Today on the Grave Talks, part two of our conversation about the Bell Mansion.

After they did the addition in 1935, they had the larger embalming room across the hall,

which did the remainder of the embalming throughout the years.

But there's an estimated of 300 to 600,000 bodies that had been in and out of that place. So it's been a high

traffic facility for a long time. So yeah, when you go in that embalming room and you really sit

and think about that, all of the people that had been in and out of that room, it's,

it is a little unsettling. And it's, it's, it's just kind of leaves you with a weird

feeling. Nothing, you know, negative, but it's just kind of, you tackle your own mortality when

you think about things like that. 300 to 600,000. But you know, you do consider it was close to 100

years that it was in operation. That's, you know, you do consider it was close to 100 years that it was in operation.

That just kind of blew me away.

Because, yeah, it's kind of a little bit of an overload, you know.

And then there was another event.

In 1982, Fort Wayne suffered a really horrible flood flood and there was a lot of damage in the

downtown area and a lot of death unfortunately and there were so many bodies coming into the funeral home

that they were actually shoving the bodies in through a basement window and just stacking them

wherever they could put them because they were so backed up.

So that kind of leaves a little bit of a residual footprint too to think about when you're

down in the basement.

It kind of makes me think, you know, funeral homes are one of those places that, you know,

I've heard of my sister had a

funeral home, an old building built in the 1800s, and it was built as a funeral home.

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