The Ghost Room
In the scene photos, Dottie's home looked like my dream country cottage. Hidden in the woods, the brick rancher with its shutters, chimney, and front porch looked compact and cozy, perhaps the home of an aging middle-class couple, their children long scattered. Then I noticed the unmown lawn littered with tree debris, the walkway covered with crunchy windblown oak leaves, and window panes festooned with cobwebs. The police cruiser parked in front of the garage shattered any lingering romantic illusions.
A police officer, not the lady of the house, opened the front door for Linda, a coroner investigator from my office.
"She's back there, in the bathroom," the officer said, pointing towards the back of the house. "You better suit up before you go in, there's a lot of insect activity."
It was tempting, but Linda knew better than to make a beeline for the dead body. Protocol required that she first look all around for clues to the elderly woman’s life and death. A talent for snooping was just as essential as a strong stomach in her line of work. Looking around the living room, Linda discovered another body, this one already cremated, the ashes stored in an urn on the mantelpiece. According to the funeral home receipt, Ronald had died about five years ago.
The amount of dust covering every surface suggested housecleaning had stopped at least six months earlier. Not more than a year, in any case, because the most recent mail and receipts on the dining table were dated about a year earlier. Curiously, the refrigerator contained half-gallon plastic bottles of low-fat milk dated years earlier, but very little else. Had Dottie starved to death, maybe too sick to shop or eat at the end?
Linda was prepared for the stench and mess of decomposition with a respirator and a Tyvek suit, but paper booties would have sufficed. The passage of time had left little but a skeleton partially draped with leathered skin. It didn’t take those dining table receipts to see that Dottie had died about a year ago, maybe longer. It looked like her only visitors in that time had been the ancestors of the thousands of dead flies piled up around her body.
Where were the smiling people in the family photos and those who had signed the greeting cards on display around the room and on the refrigerator? "Dear Dottie, Happy Birthday, ..." Well, at least it shouldn’t be hard to find next of kin to claim the body and make funeral arrangements.
I was wrong. The funeral director confirmed that Ronald had been Dottie’s husband, but Dottie had made no arrangements for her own demise, at least not with that funeral home. The only relative I could find was a distant nephew who for unknown reasons decided not to claim her body. Dottie, like most Americans, hadn't planned for the inevitable. No will, no prearrangements, not even a lawyer. After months of storing her body in the morgue freezer in hopes someone would claim Dottie, I issued a final death certificate—presumed natural causes—and ordered a cremation at the county’s expense. When the funeral home delivered the black plastic box with her cremains to the Coroner’s Office, Dottie joined dozens of others on a shelf in the Evidence Room.
***
“This is the Evidence Room," Shirley, the office manager, said giving me a tour on my first day as Coroner. "You and I are the only people with access."
After swiping her security badge, she pushed open the heavy metal door and we entered a small windowless room that resembled the jail cells I’d seen on my recent tour of the county prison. Jumbled paper bags sealed with red evidence tape filled a cardboard box. A file on a shelf was labeled "Keep Forever." Another shelf was labeled “Ligatures.” But it was the dozens of small black boxes, stacked one on top of another that caught my eye. Shelves full of them, overflow on the floor.
"Those are the unclaimed cremains," Shirley said, following my gaze. "We don't have anywhere to bury them, so we keep them in here."
Unclaimed? Like airport baggage?
The mandatory week of coroner training before I was sworn in to office had taught me about airplane crashes, blood spatter, clandestine graves, inquests, and even DNA. It had not covered my duties as keeper of my county’s unclaimed bodies.
Evidence Room? I began to think of it as the Ghost Room. A cemetery without graves, cremains languishing on shelves in a room right next to the break room where we made coffee, ate lunch, and looked at a sign on the refrigerator that read “Don’t take life too seriously, none of us are getting out alive.”
Who had these people been? How had they ended up here? I did my own snooping, delving into the case histories of those in the Ghost Room, seeking answers to my questions.
Jake, in his forties when he died, had a history of drug use and lived in a partially-burned out trailer in a junk yard. One cold winter morning a neighbor found him lying outside the trailer, dead of an opioid overdose. Jake’s estranged wife still lived nearby but refused to claim his body.
Alan was arrested for public drunkenness in his late fifties. Taken to the local police lock-up, he immediately proceeded to hang himself from the cell bars with his underwear. Alan's father was called about whether he would take responsibility for the body. “No, I will not,” he said, and hung up.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines estrangement as "having lost former closeness and affection: in a state of alienation from a previous close or familial relationship." Drugs, alcohol, and/or mental illness seemed to be common reasons for that “state of alienation.” So were fractured families. So was the isolation of old age, simply—like Dottie—outliving anyone who cared.
My brother Carl checked all of those boxes, except one. He still had one family member who spoke to him. Me. We’d been estranged for years, but were negotiating a fragile truce since our mother died. Would I get a call from the coroner in his county one day?
I thought about Carl a lot as I set about finding a final resting place for my county’s unclaimed dead. With no funds offered up by county management—dead people don’t vote, after all—I found a generous cemetery willing to donate a crypt for the fifty-two forgotten souls in the Ghost Room. I designed the memorial program and friends supplied music. “I once was lost, but now am found,” we sang, gathered under a canopy on a hot August day. Traumatized by domestic violence murders, drug deaths, and political backstabbing, the memorial service was by far the most uplifting experience of my first year in office.
***
Not long after my term as keeper of the dead came to an end, my phone lit up with an area code I recognized as my brother’s. But it wasn’t his number. Hospital? Police? Morgue? I stared at the screen for a few seconds, my mind scrolling through scenarios from my years as Coroner, then took the call.
“Carl listed you as his emergency contact,” said a county social worker. “I think you need to come.”
After a decades-long struggle with mental illness and drug addiction, my little brother was nearing the end of his rough life. I spent weeks at his hospital bedside, bringing him coffee, dark chocolate, and what other comforts I could. I made the funeral arrangements Carl didn’t want to talk about. Now I understood: those who refused to forgive or forget, not those left in the Ghost Room, were the lost souls.
Christina VandePol, MD, was the coroner of suburban Chester County, Pennsylvania from 2018 - 2021. Christina oversaw 5,697 death investigations and achieved national certification as a medicolegal death investigator. Her experiences led her to become an outspoken advocate for improving our beleaguered death investigation system.
Christina has worked as an internist, rural emergency-room doctor, clinical researcher, educator, and medical writer. She now spends her time writing, mostly about medicolegal death investigation and its intersection with public health, medicine, and justice. Currently she is working on a memoir about her experiences as coroner.
