How about another story from my time working in a dysfunctional flea market?
Original animal stories:
https://www.askamanager.org/2024/08/lets-discuss-animals-at-work.html#comment-4815994
The Haunted Spoons:
https://www.askamanager.org/2024/08/open-thread-august-9-2024.html#comment-4817527
The Mysterious Crates
Part of my job as underpaid flea market clerk was to help clear out sale remainders and bring everything back to the store. The owner was prone to buying what was leftover from estate sales and inventory closeouts, usually sight unseen while in a white powder-induced manic mood. That often led to situations like an unexpected truckload of artificial Easter floral arrangements that we didn’t even make a dent in selling the entire time I worked there.
Clearing out weird buildings and houses got to be pretty routine and I didn’t pay much attention to my surroundings when I was sent to a rambling Victorian-ish manor on the edge of town to clean out what I assumed was yet another round of ugly furniture and middling dishware from the end of an estate sale. So I was surprised when I walked in to find everything was in large wooden crates. Which…was not ideal. Half the crates were so huge, we could only fit two in the truck at a time. Also, we had to dismantle the door and part of the wall to get them out, which led to so many unanswered questions about their logistical thinking. Repacking the contents was not an option, according to the person in charge. It should have been a sign when they’d prefer we demolish part of the wall vs opening mystery crates.
After many, many trips over three (!) days, we finally got the crates removed and loaded into the flea market. Thank goodness the owner thought to install a loading dock in the back. The usual procedure is we move inventory inside and once we get the go-ahead, we then disassemble or reassemble stuff or whatever, price everything, and set as much as we can on the floor and shove the rest into the storage room (a.k.a. the former bowling alley’s restaurant and bar).
But this time, the owner got distracted by something shiny and didn’t give us the go-ahead. So the crates sat in the loading dock area, spilling out into the merchandise area, for two weeks, taunting us with their mysteries. We started a betting pool on what was inside and eventually started telling elaborate stories about a widowed duchess fleeing Interpol after being caught in an illicit affair with a black marketeer.
One day, I was pricing some boxes of books that appeared in the office when I heard the manager yell “That’s it! I’ve had it!” Then she marched out of the back office with a large pry bar and started ripping the top off one of the smaller crates. The other clerk and I grabbed the nearest implements we could find and started opening our own crates.
Upon opening the crates, we each found what looked like another rough wooden crate. And inside those crates were what looked like dirty rags. We poked at the rags but couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be. We moved on to more crates, only to find the same thing. Slightly unnerved and a tad disappointed, we decided to tackle one of the large crates together.
The first crate we opened together contained, you guessed it, another rough wooden crate. But there was something a bit odd about this one though none of us could figure out why. We opened the lid to the interior crate to find a ghastly skull staring back at us.
The other clerk shrieked, I yelped, and we both jumped back in alarm. The manager, however, yelled “NOT AGAIN DAMMIT!” and stomped off to her office. The other clerk fled to her car in the parking lot for an early lunch, while I made a hasty exit of the loading dock and went to listen to the manager as she called up the owner and scolded him for what seemed like an eternity.
The other clerk came back and I was about to go take my lunch when the owner showed up and he and the manager pulled the rest of us to the loading dock where we were directed to open the tops of all the crates but not the interior crates. After about an hour, we had pried open all the crates and a pattern began to emerge. The interior crates weren’t all rough wood. Some were sanded smooth, some were brightly polished, some were ornately decorated. And all of them, large and small alike, were rectangular.
Yes, they were coffins. All of them. USED coffins.
The manager called the sheriff’s department, who came and opened a sampling of coffins, finding occupants in most of them. The flea market was shut down for the rest of the week as the crates were slowly hauled off somewhere.
We later found out that the rambling Victorian-ish manor used to be a funeral home that had its own cemetery back in the late 1800s. At some point, the cemetery was removed and the bodies were supposed to be relocated to a new cemetery but the funeral home went bankrupt before that could happen. The records had gotten lost when the courthouse had burned down so no one knew it was there. The house passed through so many owners that the stack o’ coffins were never dealt with. The remains were eventually disbursed to whatever families, cemeteries, and crematoriums they might belong to, though most went unclaimed as identification records were long gone.
I think what really floored me in all of this wasn’t that the owner unknowingly purchased a bulk lot of dead bodies, it’s that, according to the manager, this wasn’t the first time it happened.
