Back

John Doe

(This is the original short story that would eventually be turned into Tales From The Morgue #1)

So I used to work at a morgue and it was always kind of a creepy job being around dead bodies all the time however there was one incident that happened at work that really scared me and it still freaks me out to this day. One night at work we had a body get called in. We identified him as a 21 year old man named David Turner but we weren’t able to determine a cause of death which was kind of odd but nothing too strange. Here’s where things get really crazy though. The cops end up going to David’s house to notify any family members of what happened. When the cops get there, a man answers the door and they tell him what happened. The man then said that this was impossible because he was David Turner. They checked his ID and everything and it all matched up. Anyways David ended up coming down to take a look at the body to see if maybe he could identify it and the resemblance was extremely uncanny. The body looked exactly like him right down to the very specific little minute details. It was honestly so terrifying and when he walked in the morgue, I felt like I just witnessed a walking corpse although I assume this was probably just as terrifying for him as it was for me. The body looked so much like him that I think they even had the same exact fingerprints. I asked David if maybe he had an identical twin brother since it would explain the resemblance between him and my corpse and why we misidentified the body as him but he said he was an only child. Me and the cops asked David a few more questions but he didn’t know anything and since he couldn’t give us any noteworthy information, we let him go home and I imagine he just tried to forget this whole thing and put this incredibly odd and scary incident in the back of his mind. The next day when I come into work everything looks normal and exactly like it always does except there’s just one thing. The body is missing. I went to go check the security cameras to see if someone took it but the footage showed absolutely no indication that someone took the body or that the footage was tampered with. There was also no sign of a break in anywhere. No locks were unlocked that shouldn’t have been and everything was exactly like I left it last night. I never got closure on that and to this day I still have no idea where the body went, who my John Doe was, and why it looked so much like some random guy and it’s one of those things that keeps me up at night and leaves me thinking and wondering.

Read the updated version that became Tales From The Morgue #1 here