House of 200 Corpses

House of 200 Corpses – by Liam Sweeny.

So this is a month old, which is truly appropriate to what the rest of this story entails. A funeral home in Penrose, CO is in hot water, or by now it should be soaking in hot water, after it was revealed that 189 bodies were being improperly stored. The funeral home is called “Return to Nature Funeral Home,” and their gist is to let you go right to the dirt, no chemicals, no non-biodegradable caskets. Sounds great, but when you don’t refrigerate 189 bodies, things start to smell.

I think it would be hard for a guy who’s never caught a whiff of one dead human body to describe the not-so-delicate aroma of nearly two hundred stiff ones, but suffice it to say, one of the coroner’s office employees got a rash from just walking in there. So it smelled that bad.

The governor, Jared Polis, declared it a disaster area so that he could free up resources to deal with it, including the state’s emergency management agency. The FBI showed up too, the ones that dealt with 9/11 and such. They said identifying the bodies would be a lengthy endeavor.

Apparently, the funeral home got evicted, and were being sued by their crematorium. I hate to say this, and don’t think of trying this, but if the owners could’ve burned the place down and killed two birds.

I say don’t you do that, but maybe don’t let nearly 200 bodies rot and stink up the town first.

The crazy thing, and why I picked this, is that they (Colorado) still don’t know if a crime was committed here. Colorado has notoriously lax funeral regulations. Maybe that’s why an organic, all-natural planting is possible there.

I guess it’s sort of truth in advertising. They promise you no bulky caskets and no embalbing, and that’s kind of what happened, right?

More from Liam Sweeny…