By ‘corpses’, I’m counting bodies covered by sheets as well as uncovered ones.
There was a crash in Fife, WA (near Tacoma) this morning. A tow truck driver was hit and killed by a semi driver (who was taken into custody on suspicion of DUI). The news showed the semi and emergency vehicles. I believe there was an ambulance. She said she thought they usually load up the body and take it away. (Yesterday the news was saying they couldn’t show much of a different crash because the body was still there.) I remembered a crash about twenty years ago where there were bodies under sheets strewn about. Then I remembered more…
The crash I saw was on the way back from Las Vegas. A van carrying about a dozen people (Migrants? Church group? I don’t remember.) blew a tire. The driver lost control and the van wound up in the median. IIRC, I saw seven sheet-covered bodies.
Going to high school one morning, I saw the sheet-covered body of a man who tried to rob a 7-11. My wife said she thinks she was on the same bus as I was, as she remembered it too.
I was leaving the college one evening at a break, as I already knew what was coming up in the second half of the class. There was a sheet-covered body in the street. A motorcyclist was riding south, and a girl pulled out of the parking lot and made a left turn in front of him. An official lifted up the sheet briefly, so I saw his head.
My wife (who is an RN and has seen her share of bodies in medical settings) said something like, ‘You’ve seen a lot of bodies!’ or ‘My God. How many bodies have you seen?’
I remembered a couple of years ago a motorcyclist was struck in Bellingham. I saw his sheet-covered body.
So my body count seems to be ten. That seems like an extraordinarily high number.
When I was about nine years old, there was a bad accident a few blocks from my house – a bunch of young people were tearing through the neighborhood on motorcycles, and one of them lost control and crashed. A few minutes later, we heard a lot of sirens, and we walked up there to see what had happened; by then, the emergency responders had draped a sheet over the body of one of the victims.
As an adult, at some point in the early '90s, I was walking in to my office in downtown Chicago, from the train station, and walking along Wacker Drive, next to the Chicago River. I saw a police team pulling a human body out of the river. I wasn’t close enough to see many details, but what lingers in my mind is that the body had turned a not-natural shade of purple. (I later learned that it had been a homeless man, who had apparently fallen into the river a few days earlier.)
A few years ago I was almost home and then became annoyed at a small traffic jam where two lanes go into one. As I got closer to the choke point I could see there was an accident of sorts because some people were milling about after parking their vehicles at the side of the road. I then spotted a motorcycle lying on its side, and nearby, not 5 or 6 feet away from me, the rider was lying on his back, blood running from his mouth and was very obviously dead. It had apparently happened mere moments before I got there. It was the first time I’ve ever seen a dead body that wasn’t during a funeral, and it was very disturbing to see. I felt so bad.
As it turned out, the motorcyclist was hit by a motorist, who then fled the scene, there was a bank which had a security camera that caught it.
I can recall about 10 off the top of my head. Three were especially bad. All three being extracted from a bad accident and fire. Truck burned intensely for a long time. Didn’t even get the benefit of the sheet. That was a bad day…
Another guy got hit by a Prius while crossing the highway on his ATV. And there was the guy who Kamakazied a HIghway Patrol officer while stoned out of his head. Reports were that his THC limit was something 19 times over the legal limit or something crazy like that.
All five of these were within a half-mile of one another on a ‘desolate’ stretch of highway, not far from my hole under a rock.
It’s always a Church Group. What is it with church groups and van tragedy? Seems like there are more than you would expect.
I was coming home from work with my carpooling partner and we were second in line at a light waiting to make a right turn. The light changed and we started to move, including a woman making a protected left turn, when an auto ran the light from the left and clipped her. It became airborne on its right side, bashing the hood of the plumber’s truck in front of us and ejecting one person then landed in the dry, concrete-lined irrigation ditch next to us, still on its side with a second person partially ejected.
My partner went to the intersection and I climbed into the ditch to kneel next to the victim. He was breathing and his airway sounded clear so not knowing if he might have a broken spine or ribs, I didn’t want to touch him. His right wrist was pinned under the vehicle in any event. The EMT truck was there in a couple minutes and he began struggling to breathe just at the medic was jumping down into the ditch.
My partner said the other guy was loose on the pavement and unresponsive with a distorted head but I didn’t see him; the intersection being impassable we did a U-turn.
The other still haunts me to this day. It was Christmas Eve and I got off work a little early. As I drove south about 2pm the traffic slowed almost to a stop because of the lookie-loos. In the opposite direction a Mercedes Benz was upside down in the #1 lane with two blanket-covered bodies next to it. The haunting part: The trunk of the Benz had come open and there were a half-dozen Christmas presents scattered about on the pavement.
When I saw the bodies in the desert, I couldn’t help thinking that the coroner was at least a couple of hours away (Kern County, so s/he’d have to come from Bakersfield) and that the bodies were in the hot Summer sun in an area with lots of hungry ants.
First was when my kids and I found a body in a river.
Second - not sure if it counts, because right outside my driver’s window I saw a motorcycle slam into the back of a stopped truck at 75 MPH. I saw the body flying over the handlebars as the bike crumpled. So, if he wasn’t dead at the time, he was moments away from being a corpse.
I thought I saw one last year. I live in an isolated location in the boreal forest, but with a high volume of transient workers coming and going and using the highways cutting through the bush. On my commute I saw a bunch of ravens on the ground in the ditch, but couldn’t see very well. Kept my eye on it in the rear-view mirror (the viewing angle changed) as I passed and saw that they were gathered around a big white lump… didn’t look like typical road kill that is usually smaller and/or brown-ish and furry.
I came back on a quad a little later to check it out, and got a little spooked when I got close. The big white mass was a naked torso with the back exposed and most of the rest of the body underwater in the ditch. The only other part I could see through the murky water was a bent leg and foot, with individual toes and an obvious heel. And the leg was small enough that it looked to be a child’s. Thought I was looking at a murdered & dumped kid for the first few seconds.
Then, I looked a little closer and saw that the body proportions didn’t make sense… much too big of a torso for that size leg. Then on a few parts of the pasty white skin I saw small patches of black fur. Eventually I spotted a huge clawed paw under the water. It was a young black bear that had been hit by a truck, launched into the ditch, and spent several days decomposing in the water and dropping fur.
I hadn’t realized how human-like some parts of bears are under the fur. A fish and Wildlife officer I told the story to laughed and said he too got freaked out the first time he saw a skinned bear paw; they look very human.
I think I saw a body covered in a sheet when I drove by an accident once. Other than that, I arrived at a hospice facility immediately (like 2 minutes) after the person I was visiting had died. I don’t know if that counts though.
(I confess I’ve used this story as an answer to the boilerplate “tell us about a time when you were faced with a problem at work ,and how you handled it” question in job interviews.)
I was a hospice worker / caregiver for 14 years, beginning at age 19. For the first six or eight months I was working I kept count of how many of my patients I had been with when they passed because, well, Reasons. But after that it just became too depressing so I stopped counting. But it has to be in the multiple dozens, maybe a hundred? The absolute worst was when one of my patients died and, per protocol, I called the RN in charge to report the death (this was on a graveyard shift). For whatever reason – and to this day I still don’t know what happened – there was a paperwork SNAFU and the RN couldn’t do her part with the paperwork and deal the funeral home and whatnot. So I had to call the local PD and report it as unattended death (despite the fact that he was receiving hospice care), which caused a crowd of cops and EMT’s to show up. All of this while I was trying to console the patient’s widow. That was probably 17 or 18 years ago now and I still remember the entire night vividly.
One. A head-on collision occurred a short distance behind me on a rural highway. When I approached one of the wrecked cars to render aid, the driver had the steering wheel embedded in his chest. The bad part was listening to the family’s cries from just witnessing their father taken from them in a super violent fashion. I put out the fire under the hood with an extinguisher from my car, but that was all I could do.
“Seen?” How about smelled? A half-dozen unenbalmed infants I was tasked with exhuming and reinterring when someone had the great idea of creating their own section at the Catholic cemetery, without considering that the mercury was in the 90s
I know that over the years I’ve seen a couple auto accident scenes with covered bodies.
Other than those, the two that stand out to me -
At the zoo, standing in the very long line to see the pandas. It was a very hot summer day and some poor gent had keeled over. His body was covered on the ground, and his wife was sitting on a bench nearby weeping. The long line had been slightly diverted around the scene.
Late one night, coming home from the airport in an Uber car, we exited the freeway near by condo. As we were making the turn under the overpass the traffic was swerving to avoid something in the road, which we did also. The something in the road was a young woman who had just recently jumped from the overpass.
The vans that a lot of those groups use are not as easy to control as regular vehicles – a point that many people simply don’t know until it’s too late.
I think two, both in South Africa (Jo’burg). We were hanging out with the anti-carjacking police. One was going to a call at a small bar with a pool table where the dude got shot in the head. The other was at the aftermath of a car chase where the guy got thrown out of the car and into the median. Surprisingly, in one piece. I think that’s all, but I’m not 100% sure. I’m not counting stuff like seeing a covered body with police getting hauled off in the distance. I’m just counting stuff I’ve been within 10 feet of.