I hear about this both a lot, yet very little. So, I’m wondering whether it’s because this rarely happens, or it’s censored. It’s not mentioned in fiction, or on the news - you don’t hear “the victim was found in a pool of blood and shit”. I’d expect those movies aiming for realism to mention it, e.g. war movies, but they don’t.
In what kinds of death does it happen? I suppose suffocation (including drowning) and poisoning, how about bleeding to death? Beheading?
I would think almost all of them. When you die, your muscles (including anal sphincters) relax. Perhaps it’s not mentioned because it goes without saying and because their goal isn’t to give as unsavory a description as they can.
I think in writing it’s just a given, and doesn’t need to be mentioned. It doesn’t add to the story in any useful way. It happens, but people usually are wearing pants/underclothes. So. While a pool of blood may be found due to stabbing or gunshot (and - people are full of a lot more blood than they are of feces/urine) , what’s in their shorts is contained/absorbed by a couple layers of clothing and so they aren’t in a “pool” of it.
A side question about physiology, but is it in fact the case that there is constantly stool waiting to be released, if only the sphincters would relax?
Absolutely. If one props open the sphincter, there’s a constant flow of feces until the subject dies of malnutrition.
Joe
I’ve seen lots of dead people in the ER, rarely are they incontinent to stool.
I thought it required a push, not just to relax.
So it’s one of those things that are so common, nobody bothers to point it out? Or are people squeamish about bodily waste?
Thinking about movies like Saw and Hostel, whose aim is to disgust people, you’d think they’d milk this phenomenon, but they didn’t. That’s why I say portrayal of this is unexpectedly low.
Aaron,
I heard from a nurse that it’s quite common for people who die of old age. What happens when people die isn’t my specialty so hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will confirm or infirm what I said.
I do remember that many times soldiers have described battlefields as smelling of feces. I don’t know if those feces came mainly from scared soldiers but my experience with military stress is that it has the opposite effect. So it would have to mainly come from the dead.
It could also be from intestines and abdomens being ruptured from blades, bullets, shrapnel, the usual.
This topic comes up fairly often, here is an old thread with some good replies:
This is not really accurate. Unless there is stool “near” the sphincter, and assuming its liquid enough to flow, then, yes, there may well be some ‘leakage’ around the time of death.
That said, in many, and probably most, hospitalized patients who die, there has been antecedent poor nutrition (it’s the rare patient who’s been eating well and then dies in bed from an illness such as cancer, stroke, heart failure, etc.). In such individuals, there is no passage of feces at the time of death.
(I have pronounced many people dead and can’t say I recall even one instance of “evacuation of the bowels” at the time of death. Again, this is referring to hospitalized, typically debilitated, people).
In the U.S. it was common knowledge before WWII when most people had every day dealings with farm animals. As more of the population moved to cities and relied on butchers and veterinarians, people lost that firsthand knowledge.
Some people may not mention the evacuating of bowels or bloating or sunken eyes or death rattles simply because they were never aware it happened.
Q: How common is evacuating bowels during death?
A: It only happens once.
I have dealt with many people in various stages of unlife. It does not happen often. Only if they had a turtle head sticking out. Dead people don’t have the muscles working to push fecal matter through the system.
I’d expect it to happen more often in sudden unexpected deaths of previously healthy people, rather than the majority of deaths which occur in elderly weakened, been-sick-for-a-while people, for the reasons already mentioned: Stool needs squeezin’ (peristalsis) to move, and it needs food to form. If you’re not eating much and your gut isn’t moving much (many elderly people suffer from constipation, for a variety of reasons), then there won’t be stool near enough the anus to leak out from normal handling of a dead body.
My SO had a colostomy for a year and an ileostomy for another year, so he had no sphincters preventing stooling at all. While the ileostomy put out a lot of liquidy stool, it wasn’t anything like constant. The colostomy stooled formed stool at fairly predictable intervals several times a day and didn’t leak a thing in between. To have a movement coincide with a death would be something of a…forgive me…craps game.
Now, it’s a LOT more common to have a bowel movement while giving birth, but we don’t talk about that much, either! 
Also decerebrate and decorticate posturing - it’s strange stuff, and I never knew about it until I saw the real thing. There’s a video out there of a girl who hanged herself and videotaped it (confirmed to be real and not a fake - yeah I know I’m a sick motherfucker for watching this kind of thing), and after what appears to be the point of death, her arms continue to raise and lower in this most unusual manner.
And re: the OP - it definitely happens because I’ve seen that in gore pictures too, but I really don’t know how frequently it happens in general.
In my job, I deal with dead animals fairly often. Unless there was already a history of diarrhea (which granted, is in many many cases I get), bowel emptying, to the point of having large amounts of fecal staining around the anus, does not happen in many, if not most, of the cases (pre-mortem diagnosis of GI problems excempt).
Not to be too gross or macabre about it, but…
My father died suddenly of a heart attack while sitting in his chair watching TV. I personally didn’t find him, but the relative that did find him said that, well… his bowels had evacuated.
So it does happen.
J.
I have killed a lot of animals, and this is BS.