Sisters receive stranger's body in their mother's casket after funeral home mix-up

TWO SISTERS had a devastating revelation when they saw their mother's coffin for the first time: the body it contained did not correspond to their mother's.

The incident was the result of an unfortunate mix-up at the funeral home, and while these mistakes might seem very infrequent, reports of funeral homes accidentally switching bodies are far from unusual.

According to the WAVY news site, Mary Archer passed away a few weeks ago and she left her daughters Jennifer Taylor and Jennetta Archer in mourning. Later, on September 7, the sisters gathered at Hunter's Funeral Home in Ahoskie, North Carolina, for the funeral.

However, when they saw the inside of the coffin, they immediately realized that something was wrong: they saw the body of a stranger dressed in her mother's clothes.

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“This person had no resemblance. Her size was completely different,” Jennetta Archer explained to WAVY. "When they dressed that person she was swimming in her clothes because she was too small compared to my mother."

"We just don't understand how this could happen," Taylor added.

Both remember explaining the problem to funeral home staff, but say Hunter's initially denied it. The funeral home reportedly recognized the change only after checking the embalming room, where Mary Archer's body was found.

“Nobody took care of the matter right away. It would have been a totally different situation if they had simply recognized the mistake and immediately addressed it to show that, indeed, they did, they made a mistake,” Archer said.

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After discussions the bodies were changed, allowing Mary Archer's funeral to continue. However, the sisters told WAVY that they were not satisfied with how the company had handled the situation.

“What do you do to prevent something like this from happening?” Archer asked. "Don't they have a list per person and treat each one as a client or a patient... so they don't get confused?"

For its part, the news outlet spoke to Hunter's head embalmer, who said he tried to contact the sisters to apologize, a claim Archer and Taylor deny. He also reportedly noted that in his 40-year career, a mix-up like this had never occurred before.

This terrible and alarming experience brings to mind reports of similar cases that have occurred in recent years, and in some of them the error went unnoticed until the funeral was over.

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For example, earlier this year, two families in San Antonio, Texas sued a funeral home because the bodies of their loved ones were allegedly switched, a fact that was only discovered after one of the people had already been buried, reported KENS5.

According to FOX 46 Charlotte, a South Carolina family accidentally buried a stranger during her 91-year-old grandmother's funeral in July 2020.

These types of incidents have also been recorded in other countries: according to an independent report carried out in 2017 by the United Kingdom's National Health Service, an analysis of 132 serious "mortuary incidents" that occurred between 2002 and 2013 showed that nine of these were cases in which the wrong body had been buried.

Newsweek reached out to Hunter's Funeral Home for additional comment but did not receive a response prior to publication of this article. N

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Published in cooperation with Newsweek / Published in cooperation with Newsweek