Funerals tend not to have crazy things happen during them, but there are times the most unimaginable things happen, which leaves you surprised.
“Luckily, the right cemetery was just across the street…”
“My husband was carrying the casket to the grave and I was trying to tell him that we didn’t know those people. We were following the wrong procession from the funeral home! Luckily, the right cemetery was just across the street."
“The Five Most Inconsiderate House Guests of All-Time…”
“Back in your grandmother’s day, Rudolph Valentino was widely considered the greatest thing since sliced bread, which, having just replaced punching a loaf of bread with a fistful of salami, was still pretty hot. Valentino was one of the biggest silent film stars in the world, which meant he had to carry an entire story based on how intensely he could grimace, stare ominously and make that face you make when you really have to go to the can. To many women at the time, Rudolph Valentino was what you would get if you mixed Brad Pitt with low-fat yogurt and expensive shoes–these being the three main things women love, as I understand it. So when he died all of a sudden at age 31, people lost their minds. One hundred thousand New Yorkers lined the streets for his funeral, broke windows to try to get in to see the body and some fans, totally unable to cope with the monumental loss of a person they had never met or, you know, heard speak, tried to off themselves. Two women attempted to kill themselves in front of the hospital where Valentino had died, and elsewhere it’s said a boy decided to lay down with some of the actor’s photos and take his own life, presumably with cyanide or a velveteen hammer. A 27-year-old actress poisoned herself at a friend’s apartment, surrounded by photos of Valentino and letters she’d written to him, which we’ll go into more detail in our article: The Five Most Inconsiderate House Guests of All-Time."
“The funeral director asked me out on a date…”
“Not while I was working, but when my father passed away, I was making his arrangements at another funeral home and the funeral director asked me out on a date. Just wasn’t the appropriate time."
“It went off randomly throughout…”
“A doll that sang “Ring around the Rosie” started singing inside the casket after we closed it for the funeral service. The deceased (whose name was Rosie) was a 45-year-old woman with Down’s Syndrome and it was her favorite doll. It went off randomly throughout the funeral service at least four or five times."
“She also didn’t plan on her dad being stored in a…”
“Turns out the baby boomer generation that sexed most of our readers into the world love the environment almost as much as they enjoyed making love with one another (which incidentally is like so much you don’t even know). What you may not have noticed is that, like the free love movement, the elder generation’s rush to save the environment has gotten a lot more horrifying as they’ve gotten older. The truly cheap/eco-friendly amongst them can forgo old standbys like embalming and wood boxes and instead get popped right into a cardboard box, dropped in the ground and marked by a freshly planted tree that will grow strong as it saps nutrients out of your decaying, pulpy, cardboardy grossness under the ground. When Claire Wallerstein decided to have her father buried in an eco-friendly manner, she probably wanted all that stuff to occur. The fact that eco plots are hard to come by and thus her father got put to rest a couple of steps away from a pet cemetery was probably not in the brochure, however. She also didn’t plan on her dad being stored in a freezer for a few days and then being unavailable for the planned viewing since humans, much like a Fudgsicle, need to be put away if you want to enjoy them later. It also turns out that if you want to use a tree as a grave marker, you need to let the earth settle for a while after the burial. So you have to come back a few months later and then plant it. This in turn means that, if no one took the time to jam a stick in the ground to mark the grave in the meantime, you’re going to spend your afternoon counting paces from the nearest parrot grave, trying to remember where you buried that box your dad was in."
“The funeral home in question only issued a statement of regret…”
“While a missing body at the funeral is a pain in the a**, they generally tend to turn up since they’re usually right where you left them. Except when someone lights them on fire. Like misplacing your keys and then finding out someone else in the house reduced them to ash, occasionally funeral home workers will mix up bodies and put one in a casket while they cremate another, which is the exact opposite of what was intended. Pop culture assures us that funeral homes, such as those in Six Feet Under and Phantasm, are nothing if not zany and full of homicidal dwarves. The funeral home in question only issued a statement of regret and condolences regarding the ‘incident’, so we’re forced to assume the workers got loaded the night before and played ‘Spin the Cadaver’ and lost track of who was who in the fray."
“There was a knock on the door, and…”
“Myself and one other lady were working the evening shift at the funeral home processing insurance claims, death certificates, etc. We were the only people in the building and could see each other’s desks across the room (this was before cell phones too). There was a knock on the door, and it was the police saying someone had dialed 911 from the funeral home…"
“New Yorkers take the deaths of actors extremely seriously…”
“Judy Garland, who you may know as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and possibly as numerous dudes who dress up as her, became a gay icon through some means Wikipedia has been unable to explain to us. Shortly after her death, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular New York gay bar, intent on rounding up some lesbians and cross dressers because in the 60s, those were apparently the worst things happening in New York. Instead what happened was a mob formed as the cops waited for backup and as quick as a lesbian can style her mullet, sh*t got decidedly real. While cops brutalized the people they had taken into custody, the crowd, which had grown to around 500 people, threw down. Bottles flew along with bricks, fists and fabulous shoes. Many cops had to give up beating on people with their clubs and simply run away while others barricaded themselves in the bar. In interviews after the fact, participants expressed that it was a combination of the loss of Judy Garland and the desire to not be beaten mercilessly that triggered the event. Hard to say which one of those two was more at the forefront in the minds of those present. The fact that Garland’s death had anything to do with the riots that most historians credit with the entire gay rights movement is both remarkable, and the second example that New Yorkers take the deaths of actorsextremely seriously."
“The funeral director nonchalantly checked under…”
“Dropping my cell phone from my pocket into the casket while transferring the deceased. We didn’t even notice. I was on call that night, so I went out and got a new phone because I couldn’t find mine. Right before they closed the casket, the funeral director nonchalantly checked under the deceased person’s legs and… THERE IT WAS! Can you imagine if I didn’t get a new phone… it could have started ringing during the viewing! GASP!"
“He looked at me and quickly said I’ll put this away…”
“The funeral home I worked for didn’t allow food. One night I was working a visitation and I walked into the men’s room to check on cleanliness and re-stock it. Suddenly I realized there was a guy sitting on the corner of the sink eating a chicken dinner. He looked at me and quickly said ‘I’ll put this away’. I just looked at him and said ‘if you have enough guts to eat in the bathroom, be my guest’."
“Irony. We learned what it means from Alanis Morissette…”
“You know what’s probably awesome? Irony. We learned what it means from Alanis Morissette so our grasp is tenuous at best, but when it plays out over life and death situations it can get pretty trippy. Brian Moore, a high school athlete, had to whip up something to say before the Fellowship of Christian Athletes; a group of Jesus-lovers who may or may not have traveled Middle Earth. What he came up with was an essay called ‘The Room’ and it was one h*ll of a story. It detailed how the boy met Jesus in a room full of file cards, and each card detailed something about his life. Basically, it was his view of Heaven and covered how ashamed he feels when confronted with all his wrong doings in life. Two months after he wrote it, he died. The essay was read at his funeral, and sometime later the local paper reprinted it because it was that good. It was around this time that people who had read the essay two years earlier in a magazine sent a friendly note to the paper pointing out that the real author was a guy named Joshua Harris. Moore, who had been built up so much by his community as a brilliant student and writer, an exceptional athlete and a wonderful person, was also a bit of a plagiarist. He stole the essay and presented it to the Fellowship as his own. God knows what happened to them if that’s all they had when the Balrog attacked, but it probably ended with something prolapsed."
“The battery was completely dead…”
“We had a funeral for a man who was a blue collar worker. He always said he never wanted fancy cars (i.e. limousines) in his funeral because he could never afford such cars. When he died, he left behind his wife and unmarried daughter. They said they would be too upset to drive themselves, so they asked for a small limousine. We led the procession to church and when we left the church, the limo would not start. The battery was completely dead. I apologized profusely, and secured a ride for them with the cousins behind the limo in the procession. When we returned from the cemetery after the funeral, the limo startedright up."
“I quickly slid them off my feet and in my pocket…”
“I got a brand new pair of tights (the really slick kind). I realized I forgot my underwear, so I just slipped them on over the tights. When I got to work, I started walking towards the backdoor where an older father-type co-worker was standing. When I got to the door, I felt something funny around my ankles and I looked down in horror to find my underwear around my ankles. The co-worker covered his eyes, I gasped, and I quickly slid them off my feet and in my pocket. We both started laughing so hard and swore to keep it a secret. Hey, if you can’t laugh at yourself…"
Didn’t See These Coming!
These stories are so outrageous, it’s insane! But don’t worry, there’s plenty more just like these. Head on over to Storyblend.com, and read some more weird stories!
“She and her man slow danced in front of her son’s casket…”
“I had a woman preach the funeral of her own son. After calling him a litany of derogatory names, she proceeded to call her boyfriend (who was younger than her deceased son) to the front podium, then asked me to ‘play that song’, and as I played Amazing Grace, she and her man slow danced in front of her son’s casket. No lie."
“Luckily the responding officers were too busy…”
“There’s some saying or other about beating dead horses, but we’ve been advised to avoid making PETA mad. So instead, let’s focus on what happens when a random drifter happens upon a funeral and decides to duke it out with the dearly departed in what would be a hilarious scene in a Will Ferrell movie yet in real life was probably just horrifying. Really, there’s no reason to laugh. Back in 2007, Timothy Cleary, out for a stroll, made his way to the Harvest Baptist Church where a funeral was taking place. I like to think he saw the open casket and thought something along the lines of ‘holy cow I’m insane!’ then burst into a wind sprint and leapt on the corpse before raining down blows. Mourners, not fans of Will Ferrell-style comedy, then attacked Cleary and pulled him off the dead man before calling 911. Turns out Cleary didn’t know the deceased and police weren’t readily able to come up with a reason for the attack. Luckily the responding officers were too busy trying to decide whether or not Cleary was batsht insane or simply crazier than a shthouse rat."
“The funeral director noticed the mistake and raced to the rescue…”
“Funerals are often pretty formulaic and if you’ve been to one, you have a good idea of how to prepare for any other one you’re apt to go to. There’s a somber mood and a certain degree of acceptable flirting with hot strangers depending on how close to you the deceased was. You’ve got your finger sandwiches and, generally, the right dead person. Those last two are super important. Science says the smaller or larger you make a sandwich, the more awesome it becomes. Oh, and the corpse should be someone you know. When Kenneth ‘Tex’ Roberts passed on, the funeral home had one of those zany incidents where they store all the bodies together, presumably in a ball pit or something, so when they went to get him ready, they pulled out the wrong dude and dressed him in Roberts’ clothes. So the dead guys were all undressed in that pit, too. Rough deal. Roberts’ widow pointed out, upon seeing the body, that it wasn’t her husband. However, an adept funeral home employee pointed out ‘that’s how you look when you die’ and things went ahead. So for future reference, you look exactly like a different dead guy when you die. Remember that. Before the service began, the funeral director noticed the mistake and raced to the rescue, pointing out that Roberts was not the man in the casket–in fact he was at a totally different funeral home. It was at this point crying, asthma attacks and seizures began. Luckily they were able to go get the real Roberts and drive him back lickety split. The fact the drivers were in such a hurry that Roberts popped out of his casket a little bit so that his legs were hanging all willy-nilly probably did very little to calm anyone down though."
“No words could ever describe how I felt that day…”
“I was directing a funeral for an elderly man, and his wife died during the service. Right in the front row. No words could ever describe how I felt that day…"
Some Pretty Odd Things Going On Here
Want to read more outrageous stories? Read more weird stories on Storyblend.com!
“That was a fun one!..”
“A professional UFC fighter passed away and I had to break up a fight out in front of the chapel between his sister and his ex-girlfriend. That was a fun one!"
“Sorry for your loss…”
“Most embarrassing moment… just last night, my husband, speaking with the widow says “sorry about your luck”. I called him out on it, he SHOULD of said ‘sorry for your loss’".
