Todd Harra - Mortuary Confidential - Undertakers Spill the Dirt

I was so used to this almost daily ritual, that sometimes when I lie on my back, to this day, I expect to see my father’s face above mine, the scent of his Old Spice aftershave, his large hands fumbling with my tiny tie.

I could never understand why my mother scolded my father for tying my tie. If she caught my father in the act she would say, “For heaven’s sake, stop it, George!” or, “That’s terrible, George, it’s our son!”

And my father would invariably reply, “What, Mary? It’s the only way I know how to do it on someone else! If you don’t like it, you do it then.”

My mother would then grow silent because she didn’t know how to tie a tie, and the issue would be dropped.

It wasn’t until later in life that I figured out what my mother was talking about.

My father enlisted in the Army at age 18 and served for three years in a graves registry unit before the two bombs were dropped. I can only imagine how horrific his job was as the Allied forces plowed through Europe and he followed in the war machine’s gruesome wake. The job, he told me, gave him compassion for the families of the soldiers he bagged and tagged and then buried under French soil. When the war ended, and he was discharged, he opened up a funeral home in his home state and married my mother. I think helping others deal with death must have been his way of coping with the atrocities he saw during the war.

My father confirmed my theory right before his death in a rare candid conversation. My mother had long since died, and my father lay dying of pancreatic cancer in a nursing home. He told me that he couldn’t stand the fact that “The only thing I could do was collect their tags and properly identify them while their family was about to see a sedan pull up outside their house somewhere in America.”

We talked and reminisced some more. I asked him if he remembered how he used to make me lie down to tie my ties when I was a little boy.

“Yeah, I remember,” he replied.

“Could you really not do it unless I was lying down?” I asked him.

“Hell, no!” he had replied. “I can tie my own tie without lying down. I did it just to get a rise out of your mother!”

“So all those years—”

He cut me off. “Yup, all those years I was just giving your mother a hard time.”

We both had a good laugh.

I tied a Windsor knot in his necktie less than a week after our conversation.

Contributed by a fisherman

People are insatiably curious about the particulars of the business I work in. I still haven’t figured out if it’s the mystery surrounding death or the sheer fact that most people are generally ignorant of the basic workings of the business. I get bombarded with all sorts of crazy questions. When I am with a group of people I don’t know I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut when the subject of work comes up because I know the questions that are going to follow. No, the dead do not sit up; no, I have never seen a dead person move, it’s impossible; and yes, I am a man who can do makeup. Then the stupid ringer question always follows: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

I hate this question because not only do I feel compelled to answer truthfully, but it opens up a whole other line of questioning. I tell people that not only do I believe in ghosts, but I can prove their existence. This floors them…always.

“How can you prove it?” the offended party then asks.

“Well, for starters, my wife refuses to sleep at home alone—”

Thus begins my dissertation on how I know ghosts exist. It’s really simple. Allow me to explain:

My wife and I bought a townhouse in the section of the city that’s undergoing an urban renaissance. It’s a massive old run down Victorian we spent the better part of six months renovating. In the chaos of working on the house it was hard to detect the paranormal activity, but once we moved in, we realized that our house had come with its very own ghost.

Before I moved into our new house I didn’t believe in ghosts; it just wasn’t logical. I work in a business where I am around dead people all day. My thought was, once you were dead, that was it, you were dead, end of story. That changed starting with our first night in our new house.

My wife, Sara, and I were awakened sometime in the middle of the night.

“What time is it?” Sara asked.

“I have no idea, our alarm clocks aren’t working,” I said scratching my head, puzzled.

“Do you hear that?” Sara whispered.

“Yeah, sounds like a party,” I said.

And indeed we could hear music downstairs.

“You think it’s some sort of surprise?” she asked. “It sounds like there are a lot of people in our house.” Sure enough, over the music, the sound of muted laughter, talking, and the clinking of ice in glasses wafted up the stairs.

“Who would have thrown it, especially so late like this?” I fumbled for my watch on the nightstand.

“My parents?” Sara suggested.

I looked at my watch irritably. It read after midnight. “Don’t they realize tomorrow is a work day?”

“I don’t know. They’re random like that.”

“Well, let’s go check out the party.” I sighed and swung the bedroom door open. The light from downstairs filtered up into the upstairs hallway.

Sara put on her robe and followed me.

We went downstairs and found nothing but an empty first floor, all the lights on, and the stereo blaring at near full volume.

I ran over and clicked off the stereo receiver. The silence was deafening.

“You did hear the people, right?” Sara said, standing in the middle of the foyer, looking around, bewildered. I just nodded and began turning off the lights.

“Sonofabitch!” I said when we got upstairs. Our alarm clocks were both glowing their red digits. I fingered the softball bat I had retrieved from the basement, a great sense of unease settling over me.

After that, we were very careful about keeping track of which lights and appliances we turned off. The problem persisted. I wondered if my house experienced weird electrical surges that turned things on. I had an electrician come and look at the wiring. He certified my electrical system to be in perfect working condition and suggested, “Maybe you have a ghost.”

I was beginning to think we did. When my car keys started getting hidden, I was sure.

It seemed our ghost had a sense of humor.

My new morning ritual included searching for my car keys. I always hung them on the hook next to the kitchen door when I got home. Every morning they were gone. They were never hard to find. I just had to look a little. Sara, a high school English teacher, nicknamed our ghost Thaleia after the Greek goddess of comedy. She thought it was funny that Thaleia hid my keys. I was glad she was amused.

“Wouldn’t be so funny if it were happening to you,” I grumbled on more than one occasion as I tore through the house, late for work.

In addition to Thaleia’s little jokes, like turning on the televisions, getting into bed with us, and the occasional smell of potpourri in different rooms of the house, she liked to play bigger tricks on us. The biggest one I can recall was during the summer after we moved into our house. Sara and I were going on a week-long cruise to Bermuda. The morning before we were set to leave, Sara called to me from the guest bedroom. “Dan, did you move my dress?”

“What dress?” I replied, frantically packing all my stuff last minute, my usual M.O.

“The one I wanted to wear on one of the formal nights,” Sara said. “It was white with the big red and black polka dots on it.”

“Never seen it.” I had no idea what she was talking about.