As a trainee mortician, Lauren Frost was used to doing the jobs nobody else wanted to do – but on one freezing-cold night she was sent out on a mission that truly shocked her
Lauren Frost was born into a family used to working with death. But that doesn’t mean she had an easy ride into working as a mortician. In a new video, the mortician explained how she had to do any of the jobs that more senior morticians didn’t feel like doing – and that led to a truly shocking experience.
“Back when I was in mortuary school, I lived above a funeral home owned by one of my uncles,” she explains in a video on her own YouTube channel..
“Mortuary school was about 25 minutes from this funeral home that I lived above. The neighbourhood was not great. It was not ideal. You didn’t go out after dark. But when you’re a broke mortuary student, the phrase ‘free rent’ is like being adopted by Oprah.”
But that free rent came with a downside. She continued: “The tradeoff though was that I did everything. Cleaning buildings, mowing the lawn, helping with visitations, airport transports, I did train transportations… and most importantly, death calls for the medical examiner.”
Lauren and other mortuary students would take it in turns to be on call for any after-hours emergencies. She continued: “That’s what happens when you’re a mortuary student. You take on the grunt work. And that is how I got experience with basically every type of traumatic death you could possibly imagine.” But one of those calls involved a truly experience that few people could have imagined.
The bizarre story started on a bitterly-cold Minnesota night. “This night was brutal,” Lauren recalled. “It was one of those Minnesota nights where the cold doesn’t just exist, it attacks you and hurts your face. Windchill was -30, snow blowing sideways, everything is frozen, including my will to live.”
Technically, it wasn’t even Lauren’s turn to be on-shift, but another student was already busy on another call. But she picked up her phone that evening to hear a desperate plea from her uncle, who said: “Lauren, I’m desperate. I need someone to go on this death call. Please, I’ll pay you extra. Will you go?”
But there was no additional information. Lauren continued: “No name, no date of birth, no information, no next of kin information, literally nothing. Diddly squat. They don’t provide anything. Just the address and the cause of death.”
Nevertheless, Lauren set off into the freezing night, eventually turning onto a narrow country lane choked with snow. She spotted the flickering lights of emergency vehicles in the distance and drove towards them, finding herself outside an isolated cabin in the woods.
“The fire department guided me around the house to where the medical examiner was waiting,” she recalled. The gentleman, the deceased, had been suspended in a way that required multiple trained hands to safely and respectfully cut him down.
She went on: “He was bundled head to toe because of the cold. Boots, snow pants, coat, gloves, ski mask. You could not see one single identifying feature on this man. And the house wasn’t giving anything away either.”
It wasn’t until Lauren had loaded the still tightly-wrapped corpse into the back of her van and checked her phone that the shocking truth began to emerge. She explained: “I got into the driver’s seat and I pull out my phone and I froze. I had dozens and dozens of missed calls. My dad, my mum, my sisters, my uncle, other relatives. It was like a hundred missed phone calls. My stomach dropped.”
Lauren realised that something terrible must have happened. Of all the many missed calls, Lauren decided to return her dad’s call first: “He answered on the first ring with that ‘You need to be sitting down’ voice. My dad says ‘Lauren do you know where you are right now?” When she said she’d been called out on an emergency call, he explained: “Lauren, you are in the driveway of your great uncle’s home.”
In the dark and cold, Lauren had rushed through the job as quickly as possible. It was only then that she took a proper look at the paperwork that things twigged: “There it was, his name at the top of the sheet. I had just picked up, bagged, and tagged my own uncle.”
The dead man’s widow later told Lauren that they were glad it was her that had performed this last service for her great-uncle. She went on: “My aunt walked over and gave me a hug and she whispered, ‘I’m so grateful it was you. Thank you for taking care of him.’
“That moment will stay with me literally forever. My aunt did select my uncle’s funeral home to do the funeral.
“After the autopsy was done, I was the one that went back and picked him up, brought him back to the funeral home. We embalmed him. I dressed him. Got him ready for the funeral. And I got to meet with my aunt and be the one to help her plan the funeral.”
