I was at a wedding recently, which was only a slightly unbearable experience. I was happy my friends were getting married and I didn’t have any issues with the other guests. In fact, everyone in attendance was kind and lovely, except for me. I was myself… which is to say I was awkward, low-key obnoxious and didn’t really speak to anyone until I was spoken to. (Now that I think about it, that’s how I’ve behaved at social gatherings since I was 3).
When someone decided to make Sunday-brunch-conversation with me, we were dining on the outdoor patio at some trendy, farm sourced eatery that was too bougie to spoil their aesthetic with enough umbrellas to adequately shade their customers. I was bent under the table, attempting to feed my hashbrowns to a curious sparrow when my dining companion launched the question at me. “Have you ever encountered a ghost at work?” It seems the bride and groom had alerted this person to my profession, and this was the ask.
I sat up and looked at her, at first automatically stating, “no.” Because I don’t encounter ghosts the way most people think of “ghosts.” She was asking about full- bodied apparitions and paranormal activity. She wanted to hear about floating objects, flickering lights and the weight of an invisible hand on my shoulder. And according to those definitions, no, I’ve never encountered a ghost. Heavy-footed spirits who behave like a frat boy at a kegger- all touchy and forceful, are few and far between and I can’t say for certain that I even believe in them.
But with a moment of reflection, I amended my answer to something a bit less disappointing. “Well, that’s not true. Sometimes they follow you home or hang around for a while. But not in the way you’d think.” Is my job haunted? Sure. Have I ever seen a ghost? No, but I’ve felt them. The fuckers are everywhere.
When people learn I’m a death investigator, the prime-time police procedural blossoms into a glamorous backdrop behind me. Either that, or much like the wedding guest, scenes of blood-spattered walls and outraged, restless specters dance in their horror movie heads. Often, people’s eye swill glaze over as they say something like, “Cool… that job sounds so cool.”
I suppose it is sometimes. I like solving puzzles and knowing things. I like helping people navigate hard moments. I like being a part of the backstage crew that keeps the world functioning. When I’m at work, I see things that most of the world doesn’t see. Sure, it’s cool. But even the best job is still a job. Duality is the nature of the world. I could go on and on about yin and yang or the nature of paradox. But I think I’ll just quote Brett Michaels and say “every rose has it’s thorn.” Death investigation is interesting and fun, but it’s also incredibly boring. It can be uplifting and beautiful, and it can be depressing and soul crushing. It can be hilarious, and weird. But if death investigation is a rose, ghosts are the thorns. They don’t hurt you, but they can get under your skin and follow you home.
I’ve spent a great deal of time alone in the morgue at night. Which sounds either awesome or terrible, depending on what kind of person you are. For the majority of my career, part of my job was to transport the dead to the state morgue and check them in for their autopsies. This sounds like a simple chore, but it was often difficult, frequently gross and occasionally creepy, but not in the ways one might expect.
When I would leave a death scene with a deceased passenger strapped to the stretcher in the back of the truck, the drive to the morgue could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours depending on the distance and traffic. And by nature of some cosmic fluke, deaths on my shift always happened late in the evening, which almost always meant I arrived at the morgue long after the staff and pathologists had gone home. The sky was always full dark when I arrived, and I was always alone. In fact, when I think about it, most of the time, I would arrive in the morgue around 2 or 3 in the morning. Not sure how that happened, but there it is- the witching hour: when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest and spirits are the most active…. probably because I’m making a mess of their dead bodies in the morgue as I’m trying to maneuver them from a stretcher to an autopsy tray.
The state medical examiner’s office was a strange place. It was a chilling building even if you didn’t know it was full of the bodies of people who had died badly. The facility sat at the end of a long cul-de-sac in a hidden corner of the county. The surrounding area was nothing but an overgrown, odorous marsh, about a half mile behind a strip mall. The roadway was always empty and dimly lit with a couple flickering street lights. The abandoned parking lot and desolate streets primed the atmosphere with a heavy blanket of isolation. I would slowly creep the county truck down the driveway to the back of the building, rolling down the window to pass my badge over a sensor and then mashing the button to bring the window back up as the dank, moist air, thick with the smell of rot, would creep into the truck. I would back the flat-bed, hard top truck into the sally port, throw the vehicle in park and climb out to stare at the lurking blackness behind the trees that surrounded the building beyond the chain-link fences. It felt primal and wild out there beyond the perimeter, like an ancient forest full of monsters. The wind rattling the branches together and the rustle of unseen animals made me feel like there was something hungry crouched beyond the reach of the lights, watching as I forced myself to slow my movements like a prey animal trying not to excite a predator. Keeping one eye on the dark, I would walk to the back of the truck and throw the doors open to be greeted by the formless, white plastic lump that was my decedent on the stretcher. Sometimes an arm may have shaken loose during transit, or the decedent’s weight might have shifted despite the straps meant to hold them in place. On these occasions, the body might be precariously hanging off one side of the stretcher, threatening to tumble on to the floor of the truck where I wouldn’t be able to lift them back into place.
Inevitably, my decedents always weighed somewhere between 2 and 3 times my own body weight and I would have to heave them out of the back of the truck and them shift them from the stretcher to an autopsy table all on my own. This activity often involved a great deal of pushing and rocking- angling the decedent on to the table, one limb at a time. Digging my fingers into whatever clothing they were wearing and flinging my body weight to and fro in an effort to harness momentum and catapult the dead weight on to the shining steel tray. I only dumped a body on the floor once, and fortunately, he was only slightly heavier than I and wrestling him back on to the stretcher wasn’t too difficult.
Once the dead person was on the table, I then had to undress them, log them in to the computer system, put an ID band on them and wheel them into the cooler: a chilled room behind a huge, sliding metal door. Undressing the dead could be another acrobatic trick, depending on how large and rigored they were. Also, if they were decomposed, you could count on a few layers of skin and maybe some digits falling off in the process. Such a fluke might be disgusting, but it wasn’t really creepy. If anything was creepy, it was wheeling your decedent into the cooler with the other bodies. Unlike what Hollywood would have you believe, bodies in the morgue are almost never laid out flat with their hands by their sides in the morgue. Most of the people in the morgue died somewhere other than comfortably in bed, so most of them were frozen in whatever position they died in. Some were curled up on their sides, some were bent at the waist with their heads between their knees. Some had an arm raised aloft or a knee folded beneath their plastic shrouds. Sometimes, I could see blood pooling inside.
Even in these instances, the morgue was minimally creepy. Don’t get me wrong, I was absolutely convinced the dead were watching when I entered and exited with a new customer. I could feel the slightest, chilly caress of their curiosity whenever I turned away to leave. And I realized that while the dead might inhabit the morgue, they didn’t haunt it. The morgue was a byway station with no emotional attachment, it was a waiting room. I don’t believe the dead were any more invested in the morgue than a traveler would be attached to an airport concourse. I was a stranger in the background as they waited to see what would happen next. They were too busy puzzling through their recent circumstances to really take much note of me. If they noted me at all, I imagine they were hoping I might take them home.
Our office recently started contracting a removal service, so I don’t go to the morgue much anymore… which is neither here nor there to me. The morgue wasn’t creepy and it wasn’t haunted. People are there, temporarily, then they clear out and new ones arrive.
Death scenes can be haunted to some degree, but I feel those hauntings differently than say, a friend or family member of the deceased. When I walk into a death scene, It’s creepy because of the silent, energetic echoes. I don’t feel spirit so much as I feel the rippling effects of events. I don’t feel who was there, but i definitely feel what happened there. I can walk through a space- whether it’s a home, a hotel, a parking lot… whatever, and the quiet feels haunting. It’s as if you can reach out a hand in that empty air and actually feel the hole that was ripped in reality when a person was torn from their body and dragged through: A silent home after a murder/suicide… an empty warehouse where some kid had pulled out a gun during a party and started shooting… an evacuated bar where a fight had turned into a stabbing- I see the tipped over cups, broken glass, flicks of blood and I can feel the noise and chaos of the death in the heavy silence. It feels like an enormous, carnivorous beast is stalking out the door and has brushed your face with the sweeping stroke of its tail as it leaves. Death scenes are like reading braille with the fingers of your mind- I can hear the cries, the shouts, the gunshots, the shattering of a window in the absence of sound.
But death scenes aren’t always haunted. Maybe haunted just a little by the ghosts who haven’t quite caught up with the truth yet.
In my opinion, the most haunted place I know is our property room.
The property room is an office that has been turned into storage. The desks and other furniture are long gone and now it’s nothing but endless shelves and short, tight, knobby carpet that is so green it almost vibrates. The shelves are built into the walls and go all the way up to the ceiling. Each one is lined with opaque plastic bins. They are labeled alphabetically, Aa-Ag, Af-Ao, Ao-Az and so on. Each bin is stuffed with sealed plastic pockets, containing the items people had with them when they died. The property room is packed with little plastic time capsules with artifacts from the last day of someone’s life.
If we respond to a scene where someone died in their own home, there’s no problem. We lock up their belongings in their home and leave. But lots of people die in public… out in the wild. These are the free-range dead. In those cases, we can’t leave their stuff at the scene, but we also can’t send it with the decedent to go to the funeral home or the morgue. Things are going to get lost, stolen or thrown out. Every time another person opens or closes the body bag, it’s an opportunity for a necklace or an earring to fall to the floor, or get wrapped up and discarded with the clothing, or fall into a puddle of coagulated blood and tissue and get washed down the drain. A wallet falls behind a table, a keyring ends up on the floor of a funeral home car. So, we save what we can.
We investigators empty the pockets, remove the jewelry, search the clothing folds and even underwear, pulling out wads of cash, cigarette lighters, hair ties, scraps of paper. All of it is collected and brought back to the office where it is washed, photographed, cataloged and sealed in plastic before we deposit it into a bin in the property room. And there it all sits.
How do we know what to take? We don’t. We have to look at the items and try to employ our imagination as much as possible. If the decedent were my dead brother, would I want this fabric bracelet? This belt? These papers? It’s the most agonizing guessing game ever. What matters to people I’ve never met? What thing will make all the difference when we hand it to their weeping mother? Is the wife going to want to keep that paperclip? Who knows?
When you walk into the property room, there is a faint odor of rot. It’s the subliminal scent of mold under your carpets or a head of lettuce left too long in the fridge. The smell whispers to you when you enter, reminding you that all of these items once had a life attached to them. You glance at a bin and inside the multitude of plastic bags- drivers’ licenses smile at you. The unedited, unfiltered vulnerability of an ID photo feels like such a painfully honest memorial… faces with no pretense. Seeing the ID photos feels almost as personal as looking at the decedent’s naked body. Like they’re looking at you from the past with no idea what was going to happen to them.
Then there’s the watches. Often, working late into the night, I’ll hear a beeping coming from the property room as someone’s watch chirps out a ghost alarm. Maybe it’s time to take medications or wake up for work. Maybe it’s a reminder to feed the dog or make a phone call. Whatever, these digital phantoms wail for attention, begging someone to carry out some task that mattered enough to remember. At worst, the ghost alarms just beep every fifteen minutes or every hour. Inevitably, one of us investigators will get annoyed and stomp into the property room to root through the bins in a macabre game of Marco Polo, looking for the complaining device. Then the ghost alarm will be exorcised and we pretend these little specters didn’t unnerve us.
But mixed in with the disposable vapes, jewelry, wallets full of faded business cards and sticky notes with phone numbers on them… are the most haunted items… in the most haunted room.
Cell phones
Often on the scene of a death, I have been holding a deceased person’s phone only to have it begin rigning with shrill panic. It might be a coincidence, but more often phones ring and don’t stop ringing because someone is looking for the decedent. Someone has begun to suspect something is wrong. This person was supposed to call or be somewhere. As the phone buzzes, I exchange looks with police or the body transport people. Faces are grim and my throat tightens as the question of that phone call hangs in the air, unanswered: Where are you?
Sometimes, while we’re on the death scene, we receive word that the dead person’s family has been notified of the death and then the phone rings with even more desperation. Loved ones call and call again, then they text, demanding that the person call right away. Please make contact, do something to prove that this sudden tragedy isn’t happening. It’s a joke, it’s a mistake, please answer. I’ve also been holding people’s phones when these calls come in. I’ve seen the text messages flash across the screen, pleading with the dead body in front of me to say something. Come back.
By the time the phones reach the property room, they have become a receptacle for regrets, grief and farewells. People will text their goodbyes to the phone. Apologies for long-time grudges, buried fears and confessions and endless wishes for more time- trying to say everything that should have been said ages ago- I miss you, I love you… I will never be the same. The phones will ring and beep for days if someone doesn’t turn them off. It’s like sitting in a confessional, listening to people beg for forgiveness from behind a thick curtain… or sitting in the silent bottom of a well as the wishes fall around you from the surface.
After a while, the batteries run out and the phones stops chirping out alerts and notifications. They fall silent as little tombstones with their epitaphs blanketed under a blank screen. People are supposed to come and get their loved one’s property right away. But many times, the office becomes a kind of graveyard where people bury the feelings they can’t face. They don’t want the memories attached to that ring or that barrette- The physical reminder is too much… too close… to raw.
How do we square ourselves with ghosts? What is this ethereal energy that hovers inside the parameters of our skin? Is it the dissipating electricity of our hearts and brains as they falter and decay? Is it the echoes of our actions after the lights have gone out? Or is it simply the dust-collecting accumulation of random objects, taking up space that we no longer occupy?
It’s ok, you don’t have to answer now… We’ll just hold your stuff until we figure it out.
In the meantime, if you ever want to see a ghost, we’ve got a whole room-full of them.
Boo.
Dead Men's Donuts 