November 9, 2025 • 29 mins
Listen to Mayhem in the Morgue on all podcast platforms: https://link.podtrac.com/MayhemMorgue
Content Warning: This episode contains disturbing descriptions of the death of an individual. If you’re sensitive to this topic, this episode may not be for you.
In the stillness of dawn at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, a baby’s cry echoes through the halls, breaking the silence of the morgue. In this special Halloween episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns shares eerie encounters from his forensic pathology career that defy explanation. From the spectral Lady in Red who visits dying patients to a gruesome Halloween murder displayed on a suburban porch, these stories teeter on the edge of science and the supernatural.
Highlights
- (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
- (0:30) The morgue on Halloween: no ghosts, no portals, just an ordinary workday
- (2:30) Sounds of a baby crying in the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office and a haunting coincidence
- (4:45) Linda Turner’s story: a dying patient’s wise advice for a young Dr. Crowns
- (12:45) Lady in Red, a spectral figure said to visit dying hospital patients
- (18:00) The Halloween homicide: a son, his mother, and a gruesome porch display
- (27:00) A Halloween “scary story” assignment takes an unexpected turn when the teacher learns it’s real
About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns
Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.
About the Show
Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations.
Connect and Learn More
Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin. Catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode includes a graphic and horrific story about the
death of an individual. If this sort of thing upsets you,
this is definitely not the episode for you. Well to
Mayhem the More with your host, Doctor Kinder Crowns. Today's
(00:23):
episode ghost Stories. Happy Halloween for Mayhem and the Morgue.
People think that something special happens at the Morgue on
this day, but sadly, nothing really ever does. The dead
don't rise up from their body bags, portals to Hell
don't open up in the bathrooms, and there are no
ghostly voices crying out from the cooler. All in all,
(00:44):
it's just like any other day. Nothing special. Maybe someone
dies in a costume, but beyond that, it's the same,
the same as it ever was. Today for Halloween, I'm
going to talk about a few ghostly encounters that I
have had and one gruesome Halloween story. I am not
one for ghosts. I do enjoy haunted houses, though, but
(01:07):
that's different because it's not real and they can't touch
you actually find the paranormals something that I stay away from.
My brother used to scare me as a child with
stories about the Amityville Horror and the Exorcist shows like
Ghost Hunters and Destination Fear will keep me up at night,
so I avoid them. I try not to get involved
(01:28):
in the debate about ghosts, whether they're real or not real,
but sometimes, no matter what I do, you just can't
skirt the issue. At the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office
in Chicago, Illinois, the topic would occasionally come up and
we would get into a debate about the office being haunted.
I would always say that people don't die here, so
(01:50):
why would they haunt a morgue. The very element of
ghost stories is the person haunts the place they died at.
I have stayed at haunted places like the Stanley Hotel
in Boulder, Colorado, but those places at least someone had
been murdered there or died and that's why they were haunted.
But no one dies at the more. My coworkers would
(02:11):
always argue back, oh, no, there's ghost here, this place
is haunted, but they never had any proof. There's no
blood coming from the walls, lights flickering for no reason,
and no small children saying they are here. And again,
I never saw ghosts there, except this one time where
I had a very eerie experience early in the morning
(02:34):
I used to have to take the train from the
suburbs where I lived into the city, and then I
would walk from the train station to the L and
take the L to get close to where I worked.
My daily commute would start around four am. Sometimes when
I would get to the office, I would be exhausted,
especially in the wintertime, and I would take a nap
(02:55):
by rolling up my jacket and laying down on the
floor and using the jacket as a pillow. One time,
when I was napping on the floor in this manner,
I started hearing this weird, echoey baby cry somewhere off
in the distance. I couldn't figure out where it was
coming from. My office was on the second floor of
the medical Examiner's office, and when I came down to
(03:15):
the morgue that day to start doing autopsies, I found
out there were three dead babies in the cooler waiting
to be autopsied. I told one of my coworkers, wow,
I heard a baby crying earlier when I was upstairs.
And they said, see, this place is haunted, and now
you've experienced it. There's no denying it. Now it's just
(03:36):
like a graveyard. And I again argued, I didn't know
exactly what I had heard, and I had been asleep,
so who knows. I thought it might be a baby crying,
but again, the baby didn't die here. I thought it
was ridiculous. I believe the story goes that ghosts haunt
graveyards because that's where their body is, and their spirit
(03:57):
stays close to their body, and so again, the medical
examiner's office is just the way station to the afterlife
because their body is only there temporarily before its shipped
to the next place. I did not think the crying
baby was a ghost. I've thought about this over the years,
trying to explain what I heard, and my best theory
(04:18):
is is I had an infant son at the house
at that time. He didn't like to sleep through the night.
My wife and I were constantly tired from always being awake,
and maybe I was just so tired that I thought
I was hearing crying because that's all I ever heard
at night at home. And it wasn't anything at all.
It was just a dream because I was so sleepy.
(04:38):
Who knows, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a ghost.
People say ghosts haunt places for a number of reasons.
It may have been a place that they frequented or
had meaning to them. It may have been a place
where they spent most of their lives, or it might
have been a place where they died suddenly or unexpectedly.
One thing is a hospital can be one of those places,
(04:58):
and one of the hospitals I worked at was believed
to be haunted. When I began my third year medical school,
my first rotation was in surgery. I spent two months
being assigned patients that I would take care of, see
their surgeries and help them recover. The last patient I
was assigned before I finished my rotation was a patient
(05:19):
by the name of Linda Turner. She had been admitted
to the hospital for abdominal swelling over a short period
of time. When I came in to evaluate her, she
was a fifty four year old woman with short black
hair and brown eyes. She was incredibly nice, smiling and pleasant.
Her abdomen was markedly swollen, and she said it made
(05:39):
her look like she was pregnant, and she told me
that ain't a possibility for me anymore. And when I
looked at her abdomen, it was very swollen. She was
a thin woman, and it looked like she had swallowed
a small beach ball. The overlying skin was stretched tight
and when I palpated, her abdomen as hard as a rock,
(06:01):
which is a major red flag. I told the findings
to my surgery attending and he had me order some
tests and a CT scan, and he had missus Turner
admit it. It took a few days to get her
into the CT scanner, and every day I would come
by to see how she was doing. She would always
be awake in the morning and would want to talk
a little while. She was kind and funny. We would
(06:25):
talk about her travels, her daughters, game shows, and just
how bad the hospital food was. I would also come
by in the afternoon to check on her before I
went home for the day. She would be tired and
probably in pain, but she always had a smile and
always enjoyed talking. The abdominal swelling and pain that she
was experiencing was quite concerning because she had had pancreatic
(06:49):
cancer in the past, and they had taken out most
of her pancreas some part of her intestines. She had
had chemotherapy and radiation, and they thought she was in remission.
The celebration for having beaten the cancer, Linda decided to
do some traveling that she had always wanted to do,
but after several months, she noticed that her abdomen was
beginning to swell. She figured it was bad spent a
(07:13):
few more months doing what she wanted to do before
she came into the hospital. When we finally got the
CT scan, it did show there was a return of
her cancer in the mesenteric fat, which is a fat
around the intestines, but this was the nineties, so it
wasn't definitive. It was decided by the surgeon to do
an exploratory surgery and see how bad the cancer was.
(07:35):
By the time the surgery was scheduled, it had been
about a week in total since she had been admitted,
and I had really gotten to know Linda and I
really liked her. On the day of her surgery, I
met with her beforehand, and as always, she was positive
and upbeat. She said to me, I beat it once
and I'll beat it again, and I agreed. I got
(07:56):
to be part of the surgery, but as a medical student,
my job was to reach track the incision with a
big curved blade retractor and stand there and watch. When
I walked into the operating room, Linda was draped and
had her eyes taped shut. She didn't actually look real
to me at that moment. The surgeon began the surgery
and made an incision through her abdomen and told me
(08:18):
to retract it open. I dutifully put my retractor into
the incision and pulled it open. And when I did that,
you could see it. The gray white nodules of cancer
were everywhere, infiltrating the soft tissue, the intestinal wall, the liver,
the limp notes. There was nothing that could be done.
(08:39):
The surgeon evaluated it and he said, there's nothing we
can do. It's too far. And they closed the incision
and she was sent to recovery. It was a little
late in the afternoon by this time, and I didn't
stay around until she woke up, which I regret still
to this day. I was sad that Linda, my friend,
(09:00):
could not be saved. The next morning, I came into
her hospital room to do my morning rounds. When Linda
saw me, she had a big smile on her face
and she said, hey, hey, hey, doctor k what did
they find? And I looked at her and I said,
did no one discuss anything with you? And she said, nope.
By the time I woke up, everybody was gone except
(09:22):
the nurses, and nobody had any information for me. Probably
the reality of this is the surgeon had talked to her,
but she was probably still groggy and just didn't remember,
and her family members that were there were not in
the room at the present time. She continued on, saying,
you're the first one i've seen, so what's going on?
And I said to her, it's probably best if the
(09:45):
doctor or one of the residents talk it over with you.
And she said, now, come on, Kendall, we've known each
other for a little while. Now tell me what's going on.
It's bad, isn't it. At that moment, I started crying
because I didn't know what to say. I had never
told anyone they were going to die. I said to her,
I'm just a student and it's not my place to
(10:07):
talk about it. And I just sat there crying, and
she said, you know, if you're crying, it's obviously really bad.
And I finally was able to say, well it is.
They couldn't do anything for you. Your cancer's too far.
Linda pushed a box of tissues over to me that
(10:27):
was on her bedside, table and said, Okay, get yourself
cleaned up, and then she said, I guess that's just
how it goes. We sat there for a few minutes
while I calmed down, and then Linda said to me,
very calmly and matter of factly, you know you're going
to have to learn how to toughen up, because if
you want to be a doctor, you can't get upset
(10:48):
just because someone's dying. That's just part of your job,
and you have to be able to tell them straight
without getting emotional about it. You have to figure out
how to lock it away. I always look back at
that moment and it's sad that this person with terminal
cancer was telling me to be tough. It should have
been the other way around. Linda never got to go home.
(11:11):
She continued to be my patient for the rest of
my surgery rotation and always continued to maintain her upbeat
attitude even though the inevitable was looming near at hand.
She was eventually moved to the fifth floor on the
east side of the hospital, to a corner room where
they put cancer patients who were terminal but weren't problematic.
(11:33):
It had large windows that looked out into the parking
lot that I was very familiar with because a few
years earlier I had pushed a dead body across it,
and I could see the morgue where I worked when
I was an autopsy technician before medical school. I would
sit and talk to Linda, staring out this window and
staring at that morgue, trying not to think about her dying.
(11:54):
One morning, I walked into the room. It was my
last day of my surgery rotation, and I was not
dressed in scrub on that day, but I was dressed
in dress clothes and a tie. When Linda saw me,
she said to me, my, mo, My, aren't you fancy
to day? Doctor? K what's the occasion? I know you
didn't get dressed up just for little old me. I
(12:14):
told her that I had oral exams that afternoon and
today was my last day at my surgery rotation, and
she would no longer be my patient, but I would
still come by and see her. Her response to this was, well,
I hope you do well on your examinations, and I'm
glad you're going to still come back by and see me,
but I will miss you as being my doctor. And
(12:36):
then she said, but I've got something to tell you, Kendall.
It was this weird, fancy woman wearing a red silk bathrobe,
red shoes, and a red bow in her hair. She
walked through my room, stood at the foot of my
bed and looked at me and said something. And then
she went into the bathroom and she never came out.
(12:56):
And she said while the woman in red was in
her room, the room got cold. I said to Linda,
that's really strange. And then Linda said, yes, I think
she's still in there. Can you check? And I thought
to myself, well, this is incredibly odd. I went into
the bathroom and I looked. There was no one in there.
And Linda said, did you check the shower. I bet
(13:17):
she's in the shower. And I looked in the shower
and again nobody was to be found. Linda said, that's
so strange. I never saw her leave. We talked a
little bit longer, we said our usual goodbyes, and I
headed to the nurses station to do my charting. I
said to the nurses, you know, it's bizarre. But Linda
saw some woman in red walked through her room, stopped
(13:40):
at the foot of her bed, and went into the bathroom.
But there's no one there. Did she have visitors last night?
The nurses looked at each other and one of them said, oh,
she seen the lady in red. And I said, well,
who's the lady in red? And the other nurse said,
she's the harbinger of death. She haunts this floora hospital,
(14:00):
and every patient who sees her will die shortly thereafter.
It's only a matter of time now for her. Wow.
I finished filling out my chart and found my attending.
I told him how Linda was doing, and then I said, oh,
and by the way, she said she saw some lady
in red last night. The surgery attending said, oh, she's
(14:24):
seen the lady in red. Well, we're not going to
have to worry about her much longer. And at that
point I tried to get information about who the lady
in red was and why she was a harbinger of
death for this floor of the hospital. I asked several people, nurses, doctors, janitors, librarians,
(14:44):
even the nuns, but no one really knew the origin
of her story. It's just she always was on that
floor as long as anyone could remember, haunting it, haunting
the patients that were near death. I found out that
the hospital had been built in eighteen eighty nine, and
there was no deaths associated with the hospital's construction, nor
(15:05):
had there been any mysterious deaths or murders that occurred
in the hospital. And in all the time that people
could remember, the story of the Lady in Red had
just been lost to time, and there was no explanation
of why she haunted that particular floor or chose the
patients that she would appear to. The next day, I
started my dreaded obstetric's rotation, and on my first day,
(15:28):
I was put on twenty four hour call. I had
to be part of a very eventful berth that I'll
talk about in another episode. But later on in that day,
I had a free moment and I wandered over to
the surgery floor to go see Linda and to check
up on her. She wasn't my patient anymore, but that
didn't matter. She was my friend and I wanted to
see how she was doing. When I got to her room,
(15:51):
she was on a ventilator and unresponsive. This was incredibly
upsetting to me. I went to the nurses station and
I asked what had happened. Versus said that at around
midnight she had gone into a coma and had to
be intubated. When the doctors had reached out to family
to get a final opinion on what to do, but
the nurses said, no matter what happens, it's only a
(16:13):
matter of time now. The next day I went by
to check up on her, and when I was walking
by the nurses station, they stopped me and they told
me that Linda had died the evening before. Once again,
the woman in red had claimed another victim. And that's
the end of that story. Except one thing was I
always kept my patient's information on little note cards that
(16:36):
I kept in the breast pocket of my white coat.
I carried Linda's card with me throughout the rest of
medical school and then throughout all of residency. And when
I got done, I took that white coat off and
never put it on again. I packed it up and
it's somewhere in the attic still, probably with Linda's card
in it. I've never forgotten her. She was one of
(16:58):
my most favorite patients and still brings me great sadness
to think about her. But I took her advice to heart,
and I have always tried to keep my emotions out
of my work. But let's move on. This is Halloween,
after all, we need something less sad but far more creepy.
Every forensic pathologist has their favorite story to tell, and some,
(17:20):
like myself, have favorites from different categories, including holidays. So
with Halloween looming on the horizon, well in the show
with a far more Halloween centered creepy story. This story
is a mine, though it's from one of my long
since dead mentors. He shared this story with me because
he was excited about a case that I had had.
(17:43):
He had had something very similar, almost exactly the same,
but his case had occurred on Halloween. My actual most
creepy story is far too upsetting for any media. It's
something that I'll probably never be able to share because
it's just too out there to be believed. Maybe one
day I'll put it in a book or something, But
(18:04):
for now, we're going to discuss this case, which occurred
in a suburb of a large southern city. It was
Halloween and the neighborhood was in full spooky moat. Pumpkins, monsters,
and skeletons were on full display. This was in the eighties,
so there was less hyper realistic gore available to decorate
with no zombie babies or glowing red eyed animatronics, but
(18:27):
some people still made an attempt to make it scary.
It was nighttime and the street lights had turned on.
Kids were out trigg or treating, dressed in costumes of monsters,
movie stars, and other assorted characters. Homes handing out candy
were lit with porch lights and cheerful, glowing pumpkins sitting
on hay bales, And of course there is always one
(18:49):
house with a take one candy bull that is emptied
by the first marauding trick or treat probably dressed as
a pirate. Some of the homeowners sat on the porch
or in their driveway, hanging out with neighbors or sitting
with their spouses greeting trick or treaters with a jovial,
happy Halloween. The neighborhood was alive with festive Halloween spirit
and fun. But there was one house at the end
(19:10):
of the street that was a little different. It was
not as well maintained as the other homes in the neighborhood.
The flower beds had weeds, and the yard had patchy,
dry areas of grass and dead spots with dirt. The
only porch light flickered in the darkness, creating a slight
strobing effect. The owner of the home was an elderly
woman who had lived in the neighborhood for decades and
(19:33):
was well known and well liked by her neighbors. She
was a widow, with her husband having died years ago.
Her middle aged son still lived with her. He had
lived there his entire life. To anyone's recollection, he had
never left the area. He didn't drive. They knew he
worked somewhere around town, but they weren't sure. He was
(19:53):
a little odd, but pleasant. There was never any trouble
with him. He always was benign and kept to himself.
On this Halloween night, he sat in the strobing light
of the porch in his grandmother's old wood rocking chair.
He was a big guy. He was six foot two,
about three hundred pounds, with a tight, flat top hair cut.
(20:14):
He stared out intensely into the night, rocking slowly back
and forth, waiting for trick or treaters. He had two
small tables on either side of him. One had a
ceramic bowl full of Candy Reese's peanut butter cups, baby roosts,
and blow pops. The other table had a prominent Halloween
decoration on it. The star of the show, so to say.
(20:36):
Most kids were too spooked to go up to get candy,
but the braver kids would walk up. They would excitedly
say trick or treat and he would reach into the
bowl and hand out candy, saying Happy Halloween. The kids
and adults would compliment him on his minimal list but
still creepy costume and decorations, and when they asked who
he was dressed ass, he would respond slightly confused and
(21:00):
say me. His costume consisted of a rumpled white T shirt,
blue denim pants, and black boots. The shirt had wide
bloodstains across the abdomen, and the pants and boots had
blood spatters all over them. He had blood on the
side of his face, extending from his forehead across the
side of his cheek. He also had blood on his
(21:21):
forearms and kaking his hands. There were bloody footprints leading
from the house to where he sat. He really put
effort into making it look creepy and it was quite
gory and very realistic. His white candy bowl had bloody
fingerprints on it, and the candy wrappers were also stained
with droplets of blood. One adult said, you've really gone
(21:43):
all out with that fake blood. Don't leave it on
too long, though, because he might get a rash. His
response was just a creepy smile. People also complimented him
on his very real looking decoration sitting on the other
table next to him. When one child went to touch it,
he blocked them and said, oh, don't do that. She
(22:03):
wouldn't like that. What was this decoration? The decoration was
that of a human head, long gray hair, the eyes
and mouth clothes, and there were still earrings in the ears.
The head had a waxy look to it, but overall
it looked incredibly realistic. It had a lot of fake
blood on it, in the hair and along the stump
(22:26):
of the neck, so much so that it was oozing
down the side of the table. A couple of the
adults that had ventured up onto the patio asked what
he sculpted it, out, of which he calmly replied yes.
After a while, a group of neighborhood kids came to
retrieve their candy from him. They had a couple of
moms keeping track of them. I don't know what the
(22:47):
kid's costumes were, but I always like to think they
were dressed as smurfs, because it just makes it a
little bit more absurd. The moms followed the kids up
on the porch, and when the kids were getting their candy,
one of the moms looked at the decoration in the
stroping light and gasped. She turned to the other mom
and said, oh my, that's Carol, which is not her
(23:10):
actual name, because I don't really know what it was.
The other mom quickly recognized the hat as Carol, the
woman of the house, the mom of the man handing
out the candy. The kids had gotten their candy and
were complaining about the sticky blood on the wrappers, but
they quickly took off to the next house to get
more candy. The two moms quickly followed after them, while
(23:32):
the man continued to sit in the rocking chair waiting
for the next group of kids. The moms quickly hearded
the group of children to the area where several of
the neighbors had set up a table to hand out candy.
The kids were complaining because they wanted to continue on,
but the moms told them to be quiet, and they
gathered the group of neighbors and told them what they saw,
(23:53):
to which several people didn't believe it. They debated, should
others go check, should they make sure it was really
a human head? Should they make sure it's Carol or
is it someone else? Because you know, they hadn't seen
Mike all evening. Should they just confront him in unlike
a horror movie? One of the more reasonable neighbors said,
forget that, let's call the police, and that's what they did.
(24:15):
And when the police arrived, they walked up to the
man still sitting in the rocker and they said to him,
good evening, sir, that's a nice Halloween decoration you have there,
to which the man said, well, thank you. And then
one of the officers said where did you get it from?
And the man said, oh, that's my mom. The officers
(24:35):
were taken aback by that, and one said, okay, what
happened to her? And the man said, I killed her
and then I cut off her head. The officers were
startled and paused and said, okay, are we going to
have any trouble here? Where's the rest of her? And
the man said, I won't be any trouble at all, sir.
I don't want to be I don't want to create problems. Oh,
(24:57):
and the rest of her, Well, it's in the house,
laying on the floor. I can take you there and
show you if you'd like. The officers said, well, yes,
let's go see her. And he stood up and the
officers stood on either side of him, and he led
them into the house, and sure enough, there was the
rest of the man's mom laying on the floor of
(25:18):
the foyer with about twenty to thirty stab wounds and
a large kitchen knife protruding from her back, and her
head had been completely cut off. There was blood all
over the floor around her and on the walls, and
it had been obviously walked through at some point. When
they cuffed him and were putting him in the police car,
they asked him why did he murder his mother, and
(25:40):
he said, well, you know, he needed to do that
because he thought she was possessed by the devil, or
maybe aliens, or possibly the CIA. He wasn't sure, but
she was definitely possessed. And they took him downtown where
he was processed. He had fully admitted to what he
had done. He had obviously mental problems, and he was
(26:01):
put away in a mental health facility for the rest
of his life to my knowledge, and when he was
asked why he put his mom's head on the table,
he said, well, she would like to see all the costumes,
because you know, she really loved Halloween and loved being
part of the festivities, and he didn't want to deny
her of that. I mean, of course, that makes complete sense.
(26:24):
There's one more thing about this case, and that is
my oldest daughter used the story for her eighth grade
theater arts class. The assignment was to write a short
scary play based on their own story for Halloween. She
came home and asked if I had any good scary stories.
I provided her was too this case. In another case
(26:47):
about a taco expedition that went horribly wrong, which I
will talk about in a future episode. Of course, this
story was by far the creepiest one, and she created
a play based on it. She was sick of fake
stories and wanted something real that people should be afraid of.
When she presented it to her class, she did a
(27:07):
one girl version of the story, acting out the parts,
using a ruler for a knife and re enacting the
decapitation using a ball falling to the floor. She closed
the story with a chilling and it's true. The teacher
stood silent, blinking. None of the kids spoke. It was
dead silent. The teacher broke the silence and said, that's
(27:31):
a true story, to which my daughter said, yes, yes
it is. My dad told me this one. The kids
in her class knew me because of my career day talks,
so they knew it wasn't fake. And one of the
kids in the class said, I think I'm going to
be sick. The teacher said to her, well, wow, that's
just too intense for middle school, really high school, probably
(27:54):
even college. I think we better go with something else.
And it ended up they decided to go with a
play based on the urban legend of the Licked Hand.
And if you don't know what that one is, it's
a story about a girl home alone for the first
time with only her dog as company. She hears news
about some random serial killer being on the loose in
(28:14):
the neighborhood and of course locks all the doors, but
forgets to lock one window in the basement. She goes
to bed with her trusted dog in the room, sleeping
underneath the bed. She of course wakes up in the
middle of the night because she keeps hearing this dripping
sound coming from the bathroom, but she's too afraid to
check on it, and she reaches down to pet the
dog and gets a reassuring lick from the dog on
(28:37):
her hand. The next day, when she gets up, she
walks into the bathroom and finds the dog dead and mutilated,
hanging in the shower, with a message written in the
dog's blood on the wall saying humans can look too
and that's the end of the story. My daughter feels
still to this day that her story was far superior.
I mean, seriously, a true story about a beheaded woman,
(28:59):
bloody Halloween candy is far more creepy and chilling than
some fake serial killer and why would you lick your hand?
My daughter also felt that story was pathetic because she
hates anything in which a dog gets hurt or dies.
People is one thing, but pets is just too far.
(29:23):
And that brings us to the end of the episode.
I hope you learned something like you never trust your neighbors,
and I hope you were entertained, and finally, once again,
Happy Halloween from Mayhem and the Morgue Until the next time.
Today's episode includes a graphic and horrific story about the
death of an individual. If this sort of thing upsets you,
this is definitely not the episode for you. Well to
Mayhem the More with your host, Doctor Kinder Crowns. Today's
(00:23):
episode ghost Stories. Happy Halloween for Mayhem and the Morgue.
People think that something special happens at the Morgue on
this day, but sadly, nothing really ever does. The dead
don't rise up from their body bags, portals to Hell
don't open up in the bathrooms, and there are no
ghostly voices crying out from the cooler. All in all,
(00:44):
it's just like any other day. Nothing special. Maybe someone
dies in a costume, but beyond that, it's the same,
the same as it ever was. Today for Halloween, I'm
going to talk about a few ghostly encounters that I
have had and one gruesome Halloween story. I am not
one for ghosts. I do enjoy haunted houses, though, but
(01:07):
that's different because it's not real and they can't touch
you actually find the paranormals something that I stay away from.
My brother used to scare me as a child with
stories about the Amityville Horror and the Exorcist shows like
Ghost Hunters and Destination Fear will keep me up at night,
so I avoid them. I try not to get involved
(01:28):
in the debate about ghosts, whether they're real or not real,
but sometimes, no matter what I do, you just can't
skirt the issue. At the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office
in Chicago, Illinois, the topic would occasionally come up and
we would get into a debate about the office being haunted.
I would always say that people don't die here, so
(01:50):
why would they haunt a morgue. The very element of
ghost stories is the person haunts the place they died at.
I have stayed at haunted places like the Stanley Hotel
in Boulder, Colorado, but those places at least someone had
been murdered there or died and that's why they were haunted.
But no one dies at the more. My coworkers would
(02:11):
always argue back, oh, no, there's ghost here, this place
is haunted, but they never had any proof. There's no
blood coming from the walls, lights flickering for no reason,
and no small children saying they are here. And again,
I never saw ghosts there, except this one time where
I had a very eerie experience early in the morning
(02:34):
I used to have to take the train from the
suburbs where I lived into the city, and then I
would walk from the train station to the L and
take the L to get close to where I worked.
My daily commute would start around four am. Sometimes when
I would get to the office, I would be exhausted,
especially in the wintertime, and I would take a nap
(02:55):
by rolling up my jacket and laying down on the
floor and using the jacket as a pillow. One time,
when I was napping on the floor in this manner,
I started hearing this weird, echoey baby cry somewhere off
in the distance. I couldn't figure out where it was
coming from. My office was on the second floor of
the medical Examiner's office, and when I came down to
(03:15):
the morgue that day to start doing autopsies, I found
out there were three dead babies in the cooler waiting
to be autopsied. I told one of my coworkers, wow,
I heard a baby crying earlier when I was upstairs.
And they said, see, this place is haunted, and now
you've experienced it. There's no denying it. Now it's just
(03:36):
like a graveyard. And I again argued, I didn't know
exactly what I had heard, and I had been asleep,
so who knows. I thought it might be a baby crying,
but again, the baby didn't die here. I thought it
was ridiculous. I believe the story goes that ghosts haunt
graveyards because that's where their body is, and their spirit
(03:57):
stays close to their body, and so again, the medical
examiner's office is just the way station to the afterlife
because their body is only there temporarily before its shipped
to the next place. I did not think the crying
baby was a ghost. I've thought about this over the years,
trying to explain what I heard, and my best theory
(04:18):
is is I had an infant son at the house
at that time. He didn't like to sleep through the night.
My wife and I were constantly tired from always being awake,
and maybe I was just so tired that I thought
I was hearing crying because that's all I ever heard
at night at home. And it wasn't anything at all.
It was just a dream because I was so sleepy.
(04:38):
Who knows, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a ghost.
People say ghosts haunt places for a number of reasons.
It may have been a place that they frequented or
had meaning to them. It may have been a place
where they spent most of their lives, or it might
have been a place where they died suddenly or unexpectedly.
One thing is a hospital can be one of those places,
(04:58):
and one of the hospitals I worked at was believed
to be haunted. When I began my third year medical school,
my first rotation was in surgery. I spent two months
being assigned patients that I would take care of, see
their surgeries and help them recover. The last patient I
was assigned before I finished my rotation was a patient
(05:19):
by the name of Linda Turner. She had been admitted
to the hospital for abdominal swelling over a short period
of time. When I came in to evaluate her, she
was a fifty four year old woman with short black
hair and brown eyes. She was incredibly nice, smiling and pleasant.
Her abdomen was markedly swollen, and she said it made
(05:39):
her look like she was pregnant, and she told me
that ain't a possibility for me anymore. And when I
looked at her abdomen, it was very swollen. She was
a thin woman, and it looked like she had swallowed
a small beach ball. The overlying skin was stretched tight
and when I palpated, her abdomen as hard as a rock,
(06:01):
which is a major red flag. I told the findings
to my surgery attending and he had me order some
tests and a CT scan, and he had missus Turner
admit it. It took a few days to get her
into the CT scanner, and every day I would come
by to see how she was doing. She would always
be awake in the morning and would want to talk
a little while. She was kind and funny. We would
(06:25):
talk about her travels, her daughters, game shows, and just
how bad the hospital food was. I would also come
by in the afternoon to check on her before I
went home for the day. She would be tired and
probably in pain, but she always had a smile and
always enjoyed talking. The abdominal swelling and pain that she
was experiencing was quite concerning because she had had pancreatic
(06:49):
cancer in the past, and they had taken out most
of her pancreas some part of her intestines. She had
had chemotherapy and radiation, and they thought she was in remission.
The celebration for having beaten the cancer, Linda decided to
do some traveling that she had always wanted to do,
but after several months, she noticed that her abdomen was
beginning to swell. She figured it was bad spent a
(07:13):
few more months doing what she wanted to do before
she came into the hospital. When we finally got the
CT scan, it did show there was a return of
her cancer in the mesenteric fat, which is a fat
around the intestines, but this was the nineties, so it
wasn't definitive. It was decided by the surgeon to do
an exploratory surgery and see how bad the cancer was.
(07:35):
By the time the surgery was scheduled, it had been
about a week in total since she had been admitted,
and I had really gotten to know Linda and I
really liked her. On the day of her surgery, I
met with her beforehand, and as always, she was positive
and upbeat. She said to me, I beat it once
and I'll beat it again, and I agreed. I got
(07:56):
to be part of the surgery, but as a medical student,
my job was to reach track the incision with a
big curved blade retractor and stand there and watch. When
I walked into the operating room, Linda was draped and
had her eyes taped shut. She didn't actually look real
to me at that moment. The surgeon began the surgery
and made an incision through her abdomen and told me
(08:18):
to retract it open. I dutifully put my retractor into
the incision and pulled it open. And when I did that,
you could see it. The gray white nodules of cancer
were everywhere, infiltrating the soft tissue, the intestinal wall, the liver,
the limp notes. There was nothing that could be done.
(08:39):
The surgeon evaluated it and he said, there's nothing we
can do. It's too far. And they closed the incision
and she was sent to recovery. It was a little
late in the afternoon by this time, and I didn't
stay around until she woke up, which I regret still
to this day. I was sad that Linda, my friend,
(09:00):
could not be saved. The next morning, I came into
her hospital room to do my morning rounds. When Linda
saw me, she had a big smile on her face
and she said, hey, hey, hey, doctor k what did
they find? And I looked at her and I said,
did no one discuss anything with you? And she said, nope.
By the time I woke up, everybody was gone except
(09:22):
the nurses, and nobody had any information for me. Probably
the reality of this is the surgeon had talked to her,
but she was probably still groggy and just didn't remember,
and her family members that were there were not in
the room at the present time. She continued on, saying,
you're the first one i've seen, so what's going on?
And I said to her, it's probably best if the
(09:45):
doctor or one of the residents talk it over with you.
And she said, now, come on, Kendall, we've known each
other for a little while. Now tell me what's going on.
It's bad, isn't it. At that moment, I started crying
because I didn't know what to say. I had never
told anyone they were going to die. I said to her,
I'm just a student and it's not my place to
(10:07):
talk about it. And I just sat there crying, and
she said, you know, if you're crying, it's obviously really bad.
And I finally was able to say, well it is.
They couldn't do anything for you. Your cancer's too far.
Linda pushed a box of tissues over to me that
(10:27):
was on her bedside, table and said, Okay, get yourself
cleaned up, and then she said, I guess that's just
how it goes. We sat there for a few minutes
while I calmed down, and then Linda said to me,
very calmly and matter of factly, you know you're going
to have to learn how to toughen up, because if
you want to be a doctor, you can't get upset
(10:48):
just because someone's dying. That's just part of your job,
and you have to be able to tell them straight
without getting emotional about it. You have to figure out
how to lock it away. I always look back at
that moment and it's sad that this person with terminal
cancer was telling me to be tough. It should have
been the other way around. Linda never got to go home.
(11:11):
She continued to be my patient for the rest of
my surgery rotation and always continued to maintain her upbeat
attitude even though the inevitable was looming near at hand.
She was eventually moved to the fifth floor on the
east side of the hospital, to a corner room where
they put cancer patients who were terminal but weren't problematic.
(11:33):
It had large windows that looked out into the parking
lot that I was very familiar with because a few
years earlier I had pushed a dead body across it,
and I could see the morgue where I worked when
I was an autopsy technician before medical school. I would
sit and talk to Linda, staring out this window and
staring at that morgue, trying not to think about her dying.
(11:54):
One morning, I walked into the room. It was my
last day of my surgery rotation, and I was not
dressed in scrub on that day, but I was dressed
in dress clothes and a tie. When Linda saw me,
she said to me, my, mo, My, aren't you fancy
to day? Doctor? K what's the occasion? I know you
didn't get dressed up just for little old me. I
(12:14):
told her that I had oral exams that afternoon and
today was my last day at my surgery rotation, and
she would no longer be my patient, but I would
still come by and see her. Her response to this was, well,
I hope you do well on your examinations, and I'm
glad you're going to still come back by and see me,
but I will miss you as being my doctor. And
(12:36):
then she said, but I've got something to tell you, Kendall.
It was this weird, fancy woman wearing a red silk bathrobe,
red shoes, and a red bow in her hair. She
walked through my room, stood at the foot of my
bed and looked at me and said something. And then
she went into the bathroom and she never came out.
(12:56):
And she said while the woman in red was in
her room, the room got cold. I said to Linda,
that's really strange. And then Linda said, yes, I think
she's still in there. Can you check? And I thought
to myself, well, this is incredibly odd. I went into
the bathroom and I looked. There was no one in there.
And Linda said, did you check the shower. I bet
(13:17):
she's in the shower. And I looked in the shower
and again nobody was to be found. Linda said, that's
so strange. I never saw her leave. We talked a
little bit longer, we said our usual goodbyes, and I
headed to the nurses station to do my charting. I
said to the nurses, you know, it's bizarre. But Linda
saw some woman in red walked through her room, stopped
(13:40):
at the foot of her bed, and went into the bathroom.
But there's no one there. Did she have visitors last night?
The nurses looked at each other and one of them said, oh,
she seen the lady in red. And I said, well,
who's the lady in red? And the other nurse said,
she's the harbinger of death. She haunts this floora hospital,
(14:00):
and every patient who sees her will die shortly thereafter.
It's only a matter of time now for her. Wow.
I finished filling out my chart and found my attending.
I told him how Linda was doing, and then I said, oh,
and by the way, she said she saw some lady
in red last night. The surgery attending said, oh, she's
(14:24):
seen the lady in red. Well, we're not going to
have to worry about her much longer. And at that
point I tried to get information about who the lady
in red was and why she was a harbinger of
death for this floor of the hospital. I asked several people, nurses, doctors, janitors, librarians,
(14:44):
even the nuns, but no one really knew the origin
of her story. It's just she always was on that
floor as long as anyone could remember, haunting it, haunting
the patients that were near death. I found out that
the hospital had been built in eighteen eighty nine, and
there was no deaths associated with the hospital's construction, nor
(15:05):
had there been any mysterious deaths or murders that occurred
in the hospital. And in all the time that people
could remember, the story of the Lady in Red had
just been lost to time, and there was no explanation
of why she haunted that particular floor or chose the
patients that she would appear to. The next day, I
started my dreaded obstetric's rotation, and on my first day,
(15:28):
I was put on twenty four hour call. I had
to be part of a very eventful berth that I'll
talk about in another episode. But later on in that day,
I had a free moment and I wandered over to
the surgery floor to go see Linda and to check
up on her. She wasn't my patient anymore, but that
didn't matter. She was my friend and I wanted to
see how she was doing. When I got to her room,
(15:51):
she was on a ventilator and unresponsive. This was incredibly
upsetting to me. I went to the nurses station and
I asked what had happened. Versus said that at around
midnight she had gone into a coma and had to
be intubated. When the doctors had reached out to family
to get a final opinion on what to do, but
the nurses said, no matter what happens, it's only a
(16:13):
matter of time now. The next day I went by
to check up on her, and when I was walking
by the nurses station, they stopped me and they told
me that Linda had died the evening before. Once again,
the woman in red had claimed another victim. And that's
the end of that story. Except one thing was I
always kept my patient's information on little note cards that
(16:36):
I kept in the breast pocket of my white coat.
I carried Linda's card with me throughout the rest of
medical school and then throughout all of residency. And when
I got done, I took that white coat off and
never put it on again. I packed it up and
it's somewhere in the attic still, probably with Linda's card
in it. I've never forgotten her. She was one of
(16:58):
my most favorite patients and still brings me great sadness
to think about her. But I took her advice to heart,
and I have always tried to keep my emotions out
of my work. But let's move on. This is Halloween,
after all, we need something less sad but far more creepy.
Every forensic pathologist has their favorite story to tell, and some,
(17:20):
like myself, have favorites from different categories, including holidays. So
with Halloween looming on the horizon, well in the show
with a far more Halloween centered creepy story. This story
is a mine, though it's from one of my long
since dead mentors. He shared this story with me because
he was excited about a case that I had had.
(17:43):
He had had something very similar, almost exactly the same,
but his case had occurred on Halloween. My actual most
creepy story is far too upsetting for any media. It's
something that I'll probably never be able to share because
it's just too out there to be believed. Maybe one
day I'll put it in a book or something, But
(18:04):
for now, we're going to discuss this case, which occurred
in a suburb of a large southern city. It was
Halloween and the neighborhood was in full spooky moat. Pumpkins, monsters,
and skeletons were on full display. This was in the eighties,
so there was less hyper realistic gore available to decorate
with no zombie babies or glowing red eyed animatronics, but
(18:27):
some people still made an attempt to make it scary.
It was nighttime and the street lights had turned on.
Kids were out trigg or treating, dressed in costumes of monsters,
movie stars, and other assorted characters. Homes handing out candy
were lit with porch lights and cheerful, glowing pumpkins sitting
on hay bales, And of course there is always one
(18:49):
house with a take one candy bull that is emptied
by the first marauding trick or treat probably dressed as
a pirate. Some of the homeowners sat on the porch
or in their driveway, hanging out with neighbors or sitting
with their spouses greeting trick or treaters with a jovial,
happy Halloween. The neighborhood was alive with festive Halloween spirit
and fun. But there was one house at the end
(19:10):
of the street that was a little different. It was
not as well maintained as the other homes in the neighborhood.
The flower beds had weeds, and the yard had patchy,
dry areas of grass and dead spots with dirt. The
only porch light flickered in the darkness, creating a slight
strobing effect. The owner of the home was an elderly
woman who had lived in the neighborhood for decades and
(19:33):
was well known and well liked by her neighbors. She
was a widow, with her husband having died years ago.
Her middle aged son still lived with her. He had
lived there his entire life. To anyone's recollection, he had
never left the area. He didn't drive. They knew he
worked somewhere around town, but they weren't sure. He was
(19:53):
a little odd, but pleasant. There was never any trouble
with him. He always was benign and kept to himself.
On this Halloween night, he sat in the strobing light
of the porch in his grandmother's old wood rocking chair.
He was a big guy. He was six foot two,
about three hundred pounds, with a tight, flat top hair cut.
(20:14):
He stared out intensely into the night, rocking slowly back
and forth, waiting for trick or treaters. He had two
small tables on either side of him. One had a
ceramic bowl full of Candy Reese's peanut butter cups, baby roosts,
and blow pops. The other table had a prominent Halloween
decoration on it. The star of the show, so to say.
(20:36):
Most kids were too spooked to go up to get candy,
but the braver kids would walk up. They would excitedly
say trick or treat and he would reach into the
bowl and hand out candy, saying Happy Halloween. The kids
and adults would compliment him on his minimal list but
still creepy costume and decorations, and when they asked who
he was dressed ass, he would respond slightly confused and
(21:00):
say me. His costume consisted of a rumpled white T shirt,
blue denim pants, and black boots. The shirt had wide
bloodstains across the abdomen, and the pants and boots had
blood spatters all over them. He had blood on the
side of his face, extending from his forehead across the
side of his cheek. He also had blood on his
(21:21):
forearms and kaking his hands. There were bloody footprints leading
from the house to where he sat. He really put
effort into making it look creepy and it was quite
gory and very realistic. His white candy bowl had bloody
fingerprints on it, and the candy wrappers were also stained
with droplets of blood. One adult said, you've really gone
(21:43):
all out with that fake blood. Don't leave it on
too long, though, because he might get a rash. His
response was just a creepy smile. People also complimented him
on his very real looking decoration sitting on the other
table next to him. When one child went to touch it,
he blocked them and said, oh, don't do that. She
(22:03):
wouldn't like that. What was this decoration? The decoration was
that of a human head, long gray hair, the eyes
and mouth clothes, and there were still earrings in the ears.
The head had a waxy look to it, but overall
it looked incredibly realistic. It had a lot of fake
blood on it, in the hair and along the stump
(22:26):
of the neck, so much so that it was oozing
down the side of the table. A couple of the
adults that had ventured up onto the patio asked what
he sculpted it, out, of which he calmly replied yes.
After a while, a group of neighborhood kids came to
retrieve their candy from him. They had a couple of
moms keeping track of them. I don't know what the
(22:47):
kid's costumes were, but I always like to think they
were dressed as smurfs, because it just makes it a
little bit more absurd. The moms followed the kids up
on the porch, and when the kids were getting their candy,
one of the moms looked at the decoration in the
stroping light and gasped. She turned to the other mom
and said, oh my, that's Carol, which is not her
(23:10):
actual name, because I don't really know what it was.
The other mom quickly recognized the hat as Carol, the
woman of the house, the mom of the man handing
out the candy. The kids had gotten their candy and
were complaining about the sticky blood on the wrappers, but
they quickly took off to the next house to get
more candy. The two moms quickly followed after them, while
(23:32):
the man continued to sit in the rocking chair waiting
for the next group of kids. The moms quickly hearded
the group of children to the area where several of
the neighbors had set up a table to hand out candy.
The kids were complaining because they wanted to continue on,
but the moms told them to be quiet, and they
gathered the group of neighbors and told them what they saw,
(23:53):
to which several people didn't believe it. They debated, should
others go check, should they make sure it was really
a human head? Should they make sure it's Carol or
is it someone else? Because you know, they hadn't seen
Mike all evening. Should they just confront him in unlike
a horror movie? One of the more reasonable neighbors said,
forget that, let's call the police, and that's what they did.
(24:15):
And when the police arrived, they walked up to the
man still sitting in the rocker and they said to him,
good evening, sir, that's a nice Halloween decoration you have there,
to which the man said, well, thank you. And then
one of the officers said where did you get it from?
And the man said, oh, that's my mom. The officers
(24:35):
were taken aback by that, and one said, okay, what
happened to her? And the man said, I killed her
and then I cut off her head. The officers were
startled and paused and said, okay, are we going to
have any trouble here? Where's the rest of her? And
the man said, I won't be any trouble at all, sir.
I don't want to be I don't want to create problems. Oh,
(24:57):
and the rest of her, Well, it's in the house,
laying on the floor. I can take you there and
show you if you'd like. The officers said, well, yes,
let's go see her. And he stood up and the
officers stood on either side of him, and he led
them into the house, and sure enough, there was the
rest of the man's mom laying on the floor of
(25:18):
the foyer with about twenty to thirty stab wounds and
a large kitchen knife protruding from her back, and her
head had been completely cut off. There was blood all
over the floor around her and on the walls, and
it had been obviously walked through at some point. When
they cuffed him and were putting him in the police car,
they asked him why did he murder his mother, and
(25:40):
he said, well, you know, he needed to do that
because he thought she was possessed by the devil, or
maybe aliens, or possibly the CIA. He wasn't sure, but
she was definitely possessed. And they took him downtown where
he was processed. He had fully admitted to what he
had done. He had obviously mental problems, and he was
(26:01):
put away in a mental health facility for the rest
of his life to my knowledge, and when he was
asked why he put his mom's head on the table,
he said, well, she would like to see all the costumes,
because you know, she really loved Halloween and loved being
part of the festivities, and he didn't want to deny
her of that. I mean, of course, that makes complete sense.
(26:24):
There's one more thing about this case, and that is
my oldest daughter used the story for her eighth grade
theater arts class. The assignment was to write a short
scary play based on their own story for Halloween. She
came home and asked if I had any good scary stories.
I provided her was too this case. In another case
(26:47):
about a taco expedition that went horribly wrong, which I
will talk about in a future episode. Of course, this
story was by far the creepiest one, and she created
a play based on it. She was sick of fake
stories and wanted something real that people should be afraid of.
When she presented it to her class, she did a
(27:07):
one girl version of the story, acting out the parts,
using a ruler for a knife and re enacting the
decapitation using a ball falling to the floor. She closed
the story with a chilling and it's true. The teacher
stood silent, blinking. None of the kids spoke. It was
dead silent. The teacher broke the silence and said, that's
(27:31):
a true story, to which my daughter said, yes, yes
it is. My dad told me this one. The kids
in her class knew me because of my career day talks,
so they knew it wasn't fake. And one of the
kids in the class said, I think I'm going to
be sick. The teacher said to her, well, wow, that's
just too intense for middle school, really high school, probably
(27:54):
even college. I think we better go with something else.
And it ended up they decided to go with a
play based on the urban legend of the Licked Hand.
And if you don't know what that one is, it's
a story about a girl home alone for the first
time with only her dog as company. She hears news
about some random serial killer being on the loose in
(28:14):
the neighborhood and of course locks all the doors, but
forgets to lock one window in the basement. She goes
to bed with her trusted dog in the room, sleeping
underneath the bed. She of course wakes up in the
middle of the night because she keeps hearing this dripping
sound coming from the bathroom, but she's too afraid to
check on it, and she reaches down to pet the
dog and gets a reassuring lick from the dog on
(28:37):
her hand. The next day, when she gets up, she
walks into the bathroom and finds the dog dead and mutilated,
hanging in the shower, with a message written in the
dog's blood on the wall saying humans can look too
and that's the end of the story. My daughter feels
still to this day that her story was far superior.
I mean, seriously, a true story about a beheaded woman,
(28:59):
bloody Halloween candy is far more creepy and chilling than
some fake serial killer and why would you lick your hand?
My daughter also felt that story was pathetic because she
hates anything in which a dog gets hurt or dies.
People is one thing, but pets is just too far.
(29:23):
And that brings us to the end of the episode.
I hope you learned something like you never trust your neighbors,
and I hope you were entertained, and finally, once again,
Happy Halloween from Mayhem and the Morgue Until the next time.
Host
Nancy Grace
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