 Look, I'm aware that my job isn't for everyone. Most people wouldn't have the stomach to stick their hands all up in someone else's, but I went along with this profession years ago, for the sole reason that it's a family line sort of deal. While your daddy may have been a landscaper or real estate agent, mine was busying himself performing autopsies and embalming the locals who'd gone a little early. He came home smelling like shit, both literal and metaphorical, and instilled in me from the wee ages that it was expected of me to take over the family business, dreams of being an artist or musician, unacceptable. I had to be the one to take over his job as the town's sole coroner. It was my duty. As the one and only hall air to do as told and perform this predetermined job. There were many fights about the topic in my teen years, but that really isn't all that relevant to this post. All you need to know is that I gave in and did it. When it was my turn to take over, to clear out my father's belongings to replace with my own, I did so with a lot of resentment. That was all ten years ago, eight years of schooling, and then ten years of service at a job I hate. But at the very least, I've come out of it all with interesting stories. Not that I've had anyone to share these strange occurrences with, but that's beside the point. Because I'm here now to test the waters. I've seen the many Ask Reddit threads where people inquire about the stories of those who work close to death. And while I've been tempted to share my own stories in these places, well, chances are that had I shared most of my truly outstanding stories, they wouldn't be widely believed. You see, I live up in a small town in the Canadian Appalachians. Everyone knows one another here, and generally people are quite friendly. There's a majority Native American presence here. After all, this town had originally started off as a tribe of peoples, which over the time of the white European colonizers making their rounds through Canada became a melting pot of different peoples. Not even 1000 people reside here. No one would think that there's not a whole lot of business for me to go to, right? Dead wrong. I get several bodies a week in my office, and never once in my 10 years of work has one of them been a resident of our town. Usually, if a hiker ended up dead in the mountains, maybe from the weather, a tree well or thirst, they'd see if they could be identified from personal effects, and if possible, send them back down to the relevant town to be looked over. This, however, has never once been the case. I've literally never had the body of a local in my office. Sure, people die. It's completely illogical to think that they don't. But for whatever reason, they've most likely all been sent out of town to be taken care of. Some of the weirder states I've received bodies in are, Number 1. All teeth were pulled and scattered around the nearby woods. There was no other physical damage done to the body, nor had any drug been ingested. Number 2. A man from another town at the bottom of the mountain went missing. Only 12 hours later, he was found stuffed into a hollowed out log, looking like he was a year into decomp. Number 3. A man who had no lower body. No scarring. Nothing. I'd like to say it was like a birth defect. But when he was identified, he very clearly had two completely functioning legs in every photo he'd been in for the full 58 years of his life. That's all the story for another day, I think. Instead, I'd like to focus on my first strange out of towner I'd ever received. It was just four days after the practice had become my own when he'd been brought to me. The leaves had just begun to change and Halloween was nearing. It was still pitch blackout and the frosty morning air bitted my skin. The sheriff, a weathered looking white man who'd long surpassed his 50s, had met me at the door to the building. Two paramedics and another officer accompanied him outside a stilled ambulance. Sheriff Williams had held on to his position as chief of police for our frigid little town for over 20 years. And even as he sat in his 60s, he never seemed very keen on relinquishing the title till the day he ended up on my table. That last part didn't come from me. He himself stated so. Personally, I wasn't very interested in embalming the corpse of a family friend. But in the end, there literally wasn't anyone else to do it. Peering over the old man's shoulder as he lumbered up to me, a cigarette hanging loosely between his lips, I looked at the parked vehicle and stated this early, he spat the cigarette but under the moist gravel ground, crushing it up with the toe of his shoe before replying with a long suffering grunt. Yep, found him an hour ago west about a kilometer outside of town down by the little cliff. Looks like the fall was what did him in. He gestured to the others present, a beckoning wave propelling them all into action. They opened the ambulance's door and between the two paramedics and the occasional help of the officer, they carefully lifted the gurney out of the ambulance bay and out of the ground. I held the door open for them as they entered the building and led them through to the morgue. It was just as cold in there as it was outside. At the time, even with so little real life experience with my job, the moment they unzipped that black pack, I knew there was something very, very wrong with the corpse in front of me. There was absolutely no smell. While you may not personally know the smell of a dead long decomposing corpse that's been marinating in stagnant water, you can probably guess it smells absolutely foul. I honestly don't think there's any smell worse than gross old human soup and you can challenge me on that belief. His skin had paled and bloated. His shirt was untucked in riding up his distended gut, the skin holding a strange bluish green hue to it. His eyelids had swollen up, leaving only slivers of the man's discolored eyes to be seen behind them, his tongue bulbous and misshapen, peeking out from behind blue lips, taking on a similar color to his milky eyes. His fingers were sausage like and all in all he looked like an overly full water balloon ready to pop at any given moment. Basically, with that description, I'm trying to say that it was gross and pretty far along with decomposition. I snapped blue gloves over my hands and prodded carefully at the man's clothing, pawing at the pockets or any conceivable place that a form of ID would be located. I found a washed out gum wrapper and a zippo lighter. Neither were going to really tell a whole lot about the guy on my table, aside from that he may have been a smoker, but there were likely hundreds of people in and around town that smoke cigarettes, so it basically opened the door to literally anybody. I pressed my upper teeth into the flesh of my lower lip and watched the body carefully, keeping silent for a couple of minutes before addressing the sheriff. Was there any other clothing there? Bags? Anything tossed into the brush? I ran my latex covered hands along the man's shin, finding that, to my surprise, the bone was entirely intact. There wasn't even so much as a hairline fracture. I felt up the rest of his body, finding that he indeed didn't seem to have a single broken bone. Nah, nothing around there. Just him face down in the creek in the clothes he's wearing. He said, I pressed two thumbs along the sides of his neck, then above the atom's apple, and paused. I pulled his jaw as far open as possible, but his swollen tongue made it impossible to see or reach past it into the throat. Push me the cart, I said to one of the paramedics. There's something hard on his throat. I need to cut it open to remove what it is. I looked across the table to the sheriff, who stood quietly, observing the area my hands hovered over. I'd still been new at the time, I felt reluctant to do something like that without overt prompting, and the sheriff seemed to catch on about it. I'm not the coroner, that's your job. You went to school for it, you think it's necessary, then just go ahead and do it. That was all the prompting I needed, and carefully with a scalpel, I dipped the blade in the skin just below the chin, and slowly slid it down. And still, no smell came from the body as I split him open. I stopped just above the collarbone and discarded the dirty tool. Grey fat clung to my gloved fingers as I dug them into the crevice I'd carved into the cadaver, and slowly, my fingers passed stringy muscle and soft fat. I found my way to the offending thing, blocking the throat. I couldn't quite tell what I was feeling, it wasn't sharp, edges rounded, it was broad and thick. Hey, I need one of you to hold the edges open for me, I can't pull it out. With the aid of the paramedics keeping the skin flaps open, I was slowly able to work the lodged item free, I wasn't too sure what to make of the item in my hands. I looked up from it to the sheriff, checking to see if the same surprise that no doubt colored my face was shared, but he didn't look at all shocked by the discovery. The others didn't seem shocked either. It was a palm-sized leather wallet that I just pulled from the throat of a cadaver. Yeah, I don't think he fell off that cliff, sheriff. I said, he didn't reply. I peeled the thing open to check its contents. The college aged man pictured on the driver's license looked nothing like the remains that sat just a foot away from me. He was a handsome young man. The card said he was from out of state, nowhere near where his body had been found. Even now, 10 years later, I don't know how or why he was there, but I'd like to hope he was just a tourist, that nothing else was behind how far he'd ended up from home. I placed the wallet on the side just in front of the sheriff, leaning my palms onto the table, smearing fluids across the fang as I did. I already knew that there'd be a big mess to clean after this, though I'd never been so grateful that the responsibility didn't fall on me. I'll be honest, with this level of decomp, I doubt I'll be able to pinpoint the exact cause. I do know that he definitely didn't die from a fall. I said, my eyes flickered between the wallet and the sheriff. Though personal opinion, I think that the whole throat wallet fang probably had something to do with his death. I said, all right, well, what do we do? Decide he wanted a taste of his wallet? The sheriff asked. I raised a brow at him. People tend not to do stuff like that. I think that someone else may have put it there. I said, but you won't be able to say for sure. He replied, I mean, yeah, technically I can't look. People don't get murdered around here. There's nobody running around shoving wallets down people's throats. He said, you'll see weird shit like this plenty work in this profession. Don't think too hard on it. It ain't a threat to you. If you ain't a threat to it, you understand me. When I didn't answer right away, he simply waited. After a couple of long seconds, I reluctantly agreed with him. He looked at me hard, analyzing every crevice of my face before seeming to be satisfied. He stepped away, nodding slightly, all right, you fix this fella up, all right, I'll track down his family and I'll tell him the bad news. How long you think until you can say you finished embalming this guy? He said, usually two hours, but this guy is in a bad state. So only God knows how long until he's cleaned up enough. I said, I tossed my gloves into a waste bag and stepped up alongside him. The paramedics left, taking some sort of cue that neither of us had sent out. I'll call you when he's ready though. Yeah, yeah, you do that. He replied briefly. He looked as though he wanted to add to what he said. But after staring at me, lips slightly parted, ready to speak in any moment, he pressed them into a thin line and made for the door. I'll talk to you later. Keep what I said in mind. Work in this job, you'll need it. And for years I followed that advice, I ignored the weird, wrote off the bizarre deaths and strange cadavers that ended up on my table and it worked out for me. I did my job and life was good. Turns out, though, that when the dead body that ends up on your table sits up and screams, well, all that previous advice of ignoring the weird stuff, it gets a hell of a lot more difficult. If there's enough interest in my stories, I'll continue with this little retelling of my top 10 weirdest hits, but I can't continue at the moment. My guest just woke up from unconsciousness and I need to figure out what to do with him.