The Undertaker

This spooky tale was sent to me by M.M of Kansas City. Tales like this are far from unsual, however in this case the undertaker was working on a corpse - when a ghost came to call!

I have worked all my life in the undertaking business, and since it is a family business, I have been around dead people from a very young age. Therefore, working all hours in a mortuary really doesn't bother me at all. I guess most people wouldn't understand that, it would freak most people - if you werent used to it.

Tales of ghosts and such are quite common in my profession and I have heard more than a few. In fact my father, the founder of the business and a hard-headed old-fashioned protestant, told me before he died several years ago that he had witnessed a ghost twice, on two different occassions, although surprisingly never through his work.

Well I was working late one night, laying out a badly decomposed corpse belonging to a man who had committed suicide by drowning himself, as it came to my knowledge, in the local lake and his body wasn't found for several days. I was just doing the usual stuff - preparing to infuse the embalming fluids - when I realised something was making me feel uncomfortable, not something I was even noticing as I was concentrating hard on what I was doing with the corpse.

I had the overwhelming feeling that there was a presence in the room, just the feeling you would get if you were on your own and someone entered the room. When I looked around there was a very clear figure of a man there, fully dressed, standing watching the procedure. Im not sure how long he was there before I noticed.

He jsut stood there and stared, before turning and walking away. He didnt go two steps before he just disappeared. It was only then I realised he was a ghost. The hairs on my body stood right-up, the only time this has ever happened to me.

Looking back (this was about three years ago) it still sends shivers up my spine. I know the only door into the building was locked and the big bay doors we use to back the hearses up to is always closed and padlocked until we have a coffin going out - so there is no way this man got into or out of the building the usual way.

And he made no sound, not even when he walked away.

What I found strangest of all though was that this man was not known to me. I did not recognise him and he was definately not the man I was working on.

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