Dumb Blonde - Lauren the Mortician: Black Market Body Parts

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Get ready for a spine-tingling month as Bunnie unveils the thrilling four-part 'Dumb Blonde Murder Mystery Series.' She enlists the expertise of Lauren the Mortician, a mortician / social media star known for her insights on death, the afterlife, and life's riskiest behaviors. Together, they dive into the shocking case of Megan Hess, a Colorado funeral home director sentenced to two decades behind bars for alleged illegal body parts sales and counterfeit ashes.Lauren the Mortician: TikTok Watch Full Episodes & More:www.dumbblondeunrated.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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is this thing on? Bonnie who used to be a former sex worker Now hosts the podcast Dumb Blonde Most little girls grow up wanting to be doctors And lawyers and shit And I was like I want to be super hot Make a lot of fucking money And be a rockstar's wife

That was my goal as a child And here we are What's up guys? I'm so happy to have you guys on the podcast So listen So for the month of October We are doing a murder mystery series and we are bringing on special guests and Mimi and I put our heads together and we were like who would be a perfect guest to have in this series and Lauren the mortician baby. We fucking hit her up and she was like can we do it tomorrow and I was like absolutely she was here man and here she is what's up baby hey oh my gosh I'm so excited to be here what's up I'm so happy to have you thank you so

much for um dropping everything so I could be here what do you mean you dropped everything you were literally like in LA doing Laura Clary's podcast by the time this comes out I think we're allowed to talk about that right if not we'll edit it out but you were in LA doing Laura Cleary's podcast which I'm jealous because I love Laura I think she's fucking hilarious and you just hopped on a plane and came straight to Nashville to do another podcast yeah I was already out in a boat oh my gosh that was so uh northwestern yeah I was gonna say Canadian I was already out in a boat and uh I thought I would just swing on by Nashville I love that so much thank Thank you for coming. So, dude, first of all, we're doing something different today.

Like I said, we're going to do this murder mystery thing that we had been talking about, but we're going to do that towards the end of the podcast. And it's a story that you actually brought to us that we're going to cover, which is pretty gruesome, and I can't wait to dive into that. I think it's going to be fucking amazing, and everybody's going to love it. But first, I want to get to know you a little bit more and talk to you about just, you know, I've watched a bunch of your videos. I love what you do online. I think it's fucking turned into a little bit of a movement. I think anybody's anytime anybody

hears the Beetlejuice song, they automatically think of you. Are they, have they reached out to you? Anybody? No, uh if they want to call my people let me know yeah have your people call my people yes exactly too coming out is there really yes with johnny depp oh my god i would love to with johnny depp yes oh my god i love him his old ass i'd still him for sure i mean johnny depp the hottest he ever was was in pirates of the caribbean because oh it's the eyeliner it's the makeup i love guy liners so dude johnny call me um and also my husband wants to fucking jam out with you i think my husband said that in one of his interviews so you get a twofer a two for one

over here the wife and the hubby um um i'll come too we'll come yeah i just want to watch everybody just wants to watch we just we just want to come yeah for that a five somewhere? Yeah. Everybody just wants to watch. We just want to come. Yeah, for sure. So let's take it back because I've watched a few of your videos and I've heard you say a couple of times that you are the real life Veda. And for those of those people who don't know, Veda is from the movie My Girl, which is one of the best movies ever. I love that movie. And she grew up in a funeral home. So where did you grow up? So I she grew up in a funeral home so where did you grow up um so I actually grew up in a very small town in Wisconsin oh not in the funeral home uh but yeah no I'm just kidding I'm totally kidding no yeah just like I was born in a funeral home I was born there yeah

uh no I was nine months old actually and we moved to small town USA Wisconsin and uh my dad are we allowed to say that yeah okay Are we allowed to say that? Yeah. Okay. Are we allowed to say that? I don't know if it's like politically correct, you know, because it's like, I don't know. Maybe people don't want to be called cheeseheads anymore. No, totally cheeseheads.

And we moved to Wisconsin. And my mom and dad bought the funeral home together. My mom stayed home with us as kids. And my dad was full time at the funeral home all by himself. He still owns those funeral homes, actually. Oh, I love that. What was that like being a child surrounded by death? Like, is it just like second skin to you?

Or, you know, was it did it take some getting used to it? You literally were around it since you were nine months old. So, I mean, I would think that that would just be kind of second nature for you. Yeah. I learned to walk in the funeral home. So I've always been around death. I've, I've seen dead people literally my entire, my whole life. Um, do you remember the first time you ever realized what you were looking at a dead body? How old you um I think that I was six five or six years old um actually I don't even know if you really want to talk about this or keep this in but no talk about it I remember as a child uh uh realizing that uh in the in the back room that my dad saw these people naked. I remember that moment and realizing how much trust that took, even at a young age.

You might want to cut that out, sorry. No, that's fine. That's actually fascinating because death is intimate. It really is. It's an intimate, fragile, delicate scenario. I'm learning that with my dad you know dying in front of my eyes so it's very i i text jay the other day and i told him i said the best thing we could ever do for everybody around us is make sure we know what we're doing and when we die absolutely i was like because my neither one of my parents knew and thank god i was blessed enough to be able to scramble and make shit happen for them. But not a lot of people have that blessing, you know?

And I think the best thing you could give to somebody is saying, Hey, I've already took care of all my funeral shit. I've already, I know I'm going to a nursing home. Like this is where I'm going and like, let, leave me here to croak and you guys go live your best life, you know? So I think that's the best gift you could give somebody. It's a blessing. It's a blessing. We're going to get off topic totally right now, but it really is a blessing. I've had people come in, they've been married for like 50 years and they never talked about what they wanted when they died. It's such an uncomfortable conversation. You know, the husband comes in, he looks at me, we're sitting there at the table and he says, I don't know what to do. He said, we were married for 50 years and we never talked about what we wanted when we died. And I don't know what I would do to make her happy or what, what we should do.

And so what I do is I take his hand and I tell him that we're just going to do it together. And we're going to do, uh, I think sometimes people forget that funerals are really for the living as much as they're for the dead to honor funerals are really for the living. As much as they're for the dead to honor them, they really are for the living so that we can grieve that person. And so we just do our very best to do what we think that she would have liked, but it really is so important to talk to your loved ones, what you want ahead of time, squirrel money away, put it away in an account, set up a funeral trust uh get that conversation going because we never know when we're gonna die there what's a funeral trust

uh a funeral trust would be so it's an account dedicated to uh your funeral funds so it's not supposed to be used for anything else you can even market uh since it's a trust for a funeral it's not an asset to you so you're not going to just go and your kids aren't just going to go spend it on bingo or i don't know could you imagine going and splurging mom and dad's funeral fucking money there's someone who has yeah smoke it away so it's just a way to keep it safe and then the state can't view it as an asset to someone that is meant for funeral expenses and then when the person dies we then have access to that account and we're able to pay for the funeral with that wow that's amazing i'm

gonna set one up this week it's always so morbid to think about it but it's like it's so necessary especially watching what i'm going through with my parents i'm like your parents do they have a plan yeah they do oh good for them well i wouldn't expect anything less from your fucking planned out family that is such a gift it is such a gift thank them yeah literally um so and by the way if i walked into a funeral home and you were there to console me i think i might like get a boner because because listen i walked into my funeral home whenever my mom croaked and i'm telling you the dude was like not not compassionate compassionate. There was no hot chicks there. You know, like if I saw you across the table, I'd be like, you know, I think I might be able to deal with this a little bit easier.

And that is like the greatest compliment of my entire existence. Thank you. So circling back to, um, seeing, realizing that it was a dead body when you were five or six years old, you know, do you have, have you seen spirits? Do you were five or six years old you know do you have have you seen spirits do you see spirits or you're just around dead people like have you ever had like a haunted spooky situation happen i would love to hear okay one so uh i um i kind of went through this time in my life where i i started realizing that people are given the choice to follow their bodies after they die. I'm your spirits. I'm a very big believer in that. And I've seen it. I've witnessed it. And I felt it myself. His face right now. Yeah, you're not ready for this one. I don't think I am.

Okay. So I picked up a gentleman, he died died of cancer and so it was kind of a long time coming they had come in and pre-planned and so I knew his wife ahead of time very nice lady and he passed in the very early morning hours I went out to the house um you know I I do my thing and then I bring him back to the funeral home and And the minute that I bring him into the funeral home, his wishes were for cremation. So then I roll him off into a special room where we prepare people for cremation. And I go into the building to find his file and pull it so that the office gal can just kind of get everything ready for me for the next day. So when I meet with the family, we finalize everything. And I walk in the office and the

clock is dead above my desk. And I thought, oh, well, that's kind of weird. So I walked into the main office and that clock was dead. And then I walked into the chapel and that big ass clock was dead. Because in afterlife, there's no time. And then I walked into the arrangement room room i ended up walking through the whole fucking building and ended up finding out that every single clock and they're all run on double a batteries triple a batteries every single one of them was dead that that has never happened um has never happened again and once i realized that every single clock in the entire building was dead i I walked back into the back room and I just felt this super heavy feeling. And I felt like I was being watched and I got nervous and I left because I had done what I needed to do and it was time for me to leave. So I left and I came back the next morning.

You know, I get to go home, get a couple hours of sleep and I come back and the wife meets me in the next morning we sit down for the arrangements and I didn't tell her about the clocks because I didn't want to I don't want to scare her me I feel uncomfortable and you know what for all I knew it could have been a coincidence right because when those weird things happen to you you try to rock yourself out of them that didn't you know all the batteries were dead because we put them all in at the same time even though I know even though I know we didn't because they die at random times yeah so we're meeting and I'm signing the paperwork and she says you

know I got to tell you something and I said well what's wrong and she said when you left my house and I went back inside my house all of my clocks were dead excuse me I just got goosebumps and I said what and I just I looked at her and then I told her what happened I said all the clocks died here too and we just kind of shared this moment where we just stared at each other and that was that and so I sent her off to the flower shop and she went and picked out flowers. So fast forward a couple days, uh, the entire time that he was there at the funeral home, I did not feel alone in that building. Um, I had some doors that would shut on their own, uh, that my boss would tell me was just the wind shifting in the building. There's no fucking wind in the building. Yeah. And, um, so the day of the funeral, um were tons of flowers he knew a lot of

people and there were lots of vases and i set every single flower up there i'm very when you're a funeral director people don't really know you set everything up you put the flowers up you put the cards out you just you help with the obituary you do everything from start to finish you're like the event planner but for death right and you see it all the way through. That's what you do. Literally. So the son gets up and he's telling a story about his dad. They were really big into deer hunting. And he is telling his dad that he's really sad that he's going to miss him this year for deer hunting, but they're going to still go in his memory. And as he is telling this this memory and you know telling his dad he's probably bummed out and he's gonna miss out on the big buck because he's gonna

get it this year and his dad's not gonna be able to all of a sudden I'm standing in the back and I watch this glass flower vase start spinning on the stand and I'm looking at that fucking flower vase. My heart is on the ground. I'm like, don't you fall over. Don't you fall over. And it falls over in slow motion, like just fell the whole congregation. Everybody there goes, you know, just freaking out because the flower vase just tipped over the, the, the glass shatters. And I immediately run up there embarrassed, thinking that maybe it was my fault that I put the flower vase too far to the one side. And, um, I go to start picking it up and that specific flower vase had an ornament on it that was, uh, like a 10 point buck. And when it hit the ground, the antlers had broken off of the deer. So all of a sudden it was a doe and the son picked up the

ornament and he just burst out laughing because we took that as a sign from his dad that he was not going to get the big buck and that he was just going to get a doe of all the flower vases that could have tipped over yeah it was not a coincidence no no i do not believe in coincidences at all that's amazing and the wife came up and um at the end we really shared this special moment and she hugged me and we cried and I just, I really do believe that we get to follow. It was too perfectly timed with him telling that story for that flower vase to fall over. Absolutely. A couple weeks later, the son did come in to pick up the death certificates and he told

me that the only thing he got was a dough. Oh my goodness. Oh my gosh. I have goosebumps. That's crazy. That's crazy. Is it hard for you to meet different families all the time and meet them under such, you know, terrible circumstances and watch them grieve and be able to like have good energy yourself. Like I would think that would be heavy to have to deal with on a daily basis.

It is really heavy. I'm not going to lie. It is really heavy. Our industry has a very high turnover rate. So we have, I think this is a really positive thing, but we have a lot of women coming into the industry now. When I graduated, even, gosh, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago, but really it was. I graduated in 2015. And when I graduated, there was like a class of 20 of us, very small. And we only had three men. So the women ratio has really, I love that.

It's really heavy now in the industry. So there will be a really big shift soon because of that numbers. I think it needs more compassion anyway. So I'm happy that more women are getting involved. Yes. It's like we were made to do this. We were made to do this. Yeah. And so I'd love to see more women in the space.

But to answer your question, yes, it is heavy. Um, it, uh, it can weigh on you. Uh, but what I find peace in is knowing that I am helping them and they need me. They need me because they're in such a state of grief that they're not thinking clearly and they, they are just looking for someone to take them by the hand and guide them through that process. And I, it, it brings my soul such peace and so much purpose to be able to be the one to help them through that time. And, uh, don't get me wrong. I mean, there's days where I go home and I just cry because there's, you know, life is so fragile and so precious and it's taken from, it's always, honestly, it's always taken from those that their lives are just cut way too short. turnover rate. We do get depressed. We do turn to probably unhealthy coping mechanisms. And it's a very, very hard line of work to be in, but very rewarding at the same time because you do get to help people. Yeah. So growing up in that, do you feel like you never had an opportunity to

want to be something else or is it a passion for you because you were so surrounded by it as a child I remember my dad um tucking me in one night and coming up to me and saying I can't wait for you to take over the funeral home one day and I looked at him and I said I don't want to do what you do oh I and um I swear I think I saw him tear up when, when I said that to him. And I, but I said, I said, I just, I was young. I said, I don't want to do what you do. I want to do my own thing. I want to be my own person and go out there and get my own degree. And, uh, since that conversation, we didn't talk about it. Um, so I ended up finding my way into this kind of on my own um which i can tell you about if you yeah i would love to hear okay so when i was my parents got divorced okay how old were you

12 okay uh horrible age for your parents to get divorced by the way that's a rough age i think divorce for any age of kids is brutal but especially like seven and up when you know like mommy and daddy are not going to be together anymore no no and as a child you remember those conversations too like when your parents sit you down yeah and say we're not going to be together anymore and I you remember that heartbreak you remember that feeling of what you're what you? You're breaking up. You're not going to be together anymore. And so my mom moved to Minnesota because most of my family is from Minnesota. So that's why you might hear that.

Yeah, the Minnesota. The Minnesota. Isn't that weird? I thought it was Canadian at first. I know. I get that all the time. You're like, oh, you're from Canada, right? No.

Yeah. No. So that's where I graduated high school from. And the reason we, we moved to a community, um, community sounds weird, just a neighborhood. And my, uh, my cousins lived there and I was so excited to move there because we were the same age. And, um, when I was 17, um, actually I was 18. I just turned 18 and we were set to graduate that spring. So it was around April and my cousin that I grew up with, uh, took his own life. Hmm. And I have never, I've never known loss like that. Yeah.

Just like. So sudden. It's so abrupt. Hit, you hit the ground. Yeah. Hit the ground. I always feel like suicide is so selfish and I might get in trouble for saying that, but I only say that because you're hurting, you're not hurting just yourself. You're literally hurting the people who love you you know

and it's such a selfish decision it I I I feel that and then on the other side of the coin I also feel that that person they felt like that was the only choice that they had yeah they're in so much pain they're in so much pain they're not in their right state of mind because he, you know, he was always a person that, that did what he wanted to do. He just was, he always was. That was, he was, he was so popular. He was so well loved. He was so, and, um, I just think that he didn't, he couldn't find a way out of his grief and he didn't think that his life was worth living. So sometimes it can be a selfish decision, but I definitely think that it can be a decision

where they're just not in the right mental space and they just think that this is it. My life goes nowhere and it's a horrible mind space to be in and I only know that because I was also suicidal before he took his life same I've been there before wow before he took his life wow what what was causing you to be suicidal oh my gosh um lots of things um let's talk about your trauma Lauren I'm not gonna pull it out of her I'm not about that trauma lauren i was just gonna skate on by nope we know you're never skating listen you're never skating by trauma with me ever so your parents get a divorce let's start there oh my god they're gonna fucking hate me for talking about this but it's

real and it's truth and i think that it helps people that have gone through other things that that you've gone through the same things that you've gone through so you know it's hard when you're when your parents go through a divorce they think that they own that experience it's their their pain and when when you go to talk about that i've talked about it once or twice on my platform before and my parents do not like that because they you know that was their marriage and their experiences but what sucks for me as a child yes that was your experience but i fucking lived it right i fucking lived that shit you put me through that yeah i had to go to therapy for that yeah like holy fuck my parents did not get along they still don't they hate each other no so even up until the divorce they were

probably beefing all the time fighting and stuff so that that affects the child too yep i won't raise my voice in my house or to anybody anymore because i grew up in a house where i had a mom who did nothing but fucking scream her head off i'm so sorry no it's okay i mean it's fucker but yeah i know literally skating past her trauma no i'm just saying you know like it's just they don't parents don't realize how it really affects their children staying together for kids right i hate that just end it yeah don't stay parents don't realize how it really affects their children. It's like just staying together for kids. Right. I hate that.

I always tell people, just end it. Yeah. Just don't stay together for the kids because you're making it 10 times worse. Absolutely. Don't stay together for the kids, but then at the same time, do not involve your fucking kids in your drama, please. Absolutely. Because it still haunts me and my sisters today.

Oh, did your parents do that? Did they make you choose sides and stuff? Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Yeah. It was um it was horrible it was like it's I don't even know where to start to even tell you I mean it's just you have one parent that might be trying to keep you from the trauma but then the other one feels like we know too much so they want us to hear their side and what it comes down

to is that my I mean hell hath no fury like a woman that scorned absolutely and my mom even wrote a book about my dad my dad cheated on my mom sorry dad but you did and that has multiple times and that has just followed it's i don't want it broke her heart yep and then she didn't know how to yell she went out and did her thing and then he was you know and then it was like then they were just fighting about that and it's almost like teenagers it is it is and and you and you as the child you was the 12 13 14 15 you feel like you have to be the parent you have to be the parent and um i mean sometimes i still feel like i'm the parent even even i know trust me i get it yeah yeah right now you've become the parent to your dad i've become the parent to mine yeah like we all make that dynamic shift eventually and that's exactly

where we ended up yes yeah and it's it's wild they take care of you when you're in diapers and then how life switches and then all and and then you take care of them when they're in diapers literally before they die yeah isn't that wild so be nice to your kids people because um you're yeah we're the ones who got to take care of you we take actually my parents were fucked up to me and i'm still taking care of them so yeah you ended up taking care of you. Actually, my parents were fucked up to me, and I'm still taking care of them. Yeah, you ended up taking care of both your parents. Yeah, both of them.

Yeah, that's a whole other fucking podcast. So was it just all the back and forth with your parents that was making you feel suicidal? Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, getting caught in the middle, going to therapy, and then having the therapist tell me that, um, that we knew too much and that, you know, we were being told to pick sides and, um, just, it was a lot. I mean, there's so much, we could literally spend like three podcasts on this. I just know it was, it was a lot. It was overwhelming for a child. And then you see your parents fight and it's just, um, you feel, you feel feel overwhelmed you feel like it's never

going to get better even for you it affects your mental health as a child because that's supposed to be your dad and then when your dad finds someone else or your mom finds somebody else or you know and then they break up with that person you go through that loss all over again yeah it's like you're mourning somebody who's alive. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's brutal. So how did you get through your suicidal idea? It was ideation or just thoughts. Yeah. How did you, how do you think you got through that? You know, I, um, I don't, I don't really know, but it was just, it was weird because I was having those thoughts. And then my cousin took his own life just out of the blue unexpectedly. And it was,

I remember feeling that loss and knowing that I didn't want to do that. Maybe that was his lesson and his blessing and his death was a lesson to you of like, Hey, this is what it feels like when you suddenly take your life you know yeah yeah yeah and I when I saw I mean all the people that turned up in my aunt and uncle and just you know his mom and dad and my my aunt and uncle they've never I you look in their eyes now and they've never been the same yeah I mean that's got to be losing a child I couldn't I've never shut out my own kid but I couldn't imagine no losing Bailey or you know, it changes that person. I'm sure. Was there any warning though? I mean, had he been going to therapy like you or

was it just very sudden? It was, it was kind of like a secret. He, he had told them that he was having these thoughts. They, they were getting him on medication. They were getting him help. So he had come to them one time, not two and said I'm I'm having these thoughts and I need help and uh they were working on his medications and then all of a sudden he just sometimes medications can make it worse yeah she's been through with like some of my medications where I ended up just having to cold turkey them because they were giving me more than what I was trying to prevent so like I was fighting more being on them than I was off of them. So I just chose to be, take it holistic and not big pharma. I'm already on the

edge all the time. Not so much lately. I've been really good the past, I think it's past year. I've been really good. But before when I was going through all that vitamin shit that I, there was times where it was like, if you went like this this i was fucking jumping off the edge so anytime they mentioned medication to me i was like i don't have the mental aptitude to go through any sort of like bullshit with these things if if one of those medications pushes me off the edge i'm going you know so i never did it every fucking time every time landscaping that's okay i've literally had to pay these guys to go away really we did several times we'll go out there and be like we'll give you 20 bucks to leave yeah every time he'll make a he'll make a quick pass just give it yeah he'll go away in a second walk

down the alley and then they'll leave yeah what what day of the week is it they're here every friday every time we're here filming a podcast they're here like they're it's just not it's crazy it's gonna get louder he's gonna go right under here that's okay now i can drink something yeah you can drink during like you can totally yeah you're fine i might need something better than water what you got what's that energy drink oh i thought you were having a drink with me mimi mimi stays lit yeah literally i couldn't do it there's no way oh same drink the celsius's no oh i'm on i don't do any energy drinks celsius's i feel like the only one that doesn't make me have the come down after

where like sometimes like energy drinks you get like especially red bulls you get like a quick little burst of a high and then you have the worst come down from Red Bulls. No, Celsius is really my treat. The coffee was giving me anxiety. The two sips I took in fucking Texas. She had to run on a treadmill one time because she got too cracked out from coffee. I got so cracked out from coffee one time, it hurt. It physically hurt.

I was like, this is who? How? Like, how do people fucking survive like this? I learned to drink coffee at funerals and visitations. Yeah. Because that's all we had was coffee and water. Oh, my gosh. Why is that?

Why is it they only have coffee and water? That's, you know, it won't stay in the carpet. Why don't they serve alcohol at these things? When you're in small town USA, that's just what they do. You know, whatever they want to do in the parking lot, I don't they serve alcohol at these things? When you're in small town USA, that's just what they do. You know, they'll break, they, whatever they want to do in the parking lot. I don't care, but we, we, you know, we have, um, we don't want it for liability. Right. Liability with the funeral homes are a really big thing.

You probably know that, like, you know, just having people sign waivers and, um, you don't want people to come to the funeral home, get trashed. And another big thing that funeral homes deal with is, uh, having people come in the bathrooms and overdose. So we're teached about Narcan and, um, how to administer that. And another big thing that funeral homes deal with is having people come in the bathrooms and overdose. So we're teached about Narcan and how to administer that. Because they're in so much grief, they just overdo it. Oh, goodness gracious.

Wow. No better place to OD, though. Yeah, I guess so. Well, you still got to go to the morgue. Oh. So there's a whole process. Okay, gotcha. If you take your life, if you overdose uh car accident sudden death i mean anything you go to the morgue for an autopsy you cannot you cannot decline it it's your family

can't say you didn't want it you are having an autopsy yeah so circling back your cousin's suicide is what kind of propelled you into this industry can we talk about that yeah so I was going to school to be a dentist oh I was like the highest suicide rate ever I didn't know that until I think I heard you say that on one of those podcasts yeah yeah I I wanted to do um I just wanted to make people feel good about their teeth and I'm looking back I don't know why the fuck I thought that because I don't even want to be in people's mouths especially I've seen dead people mouths like yeah no and I can't the blood no I can't do it no I'm sorry that and the cracking of the fucking yep somebody's gonna come at me and say that was disrespectful but I'm sorry when you get old and you're in your 90s your teeth are it's not good your breath's

not good you don't want to be anywhere near the mouth and you don't want to be anywhere near their feet their toenails when you're 90 your breath's not good do you take out dentures before cremation uh yeah so yeah uh dentures i mean i'm not gonna go feel around in there i might have cremated a denture or two uh but uh yeah those are gonna stay i don't want to go on your mouth oh good so they can burn they can burn yeah so you um so I was gonna go to dental school yeah and I went to school and I ended up dropping out and oh my gosh my parents were so mad at me they're like what are you doing so I moved in with my boyfriend at the time campus security actually called my mom and they're like we haven't seen your daughters um my mom thought I was dead somewhere so she freaked out but uh yeah moved in um with my boyfriend my mother-in-law is nuts and that didn't go well so he was living with his mom at the time

in the basement we're young you know so we had you know just we were working at a bakery right making coffee drinks and stuff in downtown Minneapolis. And so my one of my uncles was hiring and he was looking for somebody to do corner calls. And so is your whole family just a whole family of just death? Aren't most funeral homes very family oriented? Yes. They're just family ran and owned. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

So my dad actually has a twin brother and he has a funeral homes in Minnesota. And then I have another uncle that does it. My grandpa did it. So I'm technically a third generation funeral director and my grandma does flowers. Hi grandma. Love you. Hi grandma. So until my grandpa died and then now they're all still doing it and and I'm the one that decided to stay home with my kids. But, yeah, so just for now. And then, so I guess I started doing the corner call stuff and ended up realizing that I actually really liked it. What does a corner call consist of? So a corner call is really it's the horrible deaths.

So it's the drug overdoses, the suicides homicides car accidents a very sudden death that would require an autopsy so i i did all those calls and i went and worked for my dad for the summer and then i started uh community college that following fall uh and just told my dad i wanted to do this so that dad was elated very very excited oh and isn't crazy how life's full circle mm-hmm yeah and um you know my mom thought I was crazy to go work for my dad damn it mom relax this is her life and so she's like well you're gonna have to figure it out on your own so I did um and um uh yeah so and the rest is kind of history, but when my cousin took his life, I really, I didn't see myself. I really got depressed again, myself. I just,

I missed him. I couldn't believe he made that decision. I couldn't believe he was gone. And I, I went to school. I hated it. Uh, switched, started thinking about going in, helping other people that have lost a loved one and you'll find that a lot of morticians funeral directors that we we we get into this industry for that reason because we have lost someone that we love so much and it's healing for us to help somebody else I actually wanted to be a mortician really yes I did and I looked into it Vegas didn't offer a lot of schooling for that and the reason why I wanted to get into it was because I have such a fear of death and I was like I'm the type of person

like if I fear something I want to face it head-on so I was like you know if I could get into this industry then I would be able to conquer my fear of death and of course it never worked out that way. Because, you know, again, Vegas didn't have the schooling that they probably have now back when I wanted to do it. But I've always been fascinated with death and like all things, you know, just dark and like, I don't want to say sinister, but just like that. You're right, dude. I have always had a fascination with um all of those things so I just you know it was very fitting for me to want to do that but then I decided to be a stripper and here we are I wanted to do hair yeah like and I had before I've gone to a funeral home for a client that

passed away and did her hair but I wanted to do that so bad but my parents were like no it's like a family like a lot of funeral homes are very family-based so like to get in and to get paid well is very hard yeah absolutely yep funeral homes are hard to get into I have a lot of people that message and say oh I want to do just the makeup or I just want to do the hair and unfortunately we don't hire people just for that right yeah um it's a it's a trust thing but then also uh funeral homes are cheap and they'd rather just have the funeral directors do that so you don't have to pay somebody extra unless the family does request to have somebody specific come in to do the it's great it's crazy to hear you say funeral homes are cheap like in that aspect because death is

expensive death is expensive it is fucking like i had my mom i had a private autopsy um for my mom last year because i thought she was overdosed in her um hospital and i had um her cremated afterwards and it's expensive it is expensive and that that's not even a whole few like i looked into funerals for her because you know they wanted her to have a funeral in indiana for the two people who would have showed up and it was still freaking fricking expensive. I was just like, this is crazy. Like I'm in the wrong business. So the thing about, I don't know if you want to talk about expensive funerals or whatnot, but, um, I always like to say that it's expensive to be born. It's expensive to live and it's expensive to die because all of those things are expensive. And unfortunately what's happening in

the funeral industry is we have, um have big corporations that are coming in. And they're buying out family-owned funeral homes. And then they're lowering the price of these things to make it super cheap. And then what happens is they're running out the other family-owned funeral homes. Or the family-owned funeral homes are going to have to up their prices a little bit just to make it. homes or the family-owned funeral homes are gonna have to up their prices a little bit just to make it because we've gone from funerals that used to cost ten twelve fifteen twenty thousand dollars to people just want basic cremation the cremation rates now sixty percent at the United States like across the nation

here sixty percent when it used to be the opposite right cremation wasn't even that popular in the 90s right the Catholic Church didn't even adopt that it was okay to be cremated because be cremated yeah because isn't there there's a bible verse that says you're not supposed to be cremated they changed it yeah i don't know how do you change that i don't know it's just crazy yeah so so now they they are accepting of it so now uh that's become the lesser expensive option and so that's what families are choosing because death is unexpected and then so many people we weren't planning on paying this and it's uh they just don't want to pay it they don't maybe

they don't want to have a funeral they want to go to the bar that's a big thing in wisconsin we don't have funerals at the church anymore they weren't churched anymore a lot of churches are um it's just not churching anymore and people don't they don't want to do that in so they're like celebration of life now yep celebration of life are really big now and they're less okay so they're not bringing caskets to the bar um no okay i was like damn sit there and think i was like yeah i was like my husband would probably go i would we can make it happen up in the corner yeah just fucking put them on a barstool like weekend at bernie's like just fucking prop them up can i embalm them with a bottle of like bourbon or something whiskey he would love that fucking

casamigos tennessee whiskey yeah yeah i didn't know about like how and i didn't know really much like cremation i guess because like all of my family members it was the catholic church so everyone got buried yeah you know we did caskets and stuff like that and like i think i only knew one person to get that but did you see the tiktok the other day that said that um plots are only leased for like 99 years sometimes because like they were like how do you how have we not run out of land right and i never thought about that they were like you know there's only so many cemeteries they lease these for like 99 years or if you've had like no what do they do with the body that's actually i don't think that's true no so i i love how lauren let you talk though

well you got to explain it because i just saw that the other day too and i made a little video about it because i get asked that a lot they're like because what would they do with the bodies like what are they gonna dig them up and then just throw them all in a mass grave no they don't have the family sign any sort of a waiver that's like hey in 99 years you're fucked and then we're gonna dig grandma up and just you know because there'd be bones there'd be caskets they'd have to get rid of those yeah so and because a lot of the rumors are the cemetery fills up oh you haven't heard of a new cemetery in town well I've heard of new cemeteries you're just not in the right spot for one right in wisconsin rumors look at that can you imagine what a cemetery would look like from the view of

like cutting the earth yes of like what would you like like just see you know what i'm saying like an image yes like all the bodies like just laying on top of each other all throughout this. My great-grandma is buried on top of her husband. Mm-hmm. Because they wanted to buy one plot. Oh, I'm doing that with Jay. Yeah, she's... I didn't know you could do that.

We put her on top of him. So we call those bunk beds. Oh, my God. And I had one guy, his wife died first, so we put her in the bottom bunk, and then he requested to be buried face down so that he could be on top of her on the top bunk. Oh, but they're not in the same casket, right? No, no. Okay. Just in spirit, you know. he requested to be buried face down so that he could be on top of her on the top bunk oh and

but they're not in the same casket right no okay just in spirit you know oh my goodness you know he's face down in there that's that's really cute actually that is very sweet that's really jay you better do that for me one day um that's crazy so you are married now with babies what does your husband think about is he in the industry too no okay no um i used to bug him and make him come with me on the late night runs though and he helped me go on house calls and stuff oh i don't even know how he didn't run for the hills because the shit i put him through we'd be out in the woods and we'd have somebody that died like months ago oh my goodness please come with me oh you know that'd be kind of fun though in the woods

i know i heard that died months ago what that would be kind of crazy i think everybody has a morbid curiosity about death and they you know seeing dead bodies and stuff like that not being disrespectful but a lot of people do no because we're all going to die it's that one thing that just unites everybody is we are all going to die and it doesn't discriminate it. And it can take you at any time. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I feel like this is so taboo and maybe that's why people are so fascinated by it. Yeah. Well, people don't talk about death. They don't want to. It's very uncomfortable. I'm learning that with my parents, you know, like I'm having to be like, okay, well let's make a game plan. What are we doing? You know, like it's

very, you know, how do you say, hey, how do you want to die when somebody's dying? Because death doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good to talk about death. It's scary. Yeah, because nobody really knows where we're going after this. You know, like we have speculation. No.

Nobody's ever came back besides Jesus and been like, hey, this is what's on the other side. Yeah. So take me on your Tik Tok journey because you have exploded on the scene on Tik Tok and people just absolutely love you. Anytime we hear the Beetlejuice theme song, here comes Lauren, the mortician. And you've somehow became this child. Like, I don't want to say just child, but like, what is it like you do? Like the everybody wants like reviews from you on certain things. That's so wild that that's happened, too. But yeah.

So I started TikTok kind of making TikToks just for fun, probably in 2021. Just kind of whenever I felt like posting them and then about a year ago i started posting a lot more regularly and i went viral for a list of things that i would never do because i want to live i guess i choose life yeah um and that was because you've seen a lot and i think like i've seen a few hater comments where people are like, you're not a real, you know, whatever they want to call it, a reviewer or you're not licensed to do this. And it's like a woman that has grown up around death her entire life, who has seen what people have died from, who has done coroner calls. Like, I think you're pretty fucking certified. Yeah.

And I just, oh my gosh, all the hate I've been getting lately. Oh, it's because you're getting more popular. I feel like, yeah. And I just, Oh my gosh, all the hate I've been getting lately. Oh, it's because you're getting more popular. Yeah. I feel like TikTok is like high school and it's so crazy because like all of us OGs that have been on the app for a while, it's like, we all know the newcomers. So you're technically kind of like a newcomer and we're welcoming you with open arms. But then there's that other side of TikTok that's like, who is this? Where is she coming from? Let's dissect everything she's doing. And it's literally just like high school. It's like other side of TikTok that's like, who is this? Where is she coming from? Let's dissect everything she's doing. And it's literally just like high school.

It's like a bunch of fucking people who just gossip and fucking try to like expose. It's like exposing people is the thing to do these days. Yeah. Yeah. And there's really not much to. At all. Yeah. What you see is kind of what you get with me.

But yeah, how that whole it's like. So what the what they've called me is like that I didn't even like give my I've never said that I'm an expert on child safety or anything but that's what they like to say is they're like oh you can't be a child safety expert and I'm like um does anybody have a piece of paper that says I am now certified to talk to you about child safety no everybody just kind of specializes in certain things and I'm very certified to talk to you about child safety. No, everybody just kind of specializes in certain things. And I'm very particular to say I'm not an expert. I'm just an opinionated as fuck mother because I know a thing or two because I've seen a thing or two because I have personally seen these things. Yeah, absolutely.

And it it changes you as a person and as a mother, especially when you are burying mothers or children or it's um it fucks you up really it fucks you up the kids i wouldn't be able to handle the kids there's no way no it um i did not know i did not know how many babies pass away like stillborn births or miscarriages i did not know how many babies pass from that until I did corner calls in college. So I was 19, 20, 21 years old. And I was going to these hospitals and picking up little, little, little bags. Little nuggets. Little nuggets. Oh my goodness.

And I had no idea. I had no idea. So this TikTok thing, take me on this journey. You got on there. You started posting. It just kind of blew up so I I made a list of things of toys that I didn't like last December and uh like daily mail and everybody ran with it they're like oh my god this mortician she doesn't allow this shit in her house and it to me it just kind of seemed like normal because that's how I grew up too because

my dad was also a paramedic so a lot of these things were like engraved in my brain like my dad went on horrible calls too um where horrible fucking horrible uh and that was just how I grew up was and so it was normal to me and then when your dad's a mortician too he's got a list of things like hey we're not doing this and then when I get into it I'm like holy shit he's really right I'm not doing this shit either and and so I just made a list and then it kind of expanded into well why why yeah for each thing so I kind of went on and then and then I don't even know how it happened but I started getting tagged in videos like what do you think of this what do you think of this what do you think of this and now it's escalated I don't even know where the Beetlejuice started from, but, um, if they, if, if that's what they want to do, I'm, I'm here for it. Well, you've kind of created a safe space where people trust your opinion. And that's why they

tag, like they do that with Mama taught to like everybody, when somebody is going through something, they tag Mama taught because they want Mama taught to sit with them. So your thing is, is like, Hey, you've created a safe space of, you seem pretty knowledgeable of what you're talking about and people want to know what your opinion is on certain things. So I think that's awesome. That speaks volumes of your character because you know, obviously you're doing something right because it's grasping millions of people's attention. What's, what's crazy is, um, and what's sad is people think you only do it for the money, the views and the likes. And that's not, that's never been who I am or what I'm about the money, the views and the likes. And that's not, that's never been who I am or what I'm about. I mean, the likes and the shares and stuff. I mean, that's,

that's the, I guess you could say that's like the bonus, but it's more so the inbox messages that I get from parents. They're like, thank you for being so real. Thank you for my, my in-laws think I'm nuts because I don't let my baby sleep with a blanket because we do sleep sacks. And they did it this way for so long and we turned out okay. And that's called survivor's bias. Yeah. So you survive because, you know, your parents were doing unsafe sleep. So that makes it okay.

But no, it doesn't. I mean, I've been there. I've seen. I wish I haven't. But I have. The after effects. The parents in my face crying, just asking me if it was their fault. I mean, and so what I really wanted to do is I just started making content that was, that I felt passionate about and just sharing these messages. And I get

called a fear monger a lot, a lot like hate hate stuff uh and I don't let me interject real quick I don't think people realize going viral sucks okay it's not a fucking it's not a blessing like everyone's opinion you get opinions about people that from people who don't know what the fuck is even going on but they're just commenting because that's all they know how to do is just be a troll you know going viral sucks like it's they everybody's like oh she's in it for the numbers and the likes no not really we're in it just because we're here expressing who we are and we're hoping that it reaches the people that we want it to reach you know we're hoping that it helps somebody or saves a child's life or like i didn't know the shit about popcorn yeah and i and

i've gotten popcorn stuck in my throat a million times i could only imagine if a child did that yep you know so it's like there's just so many cool things that you do point out and show um that you know of course there's going to be haters who always look for the negative but really what you're doing is i think it's great because nobody on the app is doing that has that ever caused you more anxiety seeing the other side of it like do you have anxiety over all of those things I have horrible fucking anxiety yeah she walked in here having a panic attack but I just like if I feel like if I knew that side of things I would have so much more anxiety yeah yeah I do and and uh I think that's just what's shaped me into who I am today really and um I've I've never lied about who I am or what

what I do and I've always always been upfront. And I think that makes me a little bit more relatable. Cause yeah, I definitely, I have panic attacks. I get anxiety stuff and, um, it doesn't make me an overprotective mother maybe, but are my kids happy and loved? And do they miss out on having popcorn? No, they don't. It doesn't popcorn or we don't do nuts. You don't miss, but you don't know. know no they don't know and and they have wonderful happy childhoods and i'm so blessed to be their mom and you just want to be the best mom you can be and what sucks about a lot of these things is as parents we have to search this shit they they'll be selling oh here parent buy this and you're like oh that looks wonderful take it home and you end up finding out that it was actually recalled or yeah it's not safe i found out a thing i let my daughter

sleep in for like a long time got recalled for like a high death rate and i let her sleep in this like little swaddle so many nights because it's the only thing she could sleep in yeah and it was like a year later they were like oh mass amounts of infants have died in this and i'm like that could have been me you know it could have been my daughter no for sure so i just i just wanted to make a safe place where one we can talk about death two we can talk about um they want to know what but what i like and what i don't and i'm happy to tell them if they want to know and i just don't care if you don't like me. Yeah. And I think.

And you can't. No, I'm just being me. Because the people that love you embrace the fuck out of them. And there's always going to be hate when you're popular. It doesn't matter. It's like, like I said, it's high school. It's just a world divided. It does feel like high school.

There's people who just love you. And then there's people who just want to talk shit because they're fucking miserable. Yeah. And you're not, you're not going to be everybody's cup of tea. I'm not going to be everybody's cup of tea. Mimi's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. It just is what it is. We can't fucking make everybody happy, but what you are doing and what you can do is make a difference and help save children's lives. Or nobody knows how to be a fucking parent. No,

they don't give you a handbook. No, we're just learning. Literally. If we share it together and if we're just like, Hey, I do this or I do this this or hey i don't use that because of this yeah i it just it just makes it a safe place where we can just talk about it what's the difference between what you're doing and the fucking mom groups that they have on facebook those are so toxic literally i've never thought about that before not saying that you're toxic i'm just saying those moms go in there and they post pictures not that i know i've never been in one but i'm assuming they post pictures of like hey this is what my child did and this is what i've learned from this and like you know so it's like you're posting your experiences just like these women are yeah but you're getting crucified for it because you're on a bigger platform so suck that moms and mom groups

literally show pictures of like a flesh eating disease on a child's foot and be like what should i do what should i put on this these moms are like put some neosporin and i'm like take that fucking kid to the hospital yeah why are you asking monkeys blood on it like what in the hell yeah it's so weird those those groups are so toxic and it's the worst people giving the worst device at least you're educated and you've seen it these women are just stay-at-home moms who think they know everything yeah it's wild for sure yeah it's a wild wild west on facebook mom groups facebook is crazy they're their own fucking thing over there facebook's i love them because they're we have a huge following over there but and let me tell you something if anybody comes at me sideways they're like warriors they will

fucking go and shut pages down like they're crazy over there love. I'm a big believer in spirits and, you know, just an afterlife after seeing so much death. What are your thoughts on an afterlife? I get asked that question a lot. I definitely believe that we are all spiritual beings just living the spiritual experience. this spiritual experience and I do believe that after we die our souls our spirits we move on and I actually I do believe in God I believe in I believe in there being a better place that we all go to and I also believe in reincarnation I've never actually said that anywhere before but I do I definitely do yeah what what what what makes you believe in reincarnation um I told my mom when I was little that uh I chose her to be my mom

yeah I was one of those I was one of those uh and I was watching uh I she has no idea where that came from you know watching Barney and then switching to yeah my daughter did something very similar she told me about a car accident when she was two and for a year straight from two to three years old um three when she could like complete more sentences she told me about she was in a car accident um a white car landed on top of her because she was playing in the road and she screamed for her mommy and daddy and they didn't come and she told that story very very vividly as a child and we didn't really do like tvs when she was little so there would have been literally no way and she was i'm telling i'm a helicopter

mom really bad um and i there would have been literally no way for her to physically ever know those words um other than when she when i was pregnant my husband was in a horrible car accident and died shortly um but they brought him back and that happened while i was seven months pregnant with her and she came back and when she was two started talking about a car accident and talked about like very she talks about what she was wearing she talks about the color of the car she talks about everything oh my god i've been with her for years and she's an old soul you know yeah my daughter is that old soul she's done this a million times my other one brand new soul he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing yeah cash is a dickhead

cash is so funny wild olivia has done this life a thousand times they're so different kids are so different you have one and then you have the second one they're like totally different how are your kids you have boys girls i have two boys do you have twins no praise jesus for that yeah no no they're uh five and three okay i have to think about that you got baby babies yeah they're just toddlers oh three is a fun age oh goodness gracious um before i wanted to talk to you about um spiritual thing. I've also helped people of different faiths and such. And I've had people come in and want to open a window for after somebody dies, you open a window and that's supposed to encourage the spirit to leave the room. Have you ever heard of that? Yes. Never heard about this before. So when my mom died, I've heard about that before a lot.

But when my mom died and I walked in there, they had the window open for her. And when I walked in to see my mom, I didn't feel her presence at all. But I haven't felt my mom's presence. I only felt my mom's presence for about two weeks after she died. And she would come and visit me at my house. And she would do she came here to the studio. Um, when I was posting my tick talk about her, the lights that are behind you were off and they started going off and twirling in different colors. And I even got a video of it

and caught it on a tick tock and posted it on tick tock. And then one night I was sleeping and I woke up and my TV was doing the different colors. Oh my gosh. Yeah. She would play her favorite song. Oh, and then Mama, I'm Coming Home by Ozzy Osbourne was a song that I had dedicated to her on TikTok. And it would literally pop up. And we haven't heard it since. All the time. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. It was almost like she was just like coming to say like, thank you. Yes. Absolutely. And I haven't felt her since the, she's like left me alone. Thank God. You know. Did, before your mom passed did she

ever talk about like family coming to visit her or spirits like yeah because i also believe that before we die or when we die when the process is happening i also believe that our loved ones that we might be missing or people that we have a soul connection with i really do believe that they come absolutely to our bedside when that happens. I believe that. So I had a really cool experience with not about spirits. Um, my mom had, my mom did, she, um, hers were more kind of like sinister. She, she kept thinking that my husband was going to send somebody to kill her and it was crazy, but she was saying, I saw him, you know, like it was really weird but

I had a really cool experience with my husband's dad buddy um when he was dying in hospice he wouldn't talk to anybody towards the end of his death he couldn't talk um and it was just like he was just laying there pretty much like sleeping and when I walked in the room um he instantly opened his eyes and and was sat up and was like really excited and was trying to talk to me, but he couldn't verbalize any words cause he was really towards the end of life. So he was making all these noises and he was just so excited, so excited. And I grabbed his hand and I was like, buddy, I love you. I'm here. What are you saying? You know? And when I grabbed his hand like that, I saw, first of all, I got overcome with the most warm feeling of love

and just like, I mean, I felt like my heart was like this big, like it was the most amazing feeling I had ever felt. And all I saw was a pink galaxy. I'm talking like just stars and just a galaxy. And I mean, it brought me to tears and I was just like, and that was his way of showing me like, this is where I'm going. I'm so excited. This is where I'm going, you know? And I remember sitting there with him. And then when I walked out, I just literally lost it and started bawling in the fucking parking lot and told Jay and Jay was like, I believe it. He's like, cause buddy wasn't talking to anybody. And then as soon as I walked in, that's when he started freaking out. And it was just a really cool experience. So I

definitely believe in spirits. I definitely believe there's an afterlife. I definitely believe there's something more, you know? Um, when I was young, my mom and I, we were driving in our, uh, small town and, um, we went to go over this bridge and there was a car and we watched the car end up going into the water. Oh my goodness. And floating down down the river. My mom immediately pulled over. She got you know 9-1-1 and 9-1-1 asked her how many people are in the car and she told them three. Three people are in the car. Three people are in the car but they're not trying to get out. And we, we, we watched it sink. And I, I was little, I, I, I remember the panic. Um, I, I, you know, I, I don't remember everything that she saw. The emotion. So the police came and they, they pulled the car out

and my dad came and looked at my mom and he said, Joanne, there was only one person in the car. And he said, Joanne, there was only one person in the car. And my mom was hysterical. She said, no, there was three people in the car. One of them had a specific shape to his nose. And she was able to list everything about those two people. And they were in the back seat of the car. And the woman was driving.

And she just had her hands on the wheel. And she went in the water. And she didn't even try to escape. She didn't even try to get out. Nothing. They only found one body. So at the funeral, my mom ended up knowing the family and my mom went and looked at all the pictures that they had. And my mom ended up having a panic attack because she looked at one of the pictures and her husband and her son had died in a car accident. My mom swears up and down that it was them that was in the backseat of the car. Oh, it's like they were going to save her. And I think that she could see them.

Wow. And I think that that's why she didn't panic and why she didn't try to escape out of the car and why the river was just so high. Do you think maybe she was committing suicide? I think so. Goodness gracious. There's no reason why else for her to be parked there.

There was no reason. The water was high be parked there. Like there was no reason. She was, the water was high that year and it just came and it swept the car away and she didn't even, you know, most people, if I, if I'm going to sink in a car, I'm going to be bashing on that window. I mean, I want to live. You're going to try to kick the window out. You're going to do something. You're going to fight.

And she just sat there with her eyes straight ahead with her hands on the wheel as the car went down. My mom said it was the eeriest thing she's ever seen and then the two people in the back seat they didn't do anything either and uh so that's a big I mean I I totally believe you I believe you I I love to hear that you you touched buddy buddy and you felt and you experienced that have you been told you're like a psychic medium before so I yeah I've read numerous people and i just oh my goodness i fight it and i apparently i found out before my mom passed away that i come from a long line of kentucky white trash witches no shit really yeah

they all had a gift and they were all deemed mentally unstable especially your aunt bunny yeah i oh you want to hear something crazy la Lauren? We're totally getting off topic here. I know, but I love it. So I don't know my family. I don't know either sides of my family. My family is really fucked up and toxic. I didn't meet my mom until I was 36. I didn't spend time with my mom until she was dying.

She came here to die. And that's when I got to spend the last six months of her life with her. Technically three because I got pissed off at her. But during that time, I was just spend the last six months of her life with her. Technically three because I got pissed off at her. But during that time, you know, I was just asking her questions and stuff like that. And one day she said, yeah, you're Aunt Bunny. And I go, what? She goes, yeah. She goes, isn't that why you named yourself Bunny?

And I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, one of my aunts, her name is Bunny. Sent me, I have a picture of her in my phone. Aunt bunny wears eyeshadow. Like I do big fucking fluffy fur coats, does her hair all big. Like literally, like I'm like a version of her. And I'm like, I never fucking knew that. Like, that is so crazy that I had an aunt bunny in my life and never knew that. But like, isn't it crazy how just shit gets passed down? The one that was like very witchy yeah well they were all witchy yeah it was there was seven of them so they were all witchy they all

had gifts but they were all deemed like kind of mentally unstable because none of them knew how to deal with their gifts unbelievable yeah it like used to scare them and and to be truth be told i was scared of my gifts all the way up until like probably two years ago when i was going through that all that darkness i finally got to the point where i was like I don't give a fuck I don't care shadows in the corner fucking ghosts popping around me like I don't care and as soon as I did that and I let it go it left me it was almost like because I was so scared of it it like the the lower vibration invited the dark entities around me and then the minute I was just like I don't care if you're gonna harm me you're gonna harm me that then the minute I was just like, I don't care if you're going to harm me, you're going to harm me. Jesus is going to protect me no matter what.

I don't care that you're here. I don't care that you're fucking with me. They dissipated and I never have problems. Now when I see stuff, I'll see stuff out of the corner of my eye or I get visions all the time of stuff. I've predicted deaths, people's deaths that have happened. I predicted my dad dying this year. My husband didn't believe me until two weeks ago. He even told me, he was like, Benny, I thought you were the girl that was crying wolf. Cause I kept telling him, I feel like my dad's going to die next year. I started that like last year. And then this year I was like, I just feel like something's

off. I'm my dad's going to die this year. Boom. Find out fucking what? Not even two, three weeks ago that my dad is dying of stage four cancer. He never told us, you know, so it's just crazy. It's, it's been a, it's been a blessing and a curse, but I'm learning to embrace it. So I'll never call myself a psychic and I'll never call myself a medium, but yeah, cause I don't channel it. No, but I mean a gift, I guess. Yeah. In tune. Totally. Yeah. Totally in tune. I like that word. Totally. Yeah. Totally in tune. You're very in tune.

I like that. Well, let's answer some questions off Patreon. If you guys are on my Patreon, you guys had the privilege of being able to ask Lauren the Mortician any question you wanted to know about death. So Mimi's going to pick a few out and we're going to let Lauren answer. Has anyone ever woken up on the table? Oh, dear God. No, no.

I hear about those stories all the time. Yeah, yeah. Where they like pronounce them dead incorrectly or like, or does it, is it true that people have like involuntary movements? Because like you've been on call. So does a body move after it's dead? Usually not. You know, it, if you, if you if if you're there like right

after they die I mean sometimes the brain still works and things flinch and things but no I heard that people get erections is that true so after we die there's a chemical process that occurs so immediately after we die there's a chemical process that occurs um so uh immediately after we die we get really hot so the temperatures skyrocket you'll get a fever um post-mortem calicid i can't say the word somebody's going to comment it um but anyways so after we die we get really hot and then once that fever passes we get it goes down and then we get super cold. And then why do we get that fever? Is it because the body's still trying to fight to stay alive? I, that's a good question. I, uh, I actually don't remember. I know they taught us in school,

but I just know that that's typically what happens. Um, it happens after you die. So after you die, the body heats up, it's a chemical reaction. And then it cools down. And then that's how rigor mortis sets in after a couple hours. Then lasts for some time. So technically, things can get erect during rigor mortis. However, that will pass. And for those that I already know who are wondering, penises shrink after you die by a couple of inches. Damn. So if you're already small to begin with, you are fucked. You got a belly button. that i already know who are wondering um penises shrink after you die by a couple of inches damn

so if you're already small to begin with you are fucked um you got a belly button you're um you're micro yes oh my gosh could you imagine that seeing a dead body and it's just like i would laugh i'd be like right on brother i would be so stoked for that dude see all these stories about there's one on tiktok it's fake it was on a parody website of, I had a baby with a dead man. Oh, yeah. She worked in the morgue and she, it's not possible. That's not true. You're not getting up there and that's not, it's not going down.

So they can't ejaculate after. No, hell no. So no ejaculation after death, boys. No, but however, you can extract semen within a limited amount of time after you die. But it has to be done by a professional. I would not know where to do that. And people have done that. Yeah, that's crazy.

To make babies, you know. Yeah, for sure. What's the youngest person you've ever encountered dead? And what is the oldest person you've ever encountered dead? Oh, that's quite the question. oldest person you've ever encountered dead oh that's quite the question um i have um i have for youngest i have been on many miscarriages so um i mean i have been to the hospital and i hold them in my hand um i've also had people call the funeral home and send pictures of they've had a miscarriage and they're only about 12 weeks

and we don't do cremations if they're only 12 weeks because even if they're under 20 sometimes it can be difficult because we might not get in any any ashes because they're just so small and there's not really much for bones that are have developed so um you know that's unfortunately that is the youngest and then the oldest i've had people over 100 years old before really and they're healthy as a horse up until you know and um yeah i don't think i want to live that long my guardian lived 101 and she was a bad bitch on deathbed was wearing bright red lipstick on her deathbed bro that's why I'm going out with lashes I'm definitely going out with lashes what is the craziest cause of death you've ever seen it's probably not that crazy because I've I've I've seen so many different

um and a lot of them are really depressing honestly um but i had a gentleman that worked like as a lineman and he was up super duper duper high like hundreds of feet up and he fell off of he was supposed to have his proper equipment on and um he fell all the way down oh um when i got there the medical examiner already had him in the body bag and so I was supposed to bring him for the autopsy. But the reason why that one sticks with me is because when I was on my way back, his cell phone started ringing in his pocket. And it rang and it rang and it rang all the way back to the morgue. And I couldn't, once that bag is sealed, I can't open it and answer it.

And it was probably one of the creepiest moments i don't even know if i call it creepy but just like surreal like knowing that somebody was calling him it like broke my heart and that i couldn't i did that for my husband i called i there was like 20 missed calls on his phone yeah because his he was on the phone with his um grandma when he crashed oh and so she called me and was like i think something just happened and i just sat there and i i hit repeat over and over and over oh yeah that's crazy so it's yeah it death is it's all around us and can happen to anybody and it's it's kind of wild yeah when it yeah um someone wants to know how long does a person stay involved uh you know

that it's hard to say because a lot of us don't know yeah i mean you don't go dig up the body to check later we don't just go and uh you know dig people up yeah i mean i have but i uh that was a fresh one so i mean it uh not like that was more sure that was mortician humor right there. We can't pass over that. Why did you have to dig someone up? Oh, it's a whole drama. So this guy died. He was younger. Very sudden. And his mom's still alive.

Bless her little heart. And we planned out the burial. And we buried him. Whole family came. And the next day I get a phone call from this man. And he is so fucking pissed at me. That I buried his nephew in his grave. came and the next day i get a phone call from this man and he is so fucking pissed at me that i buried his nephew in his grave as he stood there and watched me bury him in the grave turns out

that he wanted that plot because he wanted to be next to his mom and um what an awful human so he was sisters brother and sister so the sister was the one who buried her son so i had to call that poor little lady and it was a whole i mean they're the this dude's calling screaming at me she's crying and it was horrible that's something they don't teach you in school is that you are almost like this therapist and you have to mediate these situations you don't know that's in your job description so i had to call the cemetery we had to dig him up the guy would not drop it he was going to sue the funeral home he was had to call the cemetery. We had to dig him up. The guy would not drop it. He was going to sue the funeral home. He was going to sue the cemetery. So nobody did anything wrong.

But this guy claimed that that was his plot. So we had to dig him up. That's so sad. Poor lady. She had to pay to have the vault man come back out and the grave digger. Because it was a full burial. Yeah. Death brings out the worst and oh gosh oh it is

brutal it's so it's always about the money unfortunately yeah no it's that's why anytime my parents have passed or you know whatever happens with my dad i already told everybody i don't want anything and you guys divide it amongst yourselves i just don't want to deal with it no my mom died i didn't want anything she had. I was just like, no. That's awful. Rachel asks, what is the longest amount of time someone has been dead before they came to you? I picked up a gentleman. Nobody knew he had died. And he was in his home so long for so many months that he had like mummified.

Oh, my goodness he was um the color um he was a caucasian male but his skin had turned completely black i've seen pictures like that where they just turn completely black they turn completely black and um i mean there was no there was actually no smell there was no smell it had been so long all the gases were released and everything wow no fluids no nothing um it was it was actually super interesting to see, but very sad because his mail was piled up like nobody. No one cared enough to know he had passed. That's really sad.

I know. Like I said, I had a client for years because I was a hairstylist before all this. And she was a detective and she specialized in like death. That's her thing. And she would sometimes in cases that she could talk to me about she would show me pictures and that she's found many people like that where she was like they found out from like the electric company being like hey this person didn't pay their bill for a year can we do a welfare check and then they go and this person a year dead you know and like things things like that like she's found a lot of she's been through some crazy cases and there's one guy who like uses a

shotgun underneath here where this um she showed me the marbling because i was so i was so curious about that i was impressed you knew that term yeah and it literally looks like a marble counter when people marble in death it's like their body like expands and their skin turns like this porcelain white but then like all of like the arteries and like the the veins and stuff like kind of blow out a little bit so it looks like marble countertops i've seen it yeah it's so wild she she did say someone had died of like an overdose and i guess what they put in him i don't know if it was fentanyl or something like that it blew out all veins. So at first they thought she was tattooed, like heavily tattooed. But it was just one whole side of her body had all the veins literally exploded.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. Very, very strange. Okay. Have you or another mortician mixed up bodies? Like the wrong paperwork or given someone the wrong body? Oh my goodness. she's like well legally i can't say so actually i didn't this up um i um this um

we had this uh person that used to work at one of the funeral homes that he used to work at i I'm not going to say what funeral home it was, so this is anonymous. But he went to a hospital, picked somebody up from the hospital who had died, and we were supposed to bring him back, and then he was supposed to embalm this person. So he opened the body bag, and what we were expecting when he opened the bag was a 90-year-old little old white lady. And he opened the bag and there was a very, very small male African-American man in the bag. Oh, no. So the complete opposite of what we were supposed to have.

Oh, no. So he didn't say anything to anybody didn't tell a soul sealed the body bag back up drove another hours to this hospital and knocked on the door of the hospital and said you gave me the wrong body and they did the switch people got fired at the hospital it was never talked about again golly could you imagine just getting the wrong body yep and he tried the he so when you're the funeral director and you go to the hospital it's your job to make sure you leave with the right body too right so you you you look at the name on on the bag you look at uh the you sign them out like you're supposed to

double check shit and the security people are supposed to help you with that but what's funny about security when you do security to hospital when they interview you they don't tell you that you're gonna be um working with the dead too so a lot of those guys are petrified no they're big strong men you bring them down to the morgue and they're like i don't uh they're like this they're like i don't touch dead bodies you don't you don't you don't want to help no i i'm going to wait out here and they're like this. They're like, I don't touch dead bodies. You don't, you don't, you don't want to help. No, I, um, I'm going to wait out here. And there are these big, strong, muscular, hot men. I'm like, you pussy. Like an elephant. It's like the elephant and the mouse. Oh yeah. When an elephant sees a mouse, they get scared. Yeah. And I'm like, oh my gosh,

but you're so attractive. Not anymore. Um, have you accidentally ever left something on a body when cremating it yes is there jewelry yes yeah hate my life yep i did it one time so every time we cremate somebody we should look at their hands we should because sometimes they're in the body bag and uh i oh wait you cremate them in the body pack i didn't know that i thought they were completely i thought they were naked and you just threw them in the oven they're usually naked if they're in the body bag especially if they die at a hospital or if they die after they have an autopsy uh but sometimes they die like maybe they're on hospice or they die at home and then they'll have their clothes on and we don't put them in a body bag we just put them right in the cremation container but i accidentally cremated somebody with a ring

on and i had to call the family and tell them and the son told me he goes it's okay she got it out of a cracker jack box anyways oh so he said it really wasn't that special he said I just you know I got so lucky so lucky I never did it again yeah I was blessed that day because he just happened to be that one time he just said he was like oh not a big deal but I was honest about it and I told him because he could have been a douchebag and been like this was a yep diamond cut he could have i mean i mean right now telling you about it i have anxiety because i knew that i still now that i fucked that up and i still feel horrible yeah but he said he just he said it wasn't a big deal he said it was actually happy that it went with her because he said that was probably what you would

want oh so i got really you knew yeah let's do like two more questions. All right. This one's funny. Do you bury them with bras on or not? I will bury you in a bra if your family brings in a bra. Okay. If they bring you one in and you know, sometimes it makes your boobs look better because when we get old, our titties, they, you know, they go in your they go in your pits yep and so a lot of times i mean i'm helping a girl out and i'm dressing her and i'm i'm putting a little stuffing there anyways because they're so far down here so the bra kind of helps you're so sweet and i someone do that for me i would i want mine to look good so i don't want you to look like it's over here yeah so sometimes i'll ask them to if i need it if not maybe they know somebody's gonna get mad

at me because they're gonna be like i don't want one uh but i want you to look good at the end of the day you're not gonna feel it uh so if you bring one you get one if not maybe nobody's gonna see you then it doesn't matter yeah all right um has anyone ever asked for a body part of a loved one or a hair or a fingernail i don't back in the old days they did that and would put it in a frame i just didn't know what nowadays if people do things like that still i you know sometimes they ask they'll want um i can give them like the metal so like if grandma had a hip replacement i can give that to them i can pick it out after the cremation and give it to them if they want that. I don't know what they do with it, but sometimes they want that. I don't know.

I think I would want that. But I'm not going to. I don't have little bone saws in the back to take fingers. Like a wishbone. Well, you know, they would make hair wreaths and stuff. I've taken hair. Okay. Cut hair.

I've taken fingerprints. They make jewelry now. You can get a fingerprint of your loved ones um in silver or gold they're called um there's lots of different brands of them now um footprints yeah wow okay i didn't know that they're like things like that i know that like when i go shopping at like thrift stores and stuff i do see a lot of like these hair wreaths that people have done in the past i didn't know if that was a religious thing. Like, I don't know if different religions have different, like, options. Yeah, and nowadays, there's a new company out. They'll take your tattoos. No shit. Yeah, and so it looks like a cheese grater, and they send it along to the

funeral home, and I have to grate it off, and then they, I send it in, and they preserve the skin and jason i want you to keep the one that says your name right here that's insane she's great that bad boy off now you might find funeral directors that say they're not going to do it because it's quite the process i could imagine it's like a lady who cut up bodies yeah and they don't teach us how to do that in school there's a lot they don't teach you how to do in school and you just learn on the fly that's like beauty school yeah they teach you the basics and then throw you out into the world to fuck everybody's hair up yeah literally that's exactly what we do that's yeah yeah so there's always a little bit of something for everybody everybody's into something hey lauren thank you

for answering these questions you're so welcome lauren it was so nice to hear about your life and stuff like that i think we should get into into, let's, let's shift gears and let's get into the story that you brought to us. You want to do that? Yeah. All right. Let's do it. I'm so excited about this. I know me too. This is, this is new for me because listen, I'm going to just tell the truth. Okay. I listened to a couple of podcasts that were true crime podcast, Mimi's face. Cause she knows what I'm about to say and I don't see the fucking hype like for real it's literally like a fucking bedtime story that you're being read and I don't know I just feel like I think if I'm gonna do uh murder mystery stuff I

definitely want to talk about the story but I want to stop I want to do this I want to like do it in segments and let's, let's discuss it. Yeah. You know, dissect the story, dissect the story. Like, I don't, I don't know if maybe I listened to the wrong true crime podcasts, but to me it was very no effort. Bedtime story. Yeah. And I even hit Mimi. I was like, have we been overworking? Are we like not working smarter and not harder? Are we working harder and not not smarter because like it was just so simple so the story that you sent us i thought was amazing and i thought it was perfect that uh to talk about especially because you are knowledgeable in kind of what this woman was doing yeah um let me get let me get my focus on

all right ladies and gentlemen welcome to the first murder mystery story ever told on this podcast. And it's a good one. Lauren sent us this one and we were like, okay, girl. So this one is about a lady named Megan Hess and she is in Colorado. So I'm just going to read the first paragraph. The director of a funeral home, Megan Hess in Colorado was sentenced to 20 years in prison for charges including fraud after illegally selling bodies or body parts

from more than 500 victims without the consent of their families for over a decade like first of all okay you have been in the industry a long time um and i actually read that it is legal to sell human body parts right i you know you could sell just about anything to anybody that is crazy um but uh it's definitely uh frowned upon especially if the family doesn't know not being frowned upon yeah like don't sell the body parts i would definitely not advise illegal um the big thing is about consent okay definitely about consent um those those families are trusting you to take care of their loved one and when you decide to dissect them and sell things that you're not supposed to, instead of cremating them or burying them with everything they're supposed to have,

that is when you can get into a lot of legal trouble. And the thing about legal trouble with a funeral home is you cannot put a price tag on emotional damage, emotional distress. So a lot of judges will just, they just pick a number out of the air or they'll settle before. So it's a really tough, tough thing to even think about. I heard you say that they're not like buried with something they wanted. How would someone know? They really wouldn't. That's the, yeah.

Or like if somebody gets cremated and you don't really know if you're getting that you're that person no you're literally putting so much trust in a funeral home yeah i never thought about that yeah i spend so i have a little side note here about you know in case people did have questions about that and um it says that it is legal to sell human remains and a Reuters investigation found that the body broker industry is not closely regulated in many states. However, the government said agents had confirmed that hundreds of the bodies sold by Hess had been stolen as the families had not given informed consent for how the bodies would be used. Um, and it, and it's also illegal to sell infected body parts which she was still doing yeah yeah she just made me space i'm just so blown away by all this because i think like

ethically just like in your own conscious how could you do such a thing she she has flipped her humanity switch so much that she's not viewing them as human beings the most fucked up thing is that she brought her damn 69 year old mom into this read that second paragraph right there oh my gosh that's right oh my gosh okay so her mom is involved is this a family affair 69 year old shirley cock coach i don't know i don't know how you would pronounce her name that's so funny oh my goodness okay so she she was 46 oh wait megan has 46 and her mom is 69 so wait she was doing this for 20 years which means she was 26 when she started doing this yeah 26 no they said over a decade they said over a decade oh 20 years in prison i read that

wrong yeah decade okay so she was like in her 30s when she started doing this so she ran the sunset mesa funeral home in colorado and pleaded guilty to mail fraud oh so they got her for mail fraud the mom well keep going and aiding and abetting oh my god has a 69 year old mother surely cock cock it looks like it would be cock coach coach had also charges of male fraud and aiding and abiding as part of a plea deal and was sentenced to the 15 years could you imagine going to prison at 69 years old no no you're gonna die in there yeah literally yeah that's insane to me but like you but to imagine all the families that they affected with that you know like i feel like 15 years is like not shit i even feel like the 20 years because

she'll probably end up only doing like six is that how that works yeah so they'll give you like 20 years and you'll really serve like 10 depending on how. Yeah. It always is like it's called time and a half. So they'll like. Yeah. For. Well, I've dated nothing but felons. I was going to say we got the funeral home expert.

We got the jail expert. Yeah. Felon. I love felons. Yeah. That's awful that you would bring your mother into this. So what i'm understanding from this though is that they got hit with mail fraud well because shipping the parts right out

of out of the country they were selling them in in the country and out of the country is what i had read i would like to know where they found the people to buy the body parts so here's the thing they have a thing called body donation do you see that right there this whole thing on body donation right here do you know much about body donation lauren yeah yeah i went to a school um where we had a whole body donation program so um how that works is people usually get like a free cremation if they donate their body so it's become really popular lately is you can donate your body to science however if you want to do that it's kind of people are picking up on the free part so they want to help out students and then donate their

bodies so i believe that megan had kind of like signed up for this body donation thing and she had told these families that hey uh we have this program Is it okay if I take your mom's spleen and we'll send it off to the program? But she wasn't doing that. She was actually making money. And pocketing it. So these people thought their loved ones were going to like science. Yep, they did. And she was really just hacking them up and selling them on the black market.

Yep. So what they're saying is, like if you ask like what is whole body donation, it's most people are buried or cremated when they die, but some bodies are donated to science, like Lauren was saying, usually for medical research or education. And in most cases, whole body donations must be authorized by the donor prior to death or after death by relatives. Yeah.

I had someone i knew that got donated because he had this like incredibly rare cancer that was caused from asbestos that they had sprayed over the fields that his family worked in and he was a kid and would like pick stuff in the fields that they had in the family farm and the helicopter would come by and spray this asbestos and his whole family ended up getting this cancer where it turned the bones to cement oh yeah and it was super rare and he donated his body to science where they took the whole body basically and sent it to this college for them to dissect and look and see how they could find like cures for this cancer yeah that's

yeah you have to make sure you're donating your body to a good place they say right here that you can donate it to a university a state agency or a non-transplant tissue bank because some places um i saw that uh they were taking people for body donation and then using them for experiments like blowing shit up oh my goodness yeah that was a that's probably a whole nother case that's like disrespecting the dead yeah i wouldn't want to be one of those people that would scare the fuck out of me that's like the next level of like disrespect yeah you won't feel it but right well no but i mean this is like a it's like i don't know i feel like a

dead body is like sacred you know it is yeah you were saying following your body how are you not haunted like she must be haunted as fuck if these people like are following their bodies and they're like this bitch just cut me up did you see a picture of this lady oh dude first of all she's three years older than me she like come on the she looks like she's 70 yeah like she looks like she ate the body parts like something happened she had hair like rod stewart it's it's so tall she can hide all her secrets no it's crazy so you guys want to hear something that's crazy about selling body parts it is illegal to sell human fetuses that's where they draw the line that's where you draw the line yeah otherwise in almost every state it's legal to sell

the human remains of adults. One misconception promoted by some brokers is that it is illegal to sell body parts and that people who distribute them may only be reimbursed for processing, shipping, and other expenses. So that's where the mail fraud comes in because it's the shipping and all that stuff. What the process is. Oh, I believe they were also forging documents. So grandma, mama would sign the form saying that the family gave permission. And the family didn't give permission.

And then she would go back there, do the harvesting, and then send it off anyways and make money. So if these people were getting cremated, what was she giving them, like sand? So there's still other parts of the body. I mean, even if you empty all the organs out and maybe the tendons and the muscles, you're still going to have the, the main meat suit. She said meat suit. Yeah. Do you want to hear something sick?

You can re rent the body out. What? So like you can, it's legal. You can like send the body. So right here it says, can a broker rent the same body or body part repeatedly to different customers?

Answer is yes. For example, a torso might be rented to one medical group for training, returned, and then rented again to another set of doctors. Yes. Um, I, I, I actually, so when we were in mortuary school, uh, they really don't like you to talk about this, but, uh, the room that they kept all of the donors in, I mean, they have shelves and they're just stacked. And so they need to preserve them. I will never get that smell out of my nose. It lives there rent-free.

What does it smell like? I heard that a dead body burned smells like a bean burrito. Actually, that's a totally different question. Okay. Actually, it smells like really bad barbecue that's super burnt that you can't inhale. Oh. That's also a smell you do not get out of your nose but this is a different one this is like a chemically smell mixed with decomposition because they literally put these bodies in this like stronger than embalming fluid like this super strong solution and it strips away the color of your skin like everything and then they're able to open up so you can see all the tendons and things so each program so usually how it happens we as the

mortuary students we get the the the donor bodies last so the dental students will rent them and then the uh the how do they keep them fresh like with all those chemicals oh the smell i will never it stays on you too. Like in your hair and in your clothes, you go home. I have to shower twice. Like my husband could always tell when I was in lab and doing embalmings because of the smell. Oh my goodness.

I can't even describe it to you. I really couldn't. It's now, now let's circling back. Donation is a gift. It's a wonderful gift. I never would have learned how to embalm, but we're justizing talking about this right and it is what it is i'm really just cut i'm just telling you how it is so that's just how no i've never heard that a dead body smells good i don't think anybody no no yeah no no so i definitely think that you know if anybody's smelled any dead bodies

it's you yeah i said i have your fair share lots of free sniffs that would actually be a great marketable idea for you is create a perfume and call it something crazy because you are a mortician they actually have a they already have a perfume that's supposed to smell like a cadaver okay i don't know about smelling like a cadaver i was saying something that smelled good i'll mail it to you no i'm good i don't ever want to know what a damn cadaver smells like i like it i could tell you what decomposition smells like if you really want to know yeah let's why not um so have you ever had chicken go bad in your fridge yes and yeah one time we left four rotisserie chickens in our refrigerator on accident and it was like four months later by the time we found them and that was the worst smell ever oh

that's what it smells like yeah but combine that with heat put it outside so have you ever smelled your garbage can like again not trying to be disrespectful i'm just trying to tell you what it smells like um it uh outside in the heat and you open that can you're like whoa that's what that's what our body decomposition smells like wow goodness gracious yeah i had a agent one time tell me that like there's like a smell of decomp but then like when those little bubbles burst it makes the smell like 10 times worse. She said like the body will bubble up or like when it marbleizes and like the body gets big and like turns white. And then you can see all like the marbling on it. Marbling.

Yeah. That's like the worst. Death is such a just a terrible process. It's so interesting. Yeah. No, it's crazy. We could talk about it all day. Oh my goodness.

Okay. So she is cutting up bodies yep so they neither discussed nor obtained authorization for donation of the decedent's bodies or body parts for body broker services and the department of justice said in a statement adding that in some instances the families had specifically declined to donate the bodies and according to the plea deal Hess told mourning families that their loved ones would be cremated. So kind of like what we mentioned and instead sold the parts or their whole bodies, their whole damn bodies for scientific, medical, or educational purposes

at a body broker business she operated. So she also operated the business from the same premises as the funeral home. Can you talk about double dipping but do you want to know what's crazy to me i looked up how much money that she made off of selling these bodies and she only made like a million dollars in 10 years so was she low-balling like what is happening you know because i'm sorry but if i'm gonna face jail time you better give me a couple m's yeah like give me something to fucking be plush with when I get out of prison. That just tells you she never thought she was going to get caught and she was just doing it to be small. Right.

Yeah. Said 1.2 million. Damn. Yeah. What's, um, I don't do math. I do science. What's 1.2 million divided by 10 years? Oh God.

You're asking the wrong person. 1.2. I count money. I don't add it and subtract it. How much was it? I can't figure it and subtract it. How much was it? I can't figure it out. Yeah. I'm not the math whiz over here.

I can make money and count it. Yeah. 10 years. 10 years. She only made $120,000 a year. That's nuts. To be into. Can you imagine how your conscience would be?

She didn't have one. Yeah. I would be so freaked out. Like, I would feel like these people's spirits would kind of come back to haunt me. They had to have been haunting her ass all the time. Imagine her now just sitting in, like, this prison right now. Oh, just tormented by all the spirits? Yeah.

Can you imagine? I can't do it. I don't know how you went to bed at night knowing that you're literally cutting up people's loved ones and selling their body parts. Listen to this, though. Hundreds of bodies were harvested and sent across the world with destinations ranging from Fort Collins to Saudi Arabia. Okay, I'm sorry. That's illegal. That has to be illegal.

Yeah, yeah. And also, she was making way more than that. Yeah. That's what they were able to find. Right. Okay. She was definitely making way more than that. Yeah, for sure.

that's what they were able to find right okay she was definitely making way more yeah for sure a witness had said in the courtroom that we will never know the final resting place of our mom we will never know what happened to her is she on display somewhere is she in a medical waste bin somewhere was she chopped up like an old car that just gave me chills that's so disheartening to know that you had no idea where your loved ones ended up or who you have you know like she could have just given you like you said you know she could just mix them all together yep yep and just giving you a bag and just said oh this is your loved one you have no idea because if if someone got cremated think about that if someone got cremated and she still had the body she clearly had to cut it up still yeah so

whatever she gave the person couldn't have been the person if she's out there just you know hacking at them have you ever had to dismember a body uh no uh thankfully not that's a really big thing because uh i'll have families they'll they'll ask they'll say can I have grandma's gold teeth grandma always wanted me to have her gold teeth and I they don't teach me how to remove teeth in school can you picture me in the back with a hammer knocking those suckers out oh my gosh and I'll ask the families that I'm like no and if you want to hire a dentist that's fine they know how to do that you have to be so careful at the funeral home because desecration of a corpse is a really big thing so we always have to have

signatures that says it's okay to do something i've also never removed breast implants but really even for cremation because i heard they explode uh they don't explode but sometimes they can melt and then not fully melt away so they get a little gummy um the forbidden gummies on the bottom of the crematory floor. So you just kind of scrape it out. But what I do remove from the body is pacemakers. So you'll see those like under, you know, we remove those. But we have signatures and I get permission and I tell them like so that they know what's happening back there. And she, thankfully, I've never had to dismember a body.

Yeah, good. Okay. jeffrey domer shit no right i i would never do that i i mean i have a stomach for a lot of things i've definitely put people back together oh i've just never taken them apart goodness gracious i couldn't imagine in such circumstances despite lacking any authorization cock Koch and Hess recovered body parts from or otherwise prepared entire bodies of hundreds of descendants for body broker services. In the few instances where families agreed to

donation, Hess and Koch sold the remains of these descendants beyond what was authorized by the family which was often limited to small tissue samples, tumors, or portions of skin. Hess and cock also delivered cremate cremains to families with the representation that the cremains were not that were that of the descendant when frequently that was not the case that was exactly what i was

wondering yeah as if they were just giving these families just random sex yeah that's so disheartening that's crazy you know we do have people that don't get picked up from the funeral home sometimes what do you do oh my goodness they just sit on a shelf forever is it just because they don't have family or uh they have family i think sometimes they just don't want to acknowledge the loss i mean we call we write we you know and every funeral home has one we have shelves with people that never get claimed so she could have been taking um ones that were never claimed and just taking you know handfuls out and adding it to if she really did harvest these bodies for everything that they were worth that she could get um even more gross read the last

i saw that yeah uh according to the plea agreements hess and cock would also ship bodies and body parts that tested positive for or belonging to people who had died from infectious diseases including hep b and c hiv and oh my God, I can't. After certifying to buyers that the remains were disease free, the shipments would be through the mail or on commercial air flights in violation of Department of Transportation regulations regarding the transportation hazardous. That is so sickening. I mean, okay, but what are people doing with these things?

What do you buy a body part for? Because clearly this is very... You mean like if it's not medical, what is your point of having a dead body? Yeah, what are you doing to it? Are you domering it? Yeah, they probably are. Or did you... There was a case recently where they were supposed to be donating bodies up at Harvard

and they had people buying the skin or the heads or the skulls and then they had their little shops that they, I mean. Like oddity shops? Mm-hmm. It's a whole black market for their shit. That is crazy. I wonder how many harvested human, because I have a human skull that I bought from an oddity shop

that's hanging on my wall in my house. Ooh. I wonder if that was. Why did I always think that was fake? No, it's real. That's real that's real yeah i know you know as scary as i am about shit like that when i saw it you don't even like remain create like cremation people in your home i know but you have someone's skull yeah what if

i just saw a lamp i was in um where was i i was in kelly i was in kelly and we went to this shop in the whole shop they had little drawers with teeth people's teeth i don't even know how they got them with teeth they had a vertebrae from someone that had been cremated and it was in a lamp they had the lamp i didn't i until then i actually didn't even know you could go to these stores i asked the guy i said where did you buy this from he goes we actually get it from estate sales so wherever the fuck these people so rich people yep harvesting fucking body parts and just having them made into lamps and shit there will always be a market for anything ed gein of them yeah people are crazy some people are crazy yeah ed gein was obsessed with like the idea of having

body parts on display like he's the one that they made like texas chainsaw masquerade after and everything because he like dug up his mom and cut out her vagina and painted it silver and put a bow on her clit and hung it on the wall i'm not shocked that often but holy yeah he's like well they considered him a serial killer only because technically he killed three people but he wasn't like one of those people that like went for death he was more obsessed with the idea of death versus actually killing people so he would dig up people and just like cuddle them and hold them and then like he would eat out of skulls like his cereal bowls were just like upside down skulls he's the one that like sewed all the skin that's an itch that will never get scratched and like belts and like jackets

and stuff that's where they made Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's like based off of his story because he had an obsession with the idea of death. So I feel like these lamps and stuff, it's like the same. The Ed Gein effect is like it was just an obsession with death. And it is an itch that can be scratched. And they just constantly, you know, those kind of things. Now, don't get me wrong. I love taxidermy and all of those. Yeah, I love taxidermy too all those yeah i love taxidermy too has taxidermy all over the place but they're not

humans yeah and it's like an appreciation of you know a cycle of life i feel like it's a form of art but humans i feel like there's such much more of like a connection like a soul tie to those parts that that like bothers me to think about yeah no for sure i never really i think about if those people consented or not like when i was in that shop they had three full skeletons and one of them was like from the 1900s or something and part of her like rib cage was like pushed in and i just wonder like did she consent to being dug up and then i just that's what i think about it what would cause her chest to be caved in i it's hard to say they could have dug her up and um you know the the coffin that she was buried in the wooden coffin could have collapsed the ground could have caved in and then they dug it

all up anyways i mean it's so hard to say that's wild yeah think about yeah you're right like the coffin you know they didn't make nice coffins back then no or it could have been how she died and they just um you know everything decayed away from her and then finally showed it's so hard to say and they didn't tell me i didn't ask i just you know that's so i really thought like dismembering bodies was illegal yeah me too until i fucking read this article and started researching it so what they really got megan for was shipping the shipping mail fraud these parts and then the lying to the family documents and stuff so that's how the mom got caught yeah and all of this but imagine that

like that's what you choose to do with your life but she didn't even get charged for mailing the infectious bodies where was the charges for that because all i saw was aiding and abetting shipping and mail fraud she did a plea agreement oh she did a plea agreement um she's like i'm up shits creek without a paddle so let me take a plea yeah let me take anything i possibly can she's like i'm about to be eating big wanda's but dussy she's like let me only do this for 20 years and not 40 you're very smart oh my gosh yeah very smart honestly just like the ethic part of all of this is just i mean beyond me like there's no ethics yeah the one time i did hair for someone who had passed that still sticks with

me to this day and to think how many she did over that 10 year span and you had them coming in all day, every day. That's like how busy. I won't touch dead bodies. Last time I touched, I wouldn't even touch my mom when she passed and I was in the room, she was dead. I was able to say my goodbyes to her in the hospital. I wouldn't touch her because the last time I touched a dead body, I ended up with the worst suicidal ideation I've ever had. Of course, it was the same time around a bunch of shit that had been happening, but I went to a funeral and touched my friend's chest and told him that I loved him. And I'm telling you, I battled with suicidal ideation for almost a year or two years after that. Oh, so it's like two years. Yeah,

it was a good two years and I will never touch a dead body again. So I can't imagine how this woman is touching all these dead bodies and just the karma that she has reaped for herself okay so i want to know so when you put your hand we got into my trauma um so when you put your hand on their chest is it just because it's cold is it just because it didn't feel like how you thought it was going to feel is that why it triggered you when you no i i have always been able to see spirits. I've always been able to feel things I've always been able. So this was a friend who was violently killed. Oh my gosh. And I think what happened was whatever he was into that caused that situation to happen,

latched onto me, the dark entity that was following him because I just, I lovingly went down on his chest and I was like, I love you so much like that. And I swear right then I could just, I could feel him in the funeral room and the whole, he was watching the funeral from the corner of the room. Like, and I told my husband that I was like, chisels here. I was like, he's watching this entire funeral. And, um, I just went home and literally it was like immediately just depression. And like, I mean, I'm talking like Lauren, when I tell you it, I told Jay the best way to describe it. And like I said, I was going through a lot of other shit at the time too. I had just lost it. I just had a miscarriage. I was going, I had just had my breast implants removed. So, I mean,

there's a number of factors, but this all ties into each other. So it's like, I'll never touch a dead body again because of that. But it was like eternal sadness. It was like, he was showing me like, this is how sad I am. I want you to feel how sad I am. You know, it was just the worst feeling. Like I, I was so tired that the thought of living to 50 exhausted me. So how did you, how did you come out of that? Did you, I'm a fighter. Did you banish that, those, that away? Like that, that I prayed, I, you know, I've done, I prayed, I, I don't really, I, Jesus is literally the only thing that probably pulled me out of that. And it took a good, almost two years. I talk about it a lot on the podcast, you know, cause I went through it, but Jesus exercise will to live, will to not let the darkness win. You know, when you get that low, you just get to a point where you're like me personally gets to a point where I'm like,

I'm not going to let the devil win. I'm not these thoughts, this darkness, this isn't me. Like I, I'm a, I love light, you know? so i'm obsessed with dark things i'm curious about them but i don't want that to be in me you know so it was just a fight it literally was i fought for my life for two straight years of just mimi saw it i went through hell it was crazy um but yeah so that's why i'll never touch a dead body. So this lady, I don't know how she fucking has touched and done the dead, the dead. So wrong. I mean, obviously she's, she's getting her karma now, but spiritually we're in spiritual warfare 24 seven. Yeah. And I'm not one of these crazy like Bible thumpers, but I do know that there is another side of life and it's spiritual

warfare that we're always going through. There's always light and dark that's going on around us you know so i don't know how it hasn't came back to her i mean yeah i would love to know what she's going through if she's ever had any type of you know experiences yeah going through this we should probably reach out and try to interview her well she's in prison for 20 years so she's probably not doing much else yeah we'll go do an interview in the prison so rod can you try you should try i would try yeah we could we'll see how the murder mystery i would want to bring myself to someone like that yeah we could do a phone call i i would yeah we could do no we could go visit her in prison if you want to go let's see if these murder mystery podcasts pop off we might be doing one a month so we'll see how it goes i will fly with you to go out there that would be fun we definitely would need you to be a normal

hair looks like now in prison a flat she's not getting that height she said she is not getting that fucking volume all the lies went she said all flat well guys thank you for tuning into our first murder mystery podcast lauren why don't you tell people where they can find you shout out all of your socials yeah so you can find me on facebook instagram and tiktok at lauren the mortician watch out on facebook folks there's lots of fake ones um and uh yeah check me out on tiktok yay thanks for having me yeah thanks mimi thanks for sitting in oh you're welcome i love it i think we like mimi and on the podcast it's kind of i love her i know i'm gonna take her home with me please don't she is my right hand woman i cannot survive without her i'm also

taking the dog yeah he won't go this is taking the dog too fucking he won't go this dog is so bougie i'm telling you chachi is like this he's like my mom is my mom and i'm not he's the most loyal animal i've ever had and i love that about him such a baby but definitely if these murder mysteries pop off we're gonna have to bring you back for another one because i think it'll be awesome let's go yay thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of dumb blonde i will see you guys next week bye