastic ladle tucked under the ribs. It was probably left by some poor autopsy technician who got yelled at for losing the good ladle.
20. I was once in a mental health facility for only a short amount of time, and I met a woman whose daughter passed away from a drug overdose and had been upset at her for selling her grandmother’s necklace for what she thought was drugs, but when the autopsy came back it was found in her stomach.
Apparently she was swallowing the same necklace for years and I can imagine why someone would do that. 
