A true story from my years working at a funeral home

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor

Before I became The Paranormal Professor, before the investigations and the keynotes and the book, I worked at a funeral home. I was a host, which meant I held doors open, shook hands, made grieving families feel welcome, and occasionally drove a van to pick up the deceased from airports and transfer facilities across the region.

I loved that job. The people I worked with were among the most compassionate professionals I have ever known, and being present with families in their most vulnerable moments shaped me in ways I am still discovering. Working at a funeral home teaches you things about human dignity that no classroom can replicate.

It also, on at least one occasion, produced a story I have been telling at dinner tables for over twenty years. And I have never once told it without the room going completely silent right before it erupts.

I tell it with complete respect for everyone involved, including Martha, who deserved a far smoother ride home than I gave her. Sometimes life hands you a situation so absurd that the only honest response is to laugh at yourself. I was very much the one who deserved to be laughed at here.

The Motivation

I was dating a young woman named Shannon at the time. That morning she had shown me a Victoria's Secret catalog, pointed to the cover, and suggested that if I got home early enough, we might head to the beach for a picnic. If you have ever been a young man who thought today might finally be the day your relationship took a significant step forward, you will understand exactly why I was out the door before she finished the sentence.

I had never been so motivated to get to work in my entire life.

The Assignment

I arrived at the funeral home in a state of considerable optimism. My colleague Dan, one of the funniest human beings I have ever worked alongside, greeted me with the news that I would be driving to Michigan to pick up a transfer. He mentioned that the ferry crossing would save significant time. He mentioned that his mentor, Miriam, ran the funeral home I was headed to and that she was a force of nature.

He did not mention several things that would have been extremely useful to know.

I climbed into the floral van, punched the destination into a GPS I had never used before, and headed for Michigan with Shannon's swimsuit occupying roughly eighty percent of my thoughts.

Miriam

I pulled up to a small funeral home in a quiet Michigan town and heard a voice before I saw a single person. It was coming from somewhere near the hedges at the front of the building. I looked left. I looked right. I looked straight ahead.

Then I looked down.

Miriam was approximately four foot five, wearing a green director's jacket, and trimming those hedges with the focused intensity of someone who had never taken a day off and was not about to start. She had very nearly blended into the shrubbery entirely. I genuinely almost missed her.

Miriam looked at the floral van. Then she looked at me.

"They sent you with the floral truck," she said. It was not a question.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Come inside."

Now. I need to stop here and prepare you for something.

Martha was not in a box.

This was information that would have been enormously helpful to receive before driving to Michigan. Martha was on a patient gurney, prepared and dressed and, as Miriam described her with unmistakable pride, ready for her show. Martha was also, and I say this with complete respect, a large woman. I am talking about a woman who could have walked into an NFL training camp and made the roster. She was a significant physical presence, even in repose.

I showed Miriam the back of the floral van. She studied the situation in silence. She looked at Martha. She looked at the floral cart. She looked back at Martha. Then she turned to me with the calm certainty of a woman who had solved harder problems before her first cup of coffee.

"We are going to tape her to your floral cart," she said.

Just like that. We are going to tape her to your floral cart. As if this were the most natural solution in the world. As if people taped large women to floral carts every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

I said nothing because there was genuinely nothing to say.

The Transfer

The floral cart did not have locking wheels. Please keep that detail in mind.

Miriam took one side of the gurney. I took the other. We began the process of shifting Martha onto the cart, and within approximately four seconds we discovered the central problem with our plan: the moment I applied any sideways pressure, the floral cart began rolling away from the gurney in the opposite direction. Martha began to follow the cart. The gurney began to drift the other way.

Everything was separating at once.

What happened next was pure instinct. I went underneath Martha, put my back directly against hers, and planted myself between the patient gurney on one side and the rolling floral cart on the other. I became, in that moment, the only thing standing between Martha and the floor. I was the load-bearing wall. I was the keystone. I was sweating through my shirt in a funeral home in Michigan holding a dead woman off the ground with my back while trying not to let either wheeled surface roll more than an inch in any direction.

I turned my head toward Miriam as calmly as I could manage.

"Is there anyone else in the building who might be able to help us?"

Miriam looked at me. She looked at Martha. She looked at my face, which I can only imagine was an extremely specific shade of panic.

"I'll get Horace," she said.

And then she disappeared through the doorway, leaving me completely alone with Martha and approximately three hundred pounds of rapidly developing regret.

A moment later, the doorway darkened.

Horace was Miriam's brother. And when Horace walked through that door, the first thing I thought of was Lurch from the Addams Family. Tall, broad, unhurried, and possessed of the quiet energy of a man who had seen considerably stranger things than this and handled all of them without raising his voice. Horace took one look at the situation, positioned himself, and shoved Martha the rest of the way onto the floral cart with a calm efficiency that I found genuinely beautiful in that moment.

Horace was my hero.

Martha was on the cart. Crisis averted.

Miriam then went to work with tape and cardboard boxes. I want to be clear that Miriam was gifted. What she constructed in the next few minutes was not just a solution. It was a work of engineering. When she finished, Martha was secured to that floral cart in a way that could only be described as thorough. Martha was not going anywhere.

I loaded her into the back of the floral van, shook hands with Miriam and Horace, and listened to Miriam inform me that she intended to have a very significant conversation with Dan at the earliest opportunity. Then I was back on the road, one eye on the clock and the other occasionally drifting to the rearview mirror where Martha's face was visible in the back.

After the first hour it stopped feeling strange. I even found myself glancing up at Martha occasionally and sort of nodding. You adjust.

The Car Wash

The funeral home had firm rules about returning vehicles. Full tank of gas. Clean exterior. Back in the garage before closing. I was also under strict instructions never to leave the van unattended with a body inside, which meant that lunch, gas, and washing the van all needed to happen without me stepping away from Martha for a single minute.

That is when I spotted the truck stop. Drive-through. Gas station. Automated car wash. All in one location.

One stop. Get everything done at once. Shave forty-five minutes off the return trip. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Shannon made a brief reappearance.

I ordered lunch. I filled the tank. I pulled up to the automated car wash, entered my code, and sat there eating while I waited for the cycle ahead of me to finish.

Now there are two things I should tell you at this point. First, the floral van's tires were well past their prime. They had seen better days considerably before I ever got behind the wheel. Second, and this is important, automated car washes involve large amounts of soap on the ground, which is not a surface that aging tires handle with any kind of confidence.

As I eased forward into the entrance of the car wash, the van began to spin.

Not dramatically. But enough. I was stuck right at the threshold, tires turning without finding anything to grip, with Martha in the back and the dawning realization that I might be about to explain to my employers why the funeral home van needed to be towed out of a car wash in Michigan. I should also mention that the funeral home strongly preferred hand washing to automated car washes. I had not thought about that until this exact moment.

Shannon was now the furthest thing from my mind.

I did what any reasonable person in a completely unreasonable situation would do.

I floored it.

I pressed that accelerator with everything I had. For a moment nothing happened. Then I heard it, the tires finally grabbing traction, and suddenly the floral van was rocketing forward through that car wash at what felt like thirty five miles an hour, hitting every brush and jet at full speed, and I looked up and saw the end of the tunnel coming toward me fast and had approximately one fraction of one second to make a decision.

I hit the brakes.

And Martha's foot caught me square in the back of the head.

My head went into the rearview mirror. The rearview mirror came off the windshield. And I sat there, pinned completely and thoroughly beneath a very large woman who was still taped to a floral cart with no locking wheels, watching the brushes go around and the water spray past, for the full fifteen to twenty minutes of the deluxe wash cycle.

Just me. And Martha. And the gentle hum of the car wash.

It was a long fifteen minutes.

The Return

When the wash cycle finished, I climbed out, performed what I can only describe as a full-body shudder, reattached Martha to the floral cart with every remaining piece of tape in the van, and got back on the road.

I pulled into the funeral home approximately fifteen minutes late. Dan was already wearing the expression of a man who had recently received a phone call from Miriam. When I mentioned that the rearview mirror had somehow come loose during the trip, he barely looked up.

Those things come unglued all the time, he said.

Martha was received with the dignity she deserved.

I drove home.

Shannon was standing on my doorstep in a Victoria's Secret swimsuit with a picnic basket over her arm.

She asked me how my day was.

I told her she would never believe it.

She did not.

A Final Note

The men and women who work in funeral service are among the most dedicated and compassionate professionals I have ever had the privilege of knowing.

Miriam was extraordinary. The calm she brought to an impossible situation, the care she showed for Martha even under pressure, the pride she took in her work- these are the qualities that define the best people in that profession. Dan made every shift better simply by being there. And Horace, wherever you are, I owe you one.

And Martha. We only met under the most unusual of circumstances, and the ride home was not what either of us would have planned. I hope she would have found it at least a little funny.

Working at that funeral home taught me that caring for the dead is serious and honorable work. It also taught me that even in the most solemn of professions, life has a way of reminding you that you are human.

And sometimes it does that at thirty-five miles an hour in an automated car wash in Michigan.