Years after the closure of a funeral home, three friends ventured into the grimy, dilapidated building to find a grisly scene of death
A group of urban explorers’ visit to an abandoned funeral home ended with police being called after they made an horrific discovery. The Swanson Funeral Home in Flint, Michigan, US had been closed by the authorities after unrefrigerated human bodies were found in filthy conditions during an inspection in 2017.
Neighbours had been complaining about a general smell of decay from the building. When inspectors from the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) visited the facility they found maggots crawling over floors and work surfaces and nearly a dozen human corpses that had been left unrefrigerated and were simply stacked up along the walls in cardboard boxes.
When the three explorers ventured into the dilapidated building five years later in June 2022, they found something that chilled them to the core.
Photographer April Vertucci, who uses the name Harley.Q.Urbex when she uploads videos of her exploring adventures to TikTok, told The Mirror: “A lot of people knew about the funeral home so we thought we wouldn’t have luck… But I walked up to the door and pulled and the door opened. Lock had been previously cut it looked like. I walked back to the car and told the guys the door was open.”
When the funeral home had finally closed its doors, staff left behind embalming chemicals and equipment and even a Cadillac hearse in the garage.
Over the years since its closure, vandals had broken in, leaving graffiti on the walls and looting the various syringes and sets of PPE left behind by the former staff. But on the day they visited April and her friends Nick and Matt believed they were alone in the building.
So when they came to a creepy stairwell that appeared to lead into the building’s basement, it seemed safe enough to venture down into the gloom.
“Matt is ahead of me going down the stairs,” April recalled. “He yells out ’Is that real?’ And calls for Nick and he comes from around the corner.”
In the centre of the otherwise virtually-empty basement stood a metal structure that resembled a jail cell. And, lying crushed beneath it was the body of a man.
“I am standing above the casket lift next to the stairs and hear them confirm that the body is in fact real and dead.”
The “jail cell” was in fact a large goods lift used to ferry coffins from the basement to the ground floor. The dead man is believed to have been a scavenger who had been trying to steal scrap metal from the site. A mobile phone lay just inches from the dead man’s outstretched arm.
April told the Detroit Metro Times: “You could see he had tried to crawl out from underneath [the lift].”
“I’ve done some crazy s***, but I never expected to come across a dead body, and especially not one crushed to death by a lift. We were all pretty freaked out.”
The shocked urban explorers immediately called the authorities. April told the Mirror: “We were interviewed by police and during that time the coroner came and stated the body had been there for six days making us impossible of having anything to do with the incident and we’re sent on our way.”
Police did not release the name of the accident victim, who was believed to have died several days before the gruesome discovery.
O’Neil D. Swanson II, owner of the funeral home, told reporters that the man had been “crushed because he cut a cable” to steal metal wire from the building, causing the lift to fall on top of him.
“It’s unfortunate that this happened,” he added. “But he had no business being in my facility.”
He said that since the business had been closed the building had been ransacked by intruders: “Unfortunately, criminals and thieves have come into that building, and they destroyed the electrical system, destroyed the plumbing system, took out wire took out, copper piping,”
Swanson added that he hoped to take action against the three explorers that had discovered the body, complaining: “They’re trespassers, they broke into my funeral home, and they had no business being on my property.”
April stressed that – like all responsible urban explorers – they hadn’t caused any damage and had entered the property through an unlocked door.
Several other teams of urban explorers, including a group from the Abandoned Central YouTube channel, have followed April and her friends into the eerie Swanson Funeral Home.
She’s also returned to the eerie location, explaining: “I went back. I know it’s nuts but I did. It was open just like the last time.”
Swanson has also gone on record to reject the findings of the LARA inspectors, claiming: ”We didn’t have a bunch of decomposing bodies inside of our facility when the state came in,” he says. “They absolutely were not decomposing. They were absolutely unrefrigerated, but waiting to be processed.”
A relative of Swanson, operating a nearby funeral home, stressed that his business, which also bears the name Swanson Funeral Home, had no connection with O’Neil D. Swanson II.