Crematory Whoopsies

Death in the Afternoon

Caitlin Doughty

Education, Society & Culture

5 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2018

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mistakes happen. Cremations happen. But few things capture our morbid imagination like cremation mistakes happening. Whether it’s the horror of cremating your coworker, a misplaced corpse on the way to America’s first modern cremation, or plumes of “human remains particulate” interrupting your Best Buy shopping experience, nothing fans the flames of our phobias like a cremation blunder. This week we talk about things that can go right, wrong, and sideways when you’re in the business of cremating corpses.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I remember the day that people from all across the internet started sending me the
0:09.7	article.
0:10.7	Can you talk more about this?
0:13.1	They asked, explain how it could possibly happen.
0:16.6	The article in question was Morg employee cremated by mistake while taking a nap.
0:24.3	It was a fake story I knew immediately.
0:27.1	Along the lines of other internet death hoaxes, like morgue worker arrested after giving
0:32.2	birth to a dead man's baby or police find 200
0:36.1	penises at mortician's home. I still get people asking me about that one.
0:41.6	If the headline starts with a morgue worker, followed by some truly bizarre
0:46.0	mad lib style claim, like cremated by mistake, giving birth to dead man's baby, and it appears on a website like crazy news dotbiz
0:57.4	spoiler it's always fake
1:00.4	But then I clicked on the link. The story wasn't posted on crazynews.biz.
1:07.0	It was ABC News, you know, the real news, journalism.
1:12.0	Reported in gruesome detail. the real news, journalism.
1:12.7	Reported in gruesome detail, by the way,
1:15.6	from Macham County, Michigan.
1:18.4	As someone who's worked in crematories for years,
1:21.4	every part of this story seemed wrong to me.
1:25.0	But journalism involves interviews, proof, due diligence,
1:30.0	especially in reporting a story as salacious as someone in America being cremated alive.
1:36.4	It had to be true.
	...

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