A mortician and funeral director has revealed what happens if someone dies with an erection and how often he deals with so-called 'angel lust'.
Victor M. Sweeney, author of Now Departing: A Small-town Mortician on Death, Life and the Moments in Between, is no stranger to a dead body.
The undertaker, who works in rural Minnesota, first encountered death as a child, tragically finding his best friend deceased in bed when Victor was just three years old.
"Maybe that's why I'm doing what I'm doing," he said candidly during LADbible's episode of Honesty Box.
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"The first dead body I saw on the job was also terrible," Victor continued. "I was 18 at the time.
"There was an 18-year-old girl on the table who had died in a car crash around graduation time. And that was awful because there's no better way to see yourself on the table than to see someone your same age."
After admitting he 'almost passed out', he watched as the mortician embalmed the young girl.
Apparently, it didn't put him off as the next day, he said he clocked into work and did it all over again, this time with a deceased infant.
"And then after that, everything has gotten much easier. But there is my harrowing introduction to dead bodies," Victor said.
Now a seasoned veteran in the field, the 34-year-old father has seen it all, and interestingly doesn't fear his own departure from Earth when the time comes.
Victor has also lifted the lid on what happens if his funeral home is tasked with embalming a dead body in a compromised position - specifically, with an erection.
When asked, he giggled at the 'fun' question before saying he's never encountered that specific situation before.
"I've never had anybody die with an erection... yet. I'm not sure how that would work," Victor said.
"It's a nervous response, right? There's the physicality of the thing but there's a nervous response.
"So I'd have to believe that when the nervous system and the brain stops working, that the erection goes away. But I don't know for sure."
However, Victor says he has come across what the industry dubs 'angel lust', when a man's penis suddenly becomes erect as the mortician is working.
"I have embalmed bodies where inexplicably all the pressure ends up in the c**k, and it becomes an erection again," he explained. "And then that also eventually goes away when the abdominal pressure goes down, but that doesn't happen very often.
"I've heard of people calling it 'angel lust', but I've only had that happen like twice in my career, so not super common."
Still, it isn't by far the worst thing Victor has encountered as he told the outlet he's seen some pretty gnarly injuries.
He said he's not a big fan of broken bones, calling them 'icky' as he sometimes has to fix them back into place during the embalming process.
Other injuries, like heads being split open and gunshot wounds, especially if they are self-inflicted, are 'uniformly awful'.
Victor added: "So there are sometimes really gross things that a person has to deal with and you just suck it up and do it mostly out of love, weirdly enough. You do it because you love the people that are suffering through the loss.
"That's what you have to keep in mind when you're dealing with things that really make you wanna puke."
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