Horror stories often concern death or dead bodies. Today's real life horror story comes from a Philadelphia hospital, where a corpse turned out to have a surprise.
Unzipping the body bag, a handful of forensic examiners in the room saw something they’d never seen before.
Something was moving around in the torso of the rotting, still-clothed cadaver with a “decent-sized cavity” where the chest and internal organs once resided.
Think of the examiners' mental state at that point. Then:
“One of the techs saw movement inside the torso,” according to a source, who heard about the case later that day directly from someone in the examination room. “They quickly and correctly ascertained that one of our town’s prolific Norway rats was living ... in that semi-exposed torso cavity.”
Which has bad enough, but things ramified:
the group brainstormed how best to remove the rat, which had apparently developed a taste for human flesh and organs...
From the way the body was decomposed, the flesh decomposed, the body hollowed out, it looked as if the rat had been in there for a little while.
Again, imagine the participants' minds once they realized this.
One had a definitive response:
Someone from Vector proceeded to yank the animal from the body by hand and – after being asked “you’re not going to kill it, are you?” – stomp it with a boot. This move, while brutal, helped stave off public-health concerns about a rat roaming the city with bloodlust coursing through its veins.
“The rat had to be terminated,” said the eyewitness...
Philadelphia Gothic, or just medical horror?
(thanks to Jesse "Nom Nom Nom" Walker)
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